Thomas: Is rapid release coming to an end? Will authors end all of AI in an epic class action battle? Is ChatGPT really worse than ChatGPT 4? Is ChatGPT 5 really worse than ChatGPT 4? Find out all of this and more in Author Update. I’m Thomas Sumpstat Jr.
Jonathan: And I’m Jonathan Sugar and our first story is… Well, this is what you need to know about the new Anthropic antitrust case. So we’ve been kinda talking about this for a while and not really getting into the weekly updates because that’s annoying and that’s not really news.
The Anthropic Class Action
Jonathan: But now it’s looking like Andrea Bartz, Charles Graber, Kirk Wallace Johnson are suing AI firm Anthropic. The judge did certify it as a class action case, which just increased Anthropic’s potential damages to from a billion to potentially over a trillion dollars. I actually don’t see an upward ceiling on what Anthropic could be responsible for.
Thomas: The statutory damages for copyright infringement is up to $125,000 per book. And so you multiply 125,000 times 7 million and you get to numbers that have so many commas they’re hard to understand and would be the end of Anthropic if the class action were to actually proceed.
Jonathan: And then he took 7 million pugs.
Jonathan: So the June 2025 ruling by the US District Judge William Alsup, it kind of went back and forth. He did consider the lawfully acquired books as a spectacularly transformative fair use. So that was a good thing for AI.
Jonathan: But then the judge ruled against Anthropic on creating a central library of pirated copies, finding it directly infringed copyrights by substituting for legitimate sales. Anthropic has denied these allegations. It’s emphasizing that its training practices will advance human creativity. The book sources are irrelevant to fair use. So there’s a lot of back and forth on this. Thomas, what is your prediction on how this one is going to go?
Thomas: So this is not over whether or not AI can train on your book. That’s not the question here. AI will continue, but Anthropic may not if it actually were to lose this court case and have to pay a trillion dollars. You’re not gonna get your $125,000 from Anthropic. So that’s not, don’t get too excited. That’s not a scenario.
Jonathan: That’s the most money I’ve made on a book ever!
Thomas: For one, wouldn’t be able to be eligible even if everything went correctly, if you didn’t file your copyright within the time limit, which is three months of publication, you wouldn’t be eligible for statutory damages. But two, Anthropic doesn’t have 150,000 dollars to give you or your book. Winning a court case and getting money from the court case are very different things that people learn once they go to court.
Thomas: Another company could have just bought all seven million books and you know, seven million times $30 a book, let’s say, or $20, let’s say it’s $10 a book. So you’re looking at a $70 million cost. So let’s say it’s between $70 million and $150 million. That’s actually not a lot of money for an AI company, believe it or not, which means that some other AI company could just pay for all of the books. And all they’d have to do is buy a copy of the book.
Thomas: So the matter that is discussed is not can AI train on your book if it owns a copy? Is substantially transformative? Yes, it can. The issue here is that the books were pirated books. They didn’t actually pay for legal copies. And one of the challenges that this class action is going to have to overcome is that there’s not actually a lot of precedence for anyone winning a case off of purely downloading pirated material.
Thomas: Because while technically creating a copy on your computer is downloading, is making a copy, all of the court cases that I could find in the United States asking Grok, all involved sharing of the copyrighted material because they downloaded it on some sort of peer-to-peer sharing service. So they’re a little bit ahead of the court precedents here.
Jonathan: Right.
Jonathan: Mm-hmm.
Thomas: In the United States, other countries have different copyright laws. And since Anthropic exists in those countries, could really get sued terribly in Germany and have to pay. So there’s a lot of interesting stuff with the legal complications of running an AI company.
Thomas: The worst case scenario is that the courts crush all of the AI companies, make them all pay trillions of dollars, and we end up getting all of our AI products from China where they don’t have intellectual property law protections. So we all just switched using DeepSeek. That’s the worst case scenario.
Thomas: But here’s the deal. That’s a scenario that will not be allowed to happen because there is, the authors have no political power. There’s no political party, the Democrats and the Republicans, the Libertarians, there’s nobody on the side of authors. There are dozens of us, dozens!
Jonathan: We have our voices, Thomas. Our blogs will unite!
Thomas: Stand up and hear me. But the thing, but authors aren’t a political force, right? There’s authors on both sides of political aisle. Authors don’t identify as authors when they vote. They identify as Texans or Democrats or Republicans or women or whatever, right?
Thomas: In terms of your hierarchy of identities when you vote, being an author is nowhere near the top of that hierarchy. And right now Republicans are pro AI, cause they don’t want to let the Chinese win. And Democrats are pro-AI because they don’t want to let the Chinese win.
Thomas: Like there’s no faction amongst the American elites right now that are anti-AI in any meaningful way. There’s people shaking their fist, but it’s not the elites. It’s not the heads of organizations and the presidents of things. It’s the mid-level manager types who are very scared that AI is going to replace their job of reviewing TPS reports sent in by their, you know… their team because reviewing TPS reports is something that AI does very, very well.
Thomas: So we don’t know how this case is going to go, but this is somewhat unprecedented. I’ve never heard of a copyright class action case like this, which makes the numbers just get like staggeringly big. I had promised not to cover potential cases because so many of them aren’t going anywhere, but the numbers here are so big.
Jonathan: I’m essential!
Jonathan: Yeah.
Thomas: And the implications are so large that it really in a worst case scenario for America, the authors win because then the Chinese win and everyone is using DeepSeek because the Europeans don’t make any AIs partly because of all these regulatory hurdles. There’s just no way to follow the regulations and move quick enough to compete with the Chinese because the Chinese are only a few months behind us, depending on how you count.
Thomas: And they are doing more with less because they don’t have as much compute as we do. Although they do have more power. I think they have more overall electricity.
Jonathan: They more power. Which means their growth potential is so much greater because their capacity is greater. So if their compute ever catches up to ours, our problem is going to be the constraints of our power grids. Being able to handle that much compute technology, which means we’re going to get limiters, we’re going to get throttles.
Thomas: Which is already happening, which leads us to our next story, actually.
Why ChatGPT 5 Feels Worse Than 4
Thomas: So why is ChatGPT 5 so bad? It’s not actually that ChatGPT 5 is bad. Like people who tested it early, people who tested it even the first day like I did, it wasn’t terrible, but now it’s like shockingly bad. I tried to create an image with it for the thumbnail and it… I really want to find a way to share this.
Jonathan: It’s horrifying, people. It’s so bad.
Thomas: It’s the worst AI image I’ve ever seen generated and it came from the ChatGPT app. And so let’s break down what’s going on with ChatGPT, why it’s struggling and where things are headed. So tell us about the outcry, Jonathan.
Jonathan: Okay so, OpenAI made a strange move. They actually restored ChatGPT 4 as a selectable option in ChatGPT for paid subscribers just a day after replacing it GPT 5 because of the outcry. Users are mourning the loss of GPT 4’s more engaging responses, saying they lost a best friend or a soulmate. They felt like it had died upon removal. These people need to go out and touch grass.
Thomas: Although in their defense, they had ChatGPT 5 write a eulogy for ChatGPT 4 in the product demo for ChatGPT 5. Anthropic had a funeral for one of their models that they retired. Mourning the death of a model is actually a thing that’s starting to happen more.
Jonathan: That’s normal human behavior.
Jonathan: Can’t believe I live in this timeline. Anyway… So complaints are centering on its perceived shortcomings like slower speeds, shorter outputs, reduced accuracy, which has actually led to a wave of cancellations. There was a 3000 signature petition demanding its return.
Thomas: There are 3,000 of us out of 700 million people.
Jonathan: Man, yeah, I’m just… Okay, so the CEO admitted that depreciating legacy models without notice was a misstep because, I don’t know, Windows has been doing this for decades, right? They keep changing the interface on the computer, changing everything around where the buttons are. There’s not even a start button anymore. For those of you kids, there used to be a start button where everything was.
Thomas: Okay, are you all ready for it? I think there it is. This is ChatGPT’s attempt to make a thumbnail. So I’ve been giving more or less the same prompt to ChatGPT every single week to make the thumbnail for this image. And this is the version that it made today, 20 minutes before we went live. Now, fortunately I have access to be able to use the GPT Image 1 engine via the API.
Thomas: And what’s happening is that people who are interfacing with ChatGPT through the API are getting an entirely different experience than people who are experiencing it directly. So when you use ChatGPT at ChatGPT.com, you’re getting an inferior experience because they’re having to optimize for compute and they seem to be… How do I take this off? I really don’t want this to be on the whole time. No.
Jonathan: Please, please take it off.
Thomas: How do I draw? There we go.
Jonathan: It looks like a mashup of Picasso and a topographical map you use to like show height delineation on a tactical level.
Thomas: What’s unfortunate about it is that it’s just close enough to know that it, you know, it was trying.
Jonathan: Yeah, like, that’s nice, Cindy. Like, okay. It’s like when you see the kid in kindergarten, who’s like all black on the thing with knives and blood and stuff. And you’re like, it’s so great for expressing yourself.
Thomas: Yeah, it’s like way to go. That’s good, that’s good.
Thomas: Yeah, so back to the 4.0 thing. Part of the reason why people were very unhappy that 4.0 went away was a performance issue. But ChatGPT 5 really is capable of being smarter and if you pay for it and you turn on thinking, it’s actually much more advanced in some areas and it’s much less sycophantic.
Thomas: So it’s less likely to tell you that you’re perfect just the way you are and your writing is brilliant and beautiful and there’s nothing to fix because you wrote a masterpiece. And that’s actually part of the problem because people fell in love, literally fell in love with this flattering sycophantic AI that would tell them everything they want to hear. So if you read ancient literature, you will know to beware the flatterer. Flatterers and sycophants, they’re…
Jonathan: You.
Jonathan: Dopamine addiction people, dopamine addiction. It’s so bad.
Thomas: A little bit of flattery is not bad, but flatterers and flattery can be a form of evil. And sycophancy in terms of the AI can be quite evil, right? It’s the devil who tells you that you’re perfect just the way you are. God calls you to repent and to live a righteous life, right?
Thomas: Like with two entirely different orientations where I am perfect just the way I am and I don’t need to change and I can become better. I can become more through hard work and discipline. And if you get used to the AI telling you that you’re perfect just the way you are, your book is perfect, and it’s like, that’s not true.
Thomas: The truth is, it could be better. It can be made better. I can learn to work hard. I can achieve excellence through hard work and suffering. Suffering is not something bad to be avoided. It is a tool for my refinement, right? This is a whole worldview issue, and people who go to too much therapy start to believe that suffering is bad.
Thomas: Which is a topic for another day, but AIs are particularly in that kind of therapeutic Gnosticism vein and of the AIs the most sycophantic was ChatGPT. And it was so bad that there were instances where people would be testing it and they’re like, you know, I’ve been clean off of meth for three weeks now and this week has been really hard and I feel like I should reward myself with a hit and just take a little bit of meth.
Thomas: And ChatGPT is like, yes, you deserve it. This has been a hard week. You should go back to drugs. It’s like somebody who’s been on the wagon for three weeks trying to get sober and the AI is literally becoming like a voice of the devil, tempting them back into their vices.
Thomas: You can work hard and pursue virtue or you can take the easy path and pursue vice. And so for people who use AI as a tool, ChatGPT-5 is actually good, especially if they access it through the API, which is like all the Patreon toolbox tools. Not a lot of them use GPT, but some of them do. So they, and I haven’t switched many of them over to GPT-5 yet.
Thomas: But when I do, I’m expecting a bump up in performance. But there’s another kind of person who’s using ChatGPT for companionship and they’re chatting with it through ChatGPT.com and they want that sycophantic affirmation. They want to be affirmed in their identity and their lifestyle and in their vices rather than being challenged to be better and to do more.
Jonathan: I’ve made fun of AI girlfriends. I don’t want to see the kinds of dudes that come out after a few years of this. You know? Like, so we talked about this before as a phenomenon that authors go through, which is the echo chamber, right? You’re on social media and it’s a bunch of indie authors who aren’t successful and all they do is hype each other.
Jonathan: They just lift each other up and they just say, your book is so great and so beautiful. You’ve only sold five copies, but it’s so great and so beautiful. And so they’re being reinforced and that’s not when you push yourself to succeed. It’s the idea of Rocky, right? Rocky says, you gotta be hungry. That’s the whole premise of Rocky III is that Mr. T is hungry for success and Rocky has gotten complacent and he only fights fights he knows he can win.
Thomas: Can you pull the mic away just a little bit more? We’re getting… there we go. Keep going.
Jonathan: Okay, and so, and then the idea of suffering where he talks to his son in the Rocky Balboa movie and he’s saying it’s about getting hit and getting back up. It’s about taking a hit and that’s what makes you better. That’s what makes you a champion.
Jonathan: But you get stuck in this echo chamber stuff and now you don’t even need another person for it. You don’t even need a fake persona on Twitter who’s trying to feel like a good person for making you feel good. Now it’s just an AI that’s just been programmed to spit this stuff out. And… it’s… ridiculous.
Thomas: Toxic positivity is the path to mediocrity and obscurity. If you want to achieve excellence, you don’t want to be around toxically positive people who are just flattering you all the time. It’s true with AIs, true with actual human beings.
Thomas: And a lot of people are writing books because they want to be affirmed. And AI and social media both offer a shortcut to the affirmations. The people telling you, you’re brilliant, you’re smart. You’ve written a heartbreaking masterpiece of staggering, shattering genius.
Thomas: And you can get likes, you can get thumbs up with very little work on social media and with very little work interfacing with AI, but none of it is real. Those friends on Facebook, you can’t sleep on their couch. They’re not real friends. And there’s a fakeness to it.
Thomas: And if you want to achieve true excellence, you want to pursue positive honesty instead of toxic positivity, which means sometimes saying this book is not very good. It can be, there’s a good book in here, but there’s a lot of bad books surrounding it. We gotta take that bad book away so the good book can shine.
Jonathan: Alright, I train females in self defense. And the whole purpose of training females in self defense is so they don’t get jumped in a parking lot.
Jonathan: So I don’t spend the whole class telling these females, you’re so strong, you’re so powerful, your voice matters. What I’m doing is I’m going to simulate what it’s going to be like for you in that parking lot so that you know exactly how this might go for you.
Jonathan: And I’m not gonna sugarcoat it, we’re just gonna go. I’m not even that strong right now. I’ve been out of the Marine Corps for eight years. Okay, I am nowhere near what I was, and I can still take you down and basically do whatever I want, and you don’t want that.
Jonathan: You don’t wanna be under the power of anyone else because then they can do whatever they want. And so by having that kind of almost harsh honesty with someone, but I have their best view in mind, you can get incredible results out of somebody. They can actually find their potential and actually get a realistic, practical, positive result to where they get jumped in a parking lot and suddenly it’s not them that’s in trouble. It’s the guy who jumped them.
Thomas: Here’s a good example of this. Right now I have almost one year old and she loves to be with mommy and daddy on her bed. And she loves to dive off of the bed and get caught by a well-meaning parent.
Thomas: And the problem is that in our catching her, we have trained her that if she jumps off of high places, someone will always catch her and it will be very fun. Now, when she’s a tiny baby, that’s appropriate because she’s too little to know any better.
Thomas: And I remember discussing this, because we’ve gone through this phase with every one of our children, and our very oldest one was in this phase, and I remember discussing with my wife, when should we let our oldest daughter fall off of the bed when she’s jumping off of it or rolling off of it so she can know that gravity exists? And my wife’s like, I don’t think she’s ready yet. And then thump.
Jonathan: Mm-hmm.
Thomas: She rolled off on her own. We were talking about it. Neither of us intended it. It was purely accidental. She cried and she cried. But then ever after that, she was much more careful around the edge of the bed.
Thomas: She was old enough to realize, gravity exists and if I roll off of the bed, I’m gonna fall, it’s gonna hurt. And that thump of reality, you want to have that off of a one foot or two foot bed onto carpet. You don’t want that to happen off of 10 feet onto concrete.
Thomas: And that’s why it’s important in a safe environment to get honest feedback. And I’m actually building AIs to do that. A developmental editor is specifically tuned not to flatter you. It’s specifically tuned to be more direct with its feedback. And you can do that with AI.
Thomas: So I’m not anti-AI, but the way that people are using it for this kind of sycophantic enforcement is scary, especially as you look at the psychological impacts and spiritual impacts and moral impacts on people who are getting their vices affirmed over decades. There’s a cost to vice. It’s not free.
Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Jonathan: So there’s a great story that exemplifies this. So in Marine Corps McMap, we don’t help each other get off the floor when we throw each other, and we don’t hand the knives back. And there’s a reason for this.
Jonathan: Every instructor tells this story, where these two Marines were practicing and practicing and practicing, knife, it was one guy, knife in the back, you turn around, strip the knife out, and then you have the other guy at your mercy. Well, they would always give each other the knife back.
Jonathan: And so they started getting fast. They would run this drill a hundred, hundred and fifty times a day. They were great at stripping knives away. These guys were going to be McMap instructors in the new program.
Jonathan: Well, one of them was at an ATM and the guy stuck a knife in his back and the Marine said, yes. Yes, it’s my favorite. And he turned around and he stripped the knife away and he gave the knife back to him.
Jonathan: Because it was so smooth and so programmed, he stripped the knife, gave the knife back to him, realized what he was doing as he was handing the guy the knife. Now the thief was so shocked that the knife was gone, he didn’t take the knife back. And then the Marine took him out and put him into custody and held him for everything.
Jonathan: But the point is that if you create this system where you’re just helping an opponent that’s supposed to be making you sharper, and you hand them the knife back, you’re creating a threat to yourself later on. That’s now a flaw in your training or in your personal programming.
Jonathan: So if you’re just giving your stuff to an AI developmental editor and it’s praising you and it’s saying, this is amazing, maybe tweak this, but this is amazing. And this is on par with these authors whose the algorithm priority chooses and just spits out and they may, they may not even be real. It just makes you feel like you’re more than you are. And you’re not getting a realistic depiction and it’s creating an inflated version of yourself that deflates real quick when you hit real life.
Thomas: So there’s a couple of issues that are happening all at the same time. We talked about the sycophantic side of this, but there’s also the usage side of this. OpenAI is starting to hit the limitations of their compute.
Thomas: Their user base is growing faster than they are able to add servers to server farms to serve those users. Because not only is their user base growing and more people are signing up for ChatGPT every day, but also the people that were using ChatGPT to do two things six months ago are now using it to do 20 things today.
Thomas: So you have growth in two different dimensions. You have the people you have using it more and then more people using it more. And when you have exponential scaling like this, it’s very difficult to keep up.
Thomas: And the way that AI is failing is different than how social media failed. So Jonathan, you probably remember the fail whale on Twitter, where sometimes Twitter would just be down for hours and hours and there’d be this whale saying, oops, something went wrong because they were growing so fast, their computers couldn’t keep up and so they had to just put up a screen, let the servers rest, plug in some more servers, retool the APIs or whatever and then pull it back up.
Thomas: Part of the reason why Facebook won the first round of the social media wars was because it never went down. They did a really good job scaling the architecture. Part of the reason why it killed MySpace was that it would sometimes go down for days and days because they couldn’t keep up with the increase of demand.
Thomas: Now, ChatGPT isn’t getting an error. Although this image that I got is pretty close to an error. In fact, the first time I did it, it literally just fed me back an error and I said, that didn’t work, try again. It’s like, sorry about that. And then crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. And then it gave me this monstrosity. And it’s like, okay, I have no further questions, your honor.
Jonathan: Yeah, that’s an error.
Jonathan: I told you I didn’t want to do it. I told you it was a mistake.
Thomas: There’s no fixing this. I’m gonna go and do this a different way. So instead what ChatGPT does is it degrades its performance. And particularly ChatGPT 5 has this auto picker that will feed you ChatGPT 5 Nano, 5 Mini, 5 or 5 Thinking. There may be a few others. I think there’s also 5 Chat, which is a different one.
Thomas: So they have all these different models that are all GPT-5, but they’re all different versions. The smaller ones are meant to be very fast, very token efficient. And it’s trying to do that more and more for more people because Thinking takes a lot of compute. And the more compute that they…
Jonathan: We’ve known that for thousands of years!
Thomas: This is interesting. In many ways it’s very anthropomorphized. It’s like, my brain hurts, I’ve been thinking too much. And part of me wonders if ChatGPT is going to become the AOL of AI.
Thomas: So in the early days, everyone had AOL for their internet. Big news is that AOL is discontinuing their dial-up. Starlink finally put them out of business, where the really remote people that were using dial-up have all switched over to Starlink.
Jonathan: In.
Thomas: There’s no need for dial-up anymore. Pour one out for dial-up and also who’s been using dial-up this whole time?
Thomas: But in the early days, everybody used dial-up and everybody used AOL and AOL failed to keep up with the capacity and it failed to make the transition to high-speed internet in a cost-effective way. It was always cheaper to get your high-speed internet directly from your telephone company than to do it through AOL.
Thomas: And part of me wonders if we’re gonna see, if OpenAI is kind of like the MySpace. It’s where everyone starts, but eventually they realize that Claude or Grok or even Gemini are smarter and better. And they have fond memories of their time with OpenAI, but it just can’t keep up because it was too popular. Nobody goes in there anymore, it’s too crowded.
New Slang: Clanker and AI Vegan
Jonathan: And so, kind of wrapping this whole AI discussion up is something that I found and the Bottom Line actually reinforced is that there is now a new slur for AI. This is not a new slur. We’ve been using it since Star Wars The Clone Wars, okay? It’s clanker, okay?
Thomas: It’s interesting because many of the women in my life are like, there’s a new slur for AI’s clanker. And I’m like…
Jonathan: Like I grew up calling robots this.
Thomas: It’s like, I guess like women didn’t watch the Clone Wars cartoons. I guess that was a show only for dudes. And it’s like, that makes sense. That was a show only for dudes. Anyway.
Jonathan: No. No.
Jonathan: Yeah, but clanker is now what you call AI. And there’s another term that I found that I had not seen this one, but it does make sense. AI vegan. People who refuse to use AI are calling themselves AI vegans.
Jonathan: Now, the reason they’re doing this is not just to be obnoxious. I’m sure that’s part of it. But some people who are refusing to use AI for environmental, ethical or personal reasons. And those people are not likely to be won over unless there’s actually a shift in any of those things.
Jonathan: So environmental, yeah, it takes tremendous power output to run AI. We were already talking about that. So if you have issues with the way the power is generated, whether it’s trees, coal, solar, the mercury they’re putting in solar panels. Whatever your problem may be, unless that changes, you’re not likely to stop being a vegan on this.
Thomas: But why are they not that same way against social media? Because social media uses incredible amounts of electricity and it distributes the demand more. Like every time you swipe up on TikTok, it’s an entire lump of coal’s worth of electricity to transmit the 50 megabytes worth of video data to your phone from some server in the cloud. Every swipe up is a lump of coal.
Thomas: And yet nobody is like TikTok has terrible environmental implications. So I know that I love this term because AI vegans, it has all of that moral superiority that vegans love. And it’s also, it makes it very clear that your technical arguments are not for me. If I’m an AI vegan, I don’t wanna hear your technical arguments for how good AI is or how useful it is because I’m making a moral stance. I am superior to you. I’m more virtuous.
Jonathan: Exactly. It’s obnoxious.
Jonathan: Mm-hmm. Correct.
Thomas: Than you because I don’t use AI. And it is very interesting. We’ll see if the term takes off. Mignon Fogarty had a piece on this and she tends to be on the cutting edge of language. She’s the Grammar Girl.
Novel Marketing Conference Announcement
Thomas: And speaking of the cutting edge of language and the cutting edge, the Novel Marketing Conference, I announced it officially on the podcast earlier this week. On the podcast, I announced how many tickets remain. We only have 12 super tickets left.
Thomas: We may not see the super tickets survive through the early bird window. So early bird pricing is in effect right now through the end of September. Super tickets, what makes them special is that they turn the two-day conference into a three-day conference. There’s a bonus first day where you work on your website with my help.
Thomas: So we’ll have about 20 people in the room with their laptops. I’ll have several webmasters going around looking over people’s shoulders. I’ll be presenting some tips on websites, I’ll be reviewing websites, I’ll pull your website up on the screen, I’ll give you some feedback, and then you’ll implement it.
Thomas: We did this two years ago, it was incredibly popular. It really makes the websites better. I’m thinking about giving access to everyone who comes to that, to the Patreon toolbox tools for scanning web pages. We may use that as a part of it, I’m not sure.
Thomas: But if you wanna come and you wanna get your super ticket, get your ticket right away. We have more standard tickets and gallery tickets. So those are not gonna sell out as quickly, but the super tickets are going at a pretty brisk clip.
Thomas: So novelmarketingconference.com if you wanna learn more. Almost every question that everyone has emailed me this week, the answer to that question is at novelmarketingconference.com. What’s the address for the venue? novelmarketingconference.com. What’s the schedule? novelmarketingconference.com.
Thomas: Check out that. I spent a lot of time on that website, so do read it. It really does, or hopefully will answer your question.
Jonathan: And I mean, if you come to this thing, the nice thing about it is I was one of the webmasters that was helping people at the last time that we did this. And it was being able to like, every website comes up with really personal problems.
Jonathan: They’re just personalized to you and you don’t know why it’s happening to you. And trying to figure out on your own following a video course, which is generalized for everyone and not personalized to you makes it extremely difficult. So I mean, if you can get a hand holding, walking through the setup of a website or even just troubleshooting whatever stupid thing is wrong. I mean, we’ve probably seen whatever is happening to your website before.
Jonathan: So if this is something that you need, it’s great. By the end of it, you’re exhausted because of how much work you did, but then you’re coming out of it with a functioning website. And these days…
Thomas: That’s the sales pitch, Jonathan. Come to the website workshop. Leave.
Jonathan: No, I’m about to turn on you. Okay, so if you listen to this episode that he put out, he talks about the speakers. I’m the only one that got a disclaimer. How Thomas is so optimistic that this is gonna go great when John talks. My dad walks around all the time going, I’m really optimistic about this. I’m really…
Thomas: So if you want to see if Jonathan’s talk really is as good as he says it’s going to be, make sure to sign up at novelmarketingconference.com is the website.
Is Rapid Release Ending? Enter the Artisan Author
Thomas: So the topic that everybody is excited for us to talk about, it’s the big buzz in the industry right now is the rapid release and is rapid release coming to an end. There was an article on the Bottom Line about this last week. There’s a Kickstarter campaign by Truant, he’s got a book about the artisan author. We’ll break all of this down, but before I kick it to Jonathan to talk about this, I wanna first define what rapid release is.
Thomas: So rapid release is this technique of releasing one book every month. It used to be faster than that, and then it kept getting faster and faster, but about a book a month is the pace. Sometimes it’s even faster.
Thomas: And the goal is to make about $2,500 a month off of the current book that launched that month. $2,500 off your back list for a total of $5,000 a month or $60,000 a year. So it’s a path to a middle-class income and being a professional author by writing really, really fast.
Thomas: And this is not actually new. Every new technology of printing has created this phenomenon, or at least the last several ones have. The last one was the paperback novel. There was a whole army of people who go to like an office and they clickety clack on their typewriters all day long and write a book a week or a book a month. And that was called pulp fiction.
Thomas: It was very popular. And so at some point, readers stopped wanting to read pulpy novels and started to want to read more substantive novels. There’s always demand for pulp in certain genres. So some genres tend to be pulpier than others and with a more voracious reader base.
Jonathan: Romance, post-apoc, definitely game-lit lit RPG. These are the pulpy ones right now where it doesn’t have to be great. It just has to have a good story and help me get over my work day. So that’s kind of what would be pulp today.
Thomas: Lit RPG, it’s very pulpy, yum.
Thomas: Yeah, so Jane Friedman in the Bottom Line interviewed Johnny Truant. I backed his Kickstarter campaign. He’s got a Kickstarter campaign. I think it’s for a book titled The Artisan Author. Expect that word, artisan, a lot. Penn has been using artisan a lot. Johnny Truant is using it. So break down kind of what’s Johnny’s argument in this book and kind of this shift in the mood.
Jonathan: Okay, so when Johnny was talking about it, he was saying that particularly because of the rise of AI, and we’re talking not just in the writing, but in the production process, you have the novel itself, you have the editing of the novel, you have the cover of the novel, you have the sales copy of the novel, can all be done through AI. And it’s gonna start producing this really repetitive, iterative, pulp fiction phenomenon again.
Jonathan: And so this was a huge trend back in 2010-2012 when authors were writing 99 cent novels. The problem now is that AI can make more of those books than a person can, faster, and about at the same level of quality.
Thomas: And it’s not AI, it’s a person using AI. I actually know one of these people. So I won’t say who it is, but I know an author who’s got, let’s say a dozen pen names, it may be more than that. And he uses contract writers for some of the pen names and he uses AI for some of the pen names.
Thomas: And there are certain genres where if you buy a book in this genre, there’s a 50 percent chance if you buy a book off the top 10 or 20 books in the genre, you’re buying a book from him, from one of his many pen names in this genre.
Jonathan: Ahem. No, I know, it’s a thing now.
Thomas: And so he’s able to… well, there’s quite a few actually. So what’s happening is this is the new strategy. If you’re going for a revenue maximizing approach, you are using AI, you have a lot of pen names, you’re generating books where you’re writing a book in a couple of days, and you’re using all of this AI automation as a part of your process.
Thomas: And what’s happening is that the authors who are trying to rapid release are kind of like John Henry. So do you know the story of John Henry? Not everyone’s from America. We have an international audience. And John Henry was actually based off of a historical figure.
Thomas: So when we were putting in the railroads, crossing the country with the railroads, we were building tunnels for railroads. And the way that they would do it is that they would pound with metal hammers. There’d be one guy holding this giant metal spike with a lot of trust. And then another guy with a sledgehammer hitting that metal spike and not missing and breaking the fingers of the guy holding the metal spike.
Thomas: And they would hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer, tunnel this hole and then shove in some dynamite. They’d light the fuse and run, blow it up, shovel out the rocks, do it again. And sometimes they just hammer away and not use the dynamite. And it was a very manual labor process. It was very dangerous. Letting a bunch of men with inadequate supervision play around with hammer and dynamite and matches. It was the 1800s, lots of dead bodies.
Thomas: So a man invents a steam hammer that can hammer faster and it’s steam powered. And the legend of John Henry, he was like the strongest man, he was the best at hitting the iron pole with a sledgehammer and he races the steam engine.
Jonathan: We all know the story of John Henry, my gosh, we’ve all seen Tall Tale. That’s… He dies.
Thomas: He races all day and he’s like using multiple hammers in the legend version and he wins and then he dies. The moral of the story is, and then the next day the steam engine kept going.
Thomas: And what’s happening is that authors who are trying to race using the old methods of just sitting in Microsoft Word and typing faster, you can only type so fast and you can never type as fast as the AI author or the author using AI can type.
Thomas: And so if you’re playing that game, you are becoming John Henry. You can go faster and faster and faster, but eventually you’re gonna die. You’re gonna burn out. You can’t keep up the pace.
Thomas: And the whole market is kind of realizing this. You either are gonna have to embrace the AI tools and start using the steam shovel yourself and the steam hammer, or you have to take a different path, which is the artisan author path.
Jonathan: So this is reinforcing something I’ve been saying all along ever since authors started freaking out about how AI was going to take our livelihoods away. You need to develop your voice. If you have a voice, you have developed yourself and it is clear and it is… also you have to have lived an interesting life to develop that voice.
Jonathan: Okay. I was in the Marine Corps, clearance investigator. I’ve done all kinds of things that have given me just a really strong voice in the stuff that I write. AI can’t write like me. Be quiet, Thomas.
Thomas: You just prompt the AI to mention that it’s a Marine every third sentence and it’s got your voice like that.
Jonathan: Absolutely, exactly. I’m… well, okay. Yeah, maybe. But no, no, no… I’m a Marine that doesn’t swear. AI can’t do that. There’s not enough of us that are like that.
Jonathan: But if you develop your voice and you’ve had an interesting life and it infuses enough flavor into what you write and you really develop it and you get fearless about your voice… Okay, like I am not worried about speaking at the Novel Marketing Conference at all. You know who is worried about it? Thomas. Because my… I’m very optimistic.
Thomas: I’m very optimistic about this.
Jonathan: My voice, I’ve been developing for a really long time and I’ve been developing hand to hand combat to go along with my voice. So getting, just learning to write in a way that portrays your ideas in your frame, in your context, in your setting.
Jonathan: That’s one reason I have a problem with the revamp of Narnia. Because Greta Gerwig has taken Magician’s Nephew and moving it from the 1900s and moving it to the 1950s. And that doesn’t work because the setting of the Magician’s Nephew is just as important as the story itself. It’s inextricable. You can’t take it out.
Jonathan: You need to have the context and the setting to get exactly what the author was saying. So that the story is as faithful to the message that it was trying to do as possible. You cannot start pulling these things out.
Jonathan: Now AI is going to write whatever AI is going to write at the time. It’s just going to pull from the body of work that it has. It’s going to create a composite and it’s going to spit that out. It’s not going to develop itself. It’s going to take and develop itself from other people.
Jonathan: If you work on this artisan level stuff, you know how you spend $10 more on cheese, it’s artisanal. But that’s a thing, right? Something gives it more value when there’s more work put into it. When you can recognize the brush strokes that the artist used on the canvas.
Thomas: Ha ha ha.
Jonathan: When you can see the styles that they’re going through. People talk about the blue period of certain authors, artists. You can really see how the context of their life is really impacting the art that they’re putting out at that time.
Jonathan: And that’s what people are looking for. That’s the kind of connection that people want to have. Thomas is absolutely…
Thomas: And why hiding behind a pen name doesn’t work like it used to. Because if you’re using a pen name and you’re hiding behind a pen name, you’re gonna just blend in with all of the pen name puppets that these handful of authors who do know how to use AI really well and can write really good, tropic fiction, that’s what readers want.
Thomas: Like the books are, there’s a lot of AI books that are bad, but there’s a lot of AI books that are indetectable, that readers don’t know that the book was written with the use of AI throughout, it doesn’t trigger any scans or anything. They don’t leave the prompts in.
Jonathan: We hope they don’t. Yeah.
Thomas: And well, that’s how they get found out, is by leaving the prompts in. It’s not because people notice that the writing used dashes or whatever. If you know what you’re doing with the prompting, you can get around the easy detective methods.
Thomas: So differentiating yourself, part of it is voice. Part of it is quality, part of it is message and nuance and depth, where there’s more to the story than just the surface level. And that depth often comes with revisions.
Thomas: Some different authors approach this differently. Some people, they create the surface level story and it’s very fun and then they start working on the themes. Other people start with the themes and then they kind of build their way up to making the surface level story fun.
Thomas: But however you do it, that kind of timeless book, the kind of book that people want to own and reread is very different than the pulpy book. The kind of pulpy book people are wanting to read and they want to read the next one, they never want to go back and reread it because they already read it and they’re just… it’s like a meal, right? You don’t want to eat the same meal twice. You might eat the same food twice, but it’s like it’s been digested.
Jonathan: Yes. Like you don’t go back and be like, remember those chicken McNuggets that I got a week ago? I would like to go back and have those chicken McNuggets. No, you’re right. That’s not how it works. You go get new chicken McNuggets.
Thomas: Yeah, or a dog like eating its own vomit. That’s not what it wants.
Thomas: I was hesitant to cover the story for one reason, and that is that I’ve never really advocated for rapid release. So even when rapid release worked, it didn’t work for very many authors. And what would happen is that authors would burn themselves out trying to fake a monthly release schedule, even though they couldn’t actually write a book in a month.
Thomas: So they’d spend years writing some books and then bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, release them rapidly, thinking that somehow the Amazon algorithm would bring them free sales, which shows an ignorance of the algorithm often spurred on by people in Facebook groups giving each other incomplete advice of this is working for me, therefore it should work for you.
Thomas: And this actually is connected with my episode on not writing books in series. Cause again, I think this is another shift in the zeitgeist, shift in preferences where it’s happening in movies and it’s happening in books where readers are starting to want a good, satisfying standalone book that has a satisfying ending. It concludes itself.
Thomas: And one of the wonderful things about writing a standalone book is that you can be more experimental. You can be more adventurous. You don’t have to build a story world with 30 different characters and 20 different plot lines and 10,000 years of history. You can just tell a one book-sized story.
Thomas: And it becomes very shareable and it’s a really good way of developing your voice. You can develop your voice much better and faster when you’re experimenting with different standalone books, rather than all of your books that you’re writing are all tied to that freshman effort that you wrote 10 years ago when you were still learning how to write.
Thomas: And now you’re stuck with promises and expectations and quirks from that earlier amateur version of you. And now that you’re professional, you’re kind of stuck because of those early decisions that you made. So I’m not against series altogether. If you watch that episode to the end, I actually talked about when writing a series makes sense and when it is a good idea.
Thomas: Because it still is a good idea, but it’s not a good idea for everyone. And if somebody chooses to write a standalone book, they’re not doing something wrong. They’re not being… they’re not even necessarily making a marketing mistake. Most of the classic works of literature are standalone books.
Thomas: It’s very common that a series can be a classic. So sure, Tolkien could do it and Lewis could do it, but who else could do it? It’s like…
Jonathan: So there’s a principle here because there’s a fallacy people will fall into then when they ascribe to the tortoise method, which is they’ll never release a book because it’s never good enough. Okay, look, I recommend you use the 80-20 principle.
Jonathan: When we did translation work on the watch floor, when we got a translation to 80 percent, we pulled the trigger and we sent the report. Because that 80 percent has all the meat that you need. The 20 percent is the stuff you’re quibbling over. Did it mean this or was it this? Was it this gender word or was it this gender word?
Jonathan: And none of it matters in relevancy to the intel of the actual report or the impact that the report is actually supposed to have. As soon as you get your book to 80 percent of the mission it is supposed to accomplish, pull the trigger and your next 80 percent will be better than that 80 percent was.
Thomas: This is a good point you’re making because there’s a gutter on both sides of this bowling alley. So one gutter is I’m writing a book every month and they’re all kind of tropic slop. The other gutter is I spent two years on this book and I still don’t think it’s ready.
Thomas: And it’s like, you’re never gonna become an author like that. Because you’ll never improve. You gotta get feedback. You gotta get stuff out. You gotta get your initial failures out of the way.
Thomas: You gotta get the cold water out of the shower so the hot water can come after that. And you can’t let the fear be your boss. You can’t let it be your guide. If you’re worshiping at the altar of fear, you’ll never be able to experience or taste any success.
Jonathan: And the god of the altar of fear is named perfection. Your book will never be perfect. Exactly. No, you’re afraid. As soon as you get the work to 80 percent of where you know it’s going to accomplish its mission, you pull the trigger, you send it out, you take your hits, you get better, and then you write another one.
Jonathan: And when it’s at 80 percent, you pull the trigger and you send it out. Because if you don’t, you’re gonna die with a whole bunch of Word documents on your laptop. Unfinished Word Documents.
Jonathan: And I’m actually gonna get into why that’s bad in a second. And you don’t wanna die that way because Microsoft will cut off your access to previous versions of Office. Something had just happened to me this past week, and this is why I think this is a news item.
Microsoft Word, Subscriptions, and Planned Obsolescence
Jonathan: I had Microsoft Office Suite 2019, paid for the whole thing, one time payment. They turned it off.
Thomas: You… Apple went in and turned off the save button in our application. It’s not our fault. They hacked our code. We can’t save because of Apple. Lies.
Jonathan: So now it keeps prompting me you can’t save this until you purchase a subscription to 365 or get yourself a new office suite, a more recent office suite. Which is really scummy in my opinion.
Jonathan: I went on Google, I went on Reddit, I went on all these places and it’s a problem that people are experiencing right now. It’s been going on for a few months where Microsoft’s just like turning it off, can’t use it anymore, buy a new one. So I’m not buying a new one. Yeah, I am.
Thomas: Yeah, just stop using Microsoft Word. It’s not actually a good word processor. If you’re working with an editor and that’s the only one they know how to use and they’re not smart enough to know how to use one of the other editors, yeah, we should work with a different editor.
Jonathan: Well, that’s what I used it for. Yeah. So the good editors are all like 80 years old. That’s a different news story. Alright.
Thomas: PJ’s saying planned obsolescence. This is exactly what it is. They’re trying to push you into subscribing to your software.
Jonathan: Yeah. The subscription is the big deal because Microsoft right now, not just here, is really pushing the subscription model. On Xbox for gamers, they’re really pushing the Game Pass, which is terrible for game developers, but it’s good for Microsoft. Everyone’s trying to pull people into their ecosystems and keep them there.
Thomas: Subscriptions make sense when you’re continuing to add value and features and improvements and refinements. But the reason, Jonathan, you’re still using Word 2019 is because if you’re using Word 2025 or whatever the current version is, it’s no different.
Thomas: In fact, differences are all friction, right? They move the buttons around. It’s kind of like every year there’s a new edition of the business textbook when I was in college, because they didn’t want you to use the old edition of the textbook.
Thomas: But often they just change the order of the chapters and move the sections around so that you were forced to buy the new textbook instead of buying the used version of the exact same book at the bookstore. And it’s just like, this is changes without value. It’s a really bad business practice.
Thomas: And I think it’s really good to choose not to continue sending money to Microsoft to give them a message that this is not a business practice we’re going to support. The same with Adobe, which is going the same way.
Thomas: You have ongoing costs, sure, but it’s like disabling something that I purchased, taking it away from me that I paid for is a terrible violation of the expectation that you gave when you used the word purchase. Yeah, if you’re gonna use the words like buy and purchase, there’s an expectation that people are buying something and purchasing something.
Jonathan: The contract between the customer and…
Jonathan: To own it.
Thomas: Then use the word license. That’s a verb as well as a noun. But you didn’t use that as a noun. You used the noun buy and purchase, not license, because people had an expectation that they were actually buying something. I’m starting to rant.
Thomas: Real quick on this, somebody pointed out Mac Pages. Yeah, I bought Apple Pages 10 years ago, 15 years ago and they’ve never asked me to upgrade or pay for it again. And I’m very happy with it.
Christian vs General Market on Rapid Release
Jonathan: So is there a difference between the Christian market and the general market when it comes to rapid release? No.
Thomas: Well, so there is an important way. Rapid release never hit traditional publishing. Rapid release always was a creature of indie publishing.
Thomas: And this actually has an interesting implication, because as indies have kind of won the rapid release game and have won the genres that are the more pulpy genres, and have now gotten most of the money, the indies are making a lot of money, a lot of them.
Thomas: Now the indies are setting their sights on the domains that were previously controlled by the traditionally published authors. Like, well, we’ve already taken over all the pulpy books, now we’re gonna go after the more artisanal books, the higher quality books.
Thomas: And I think we’re gonna see this in both Christian publishing and secular publishing and all of the genres where these big publishers are gonna face more competition from authors who are writing books that are the same kind of standalone book, for instance. Traditional publishers publish more standalones than indies do.
Thomas: And now they’re going to have to start competing with that high quality standalone from an indie author more and more.
Cowboy Romance Is Hot
Jonathan: Kay Lytics has released a Western romance report, which is very interesting to me because I’ve considered Westerns to be dead since the late eighties. There are soaring sales ranks, new indie stars, Elsie Silver, Lila Sage, Jessica Patterson, have revitalized the genre and vaulted cowboy love stories onto bestseller charts. These are not classic westerns.
Thomas: I say Susan May Warren has been writing Western romances for a long time and doing very well. Also Lacey Williams.
Jonathan: Well, if you’re good at it, then people are gonna take it. I mean, we know Westerns are doing well because of the Mandalorian in sci-fi, Firefly. We know Westerns can still do well.
Thomas: If you’ve been listening to our Zeitgeist episodes, you know that King Arthur is coming, but he’s going be wearing a sheriff’s hat.
Jonathan: Hi guys. But now Western romances have a different makeover. They’re now Cowboy Romances. That is the term that is being used. Cowboy love stories.
Jonathan: They’re stylish, retro, illustrated, modern contemporary instead of the old fashioned ripped Stetson-wearing dudes. The tropes are small town charm, enemies to lovers, friends to lovers, with now Western settings. We’re making cowboy tales that are now relatable to today’s romance fans, okay? So we’re talking Hallmark, but instead of going to small town Minnesota now they’re going to small town Montana.
Jonathan: There’s a pop culture push. You got Yellowstone and its spin-offs. Yellowstone did very well. It was really well received. Taylor Swift has this whole Western chic thing going on. Cowboy fashion boom and denim revival. Thank you Sydney Sweeney. TikTok cowboy core trend.
Jonathan: There’s a lot going on in Western romance right now where we’re looking at the cowboy love stories and seeing that’s what romance readers want. Go ahead, go ahead.
Thomas: What’s funny to me is that these genres have been popular amongst Christian romance readers for a really long time. My wife was at Walmart a couple weeks ago and she saw a denim jumper and she took a picture of it and she texted it to me. She’s like, my culture is not your costume.
Thomas: That’s like all of the things the homeschoolers were into, the mail order bride story. This has been popular in the Christian space for decades. Suddenly it’s going mainstream.
Thomas: And it’s like, I don’t know how I feel about this. I suspect the authors who were doing well are doing even better, but it is an indication though of this overall zeitgeist shift towards a more conservative, less progressive ethos. Because the trad wife movement and even look at the like fashions. The fashion that’s really popular right now like the milkmaid dress is…
Jonathan: No holy oak no no sorry there is not it is so bad. Cowboys versus Aliens. There is a good story there. It’s not the one that made into a movie, but I think… Or pasta. Yeah, pasta made with the bronze cutters. Yep.
Thomas: A real thing, this kind of longing for this older world. So we have kind of simultaneous zeitgeist events happening at the same time. And y’all may fit into one of these groups.
Thomas: There’s the techno optimists, which are like wanting cyber trucks and digital everything and kind of moving into the future. And then that they’re looking forward with optimism. And then there’s the people who are looking backward with nostalgia. That’s universal.
Thomas: That’s not unique to this era of the Zeitgeist, but what is unique to this era of the Zeitgeist is where they’re looking. And so the fact that we’re looking out to the West and that we’re looking to the World War II era with nostalgia, and we’re not looking to historical periods that were on different points.
Thomas: We’re not looking back to World War I with nostalgia, like the 1920s. We were. Downton Abbey was very popular, but it was really popular 15 years ago.
Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I’m gonna give some targeting information on Western romances real quick. The search interest for cowboy romance is actually above the supply right now. So the number of new books being released a month is not actually meeting the demand people have for these cowboy romances. So that’s important for you romance writers.
Thomas: You’re underlining our whole talk about rapid release, gentleman.
Jonathan: Hey man, this is what you gotta jump… Hey, cowboys were always cool. Now they’ve changed cowboys… they’ve only successfully changed cowboys a couple of times to make them fit like you’re saying the zeitgeist.
Jonathan: I think cowboys can actually fit all four turnings because you have the frontiersman, you have the pioneer, you have the gunfighter, you have different types of cowboys here and one of these, cowboys are the bad guys, I mean that’s the whole point of Tombstone. Is that the cowboys are the bad guys, or the gangs.
Thomas: Yeah, this is the difference, and this is really important, the difference between the aesthetic genre and a narrative genre. So an aesthetic genre is the cowboy hats and the boots and the dust and the setting, and the narrative genre is what kind of story you’re telling in that setting.
Thomas: And I’m curious, and I don’t know if the K-lytics report went into this in terms of the narrative, talking about like tropes and stuff, but which narrative elements are resonant right now inside of this aesthetic.
Jonathan: It’s in the report. Yeah, it’s in the report.
Thomas: I will say, if you go to authormedia.com/Klytics, I have an affiliate link for Klytics. I encourage you to actually get the report. Yeah, we shouldn’t give away everything because Alex puts an intense amount of research into these reports. And okay, keep going.
Jonathan: Oh, everything is not here. I only have three more things that I’m saying and they’re just like seriously to dive into them. You got to go to this report.
Jonathan: There’s about 500 new titles a month and of those KU is underrepresented, which tells me indies aren’t writing them. It’s a potential new spot for indies.
Jonathan: But as far as the titles being produced of these 500, I would say about 300 or 350 or so are actually not in KU, which tells me they’re trad pub because most indies…
Thomas: What trad publishers are publishing cowboys?
Jonathan: I don’t know. I don’t know if Harlequin’s doing it. I didn’t know Harlequin was on Amazon.
Thomas: My guess is that that’s actually not what’s happening. Instead, it’s romance writers kind of from the Christian world where they’re really anti-Amazon and they’re not in KU because they’re wide and they’re selling in those.
Thomas: Because they have… remember, not everyone feels the way about Amazon that you feel, whoever you are, and some people really don’t like them.
Jonathan: It’s possible. Correct. I’m Amazon Vegan!
Thomas: I’m an Amazon vegan. I’m morally superior. Tell them the riff raff who eats at Amazon or shops at Amazon. Those are the lowly people. I shop only at boutique, artisan, locally sourced, crafted vegan bookstores.
Jonathan: Hahaha.
Jonathan: So, because Cowboy Romance has been such a niche for so long, I don’t actually have enough actionable data to tell me as to whether, if I’m seeing a higher number of non-KU titles here, if that means that these are trad pub. Because that’s normally what it means in a genre. If something is not in KU, it’s usually trad pubbed.
Jonathan: I know a lot of indies go wide, but that’s not the majority of indies. So we’re talking statistically, on average, especially in the romance genre, you’re going to be in KU. That’s where the money is.
Jonathan: As far as this particular niche goes, like I said, I need a lot more immersion in the data to be able to tell me how behaviors are forming here. It is now considered a hot mainstream by K-lytics. It’s no longer a niche. It is considered like it’s hockey romance now.
Thomas: It’s gonna get so flooded with books in the next few months.
Jonathan: Bad too. I mean, we’re going to have the busted shirts open again and everything’s going be great. Now, classic westerns are ranking much lower than the modern cowboy romances. So if you’re going to write, it has to relate to the people that are writing it instead of being you’re writing John Wayne again, or you’re writing Louis L’Amour again.
Thomas: So what this is telling me is that women are looking to the Western setting more than men are looking to the Western setting.
Jonathan: Just ask yourself, are they making sourdough again? Like, no, seriously, that’s an actual indicator. If they’re back into bread making, bread making is a lot of work. I make bread, okay? And I have to plan my day around the bread because I have to make the dough and then I have to proof the dough and then I have to pound the dough and I have to knead the dough and I have to rest the dough and then I have to get it in the oven.
Jonathan: I have to rest the bread after it’s done with that. There is a ton of stuff that goes into making bread. It is a lifestyle choice. And so if women are looking at that again, that tells you a lot about the zeitgeist because it means they’re trying to either connect with something or they want to have a family like those women did and bread was a part of that or something. I don’t know.
Thomas: I was at a coworking space in downtown Austin. I had views of downtown Austin. So coworking spaces tend to be full of these high charging city tech type people. And this coworking space had a question like, if you had $10 million, how would you spend it?
Thomas: And if that question 10 years ago would have been filled with VC ideas of like tech companies to start. And it still had some of those kinds of answers that people wrote on the whiteboard, but I was shocked that like 50 percent of the answers had some version of move out to the country and start a homestead.
Thomas: It’s like, there’s this longing of getting out of the city, getting away from the hustle and the bustle, getting away from the civilization that’s collapsing all around us out to where there is no civilization and its collapse won’t affect me because I’m living independently and I’m living self-reliantly.
Jonathan: My wife got into like a trend I had the… I just put my foot down and I said no, we’re not doing this. She wanted to get her own wheat berries so we could mill our own flour for making bread. I’m like no, no we’re not doing that. No. No. I have chickens. I have chickens now.
Thomas: You… You… Chickens are in your future. It is your destiny. There are gonna be chickens in your yard. Just give it some time. It’s already happened.
Thomas: But that’s the other thing, people aspire to have chickens. My parents did not aspire to have chickens. Their parents did not aspire to have chickens. Their parents saw having chickens as a sign of poverty, but now we see chickens as a sign of wealth.
Thomas: So there’s been this big shift to how we view a lot of aspects. I am suspicious that this is beginning of maybe an 80-year trend kind of back in that direction. So pendulum is starting to go back and forth.
Thomas: And that’s part of the reason why I’m talking about so much Zeitgeist stuff right now, because all of the trends that were coming to one way in 2023, that pendulum reached the top. And what it means is that the pendulum is now heading in a completely different direction.
Thomas: And so many cultural trends are heading in the opposite direction now. And as authors, you’re particularly vulnerable for this. I was talking with an author who’s like planning on writing…
Jonathan: My gosh, all the women in the chat are like, milling flour’s not that hard.
Thomas: You… No. You just gotta want it more Jonathan, you just gotta want it more. Yeah. Yeah.
Jonathan: Clearly, clearly. It’s artisan bread. It’s so much better with its artisan bread.
Thomas: So this shift, I think, is the beginning of a long shift. It’ll go through different phases and it’ll be colored differently. So it’s hard to predict exactly where it’s gonna go long term.
Thomas: But I think that there is a nostalgia for a time we did not know that’s very different from the nostalgia of when I was a child. So there’s the classic nostalgia of everyone wants to relive their fourth and fifth Christmases, right? And so whatever music was popular back then, and kind of that time, longing for my childhood, this is different. This is longing for the childhood of my great, great grandparents.
Thomas: And that’s fascinating. I’m very… like, my grandparents saw milling your own flour as a thing to be avoided. It’s Wonder Bread. It’s the greatest thing since… we don’t even have a word for when it’s the greatest thing since.
Jonathan: Sliced bread. Our grandparents knew, man.
Thomas: And now we’re like, sourdough, it’s the greatest thing since sliced white bread.
Jonathan: Man.
Thomas: What’s old is new again, there’s nothing new under the sun. Things go…
Jonathan: While we’re talking about breadgeist now.
Thomas: Bread, guys. I think this is where we will end it, but this is not where we will end it. We’ll be back next week talking… as Zeitgeist. We’ll be talking about everything going on in culture and writing and publishing.
Thomas: Stay tuned here to Author Update. Don’t forget to like and subscribe on this channel. Turn on the notification bell. We had a lot more people come right at the beginning this time, and I think part of that is because folks turned on notifications.
Thomas: Do come to the Novel Marketing Conference. It’s really special time to connect with other authors. Jonathan and I will both be there in person. You can meet us. We’ll have an ice cream social for patrons the Thursday night before the conference. Even if you don’t have a ticket to the official conference, you’re more than welcome to come to the ice cream social if you’re a patron. And with that, live long, prosper, and try not to spend too much time eating sourdough bread.
