Will “Free” Libby Ebooks Bankrupt Libraries?

by | Jun 9, 2026 | Author Update | 0 comments

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Week Ending June 4, 2026

This week, Payhip gets a substantial upgrade and becomes a much more attractive option for indie authors. Libraries complain of indies gaming the system for Libby profits. LGBTQ children’s book sales have collapsed, and the numbers are brutal. Audible returns fire at Spotify by launching a gamified loyalty program. A $107 desktop app challenges Vellum and Scrivener. AI brain fry is hitting creative workers hard. And lastly, Gen Z men are ready to burn it all down, and what we as storytellers must do about it.

Publishing News

Direct Sales Makes Sense Again! Payhip to Automatically Handle US and Canada Sales Tax Starting July 1

According to Payhip’s official Help Center FAQ article “Sales Tax In US and Canada FAQ,” updated May 31, 2026, the platform will take over sales tax responsibilities for US and Canadian sales effective July 1. Payhip states it will “become entirely responsible for collecting and paying sales tax in the US and Canada” on behalf of sellers, citing marketplace facilitator laws in the US and rules for digital platform operators in Canada as the driver for the shift.

Starting July 1, Payhip will automatically calculate the correct sales tax rate at checkout based on the product type sellers define on their edit product page. The platform will collect the tax from buyers, with sellers able to choose whether tax appears added on top of the price or included within it through account Tax Settings, and Payhip will handle remittance, filing, and any required registrations. Sellers no longer need to manually set up tax rates for US states or Canadian provinces. The change applies across product types, though exact tax treatment varies by location and category; digital products face different rules in California than in other states, for example. Payhip confirmed the service comes at no extra cost to sellers.

Many indie authors use Payhip to sell ebooks, courses, memberships, and digital products directly, and US and Canadian sales tax compliance has long required manual rate setup and ongoing filing work across dozens of jurisdictions. This move reduces that administrative load significantly and lowers risk, since Payhip assumes the compliance liability. The timing aligns with Payhip’s updated marketing materials, which now list “Automatic sales tax and VAT handling for the US, Canada, UK and EU” as a core platform feature.

Sellers should log in before July 1 to define product types on existing and new listings so the correct rates apply automatically. The old manual tax setup process under Account > Settings > Taxes will no longer be necessary for US and Canada. This follows Payhip’s existing model for EU and UK VAT, where the platform already acts as the responsible party for collection and remittance.

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Commentary

Thomas: Late last year I did an episode on why direct sales was a bad idea for most authors. It’s part of an ongoing friendly back-and-forth with Joanna Penn. We both favor direct sales for big-time authors, where keeping a bigger cut of thousands of dollars a month makes sense, and we both agree that for an author with very few sales, direct selling just adds cost and complexity without actually selling more books. We only disagree on where the cutoff is.

This change moves me closer to Joanna’s position. My main criticism of Shopify, in my episode The Shopify Trap, is that it charges about $20 a month, and then you pay another $20 or $30 a month for TaxJar to remit sales tax across roughly 400 jurisdictions.

Most authors don’t sell enough to cover $50 a month in expenses. The numbers don’t work. Now that Payhip handles sales tax remittance for free, the math completely changes. Payhip has no monthly fee. They take a percentage, but it’s less than Amazon’s, and they host most of the transaction on their site, so you don’t have to revamp your own website much to add direct sales.

I believe Payhip also has a BookVault integration. If so, you can sell direct without ever touching a book. Payhip handles the credit card transaction, sends the order to BookVault, and BookVault mails the book. The experience is almost identical to selling on Amazon, except you keep about 90% of the money instead of about 50%.

You can now do this at much lower risk. If you add a Payhip checkout and only a handful of people buy, you make a little money without having to file a sales tax return over five books. That kind of crushing paperwork for very little benefit is exactly what’s kept people away from direct sales.

Jonathan: Payhip also has a BookFunnel integration, so you can deliver your ebooks and audiobooks through BookFunnel as well. Payhip and Shopify were the only two integrations I saw on BookFunnel.

Thomas: Those are the only ones you need. Your ebook, audiobook, and paperback can all deliver automatically through either BookVault or BookFunnel. What’s sad is that Payhip offered this feature two years ago. When I interviewed Joanna Penn about selling direct, she recommended Payhip specifically because it handled sales tax. Then they stopped, and now they’ve started again. It’s like Apple giving us MagSafe back. Why did you take it away in the first place?

Only 35 Standard Tickets Remain for the Novel Marketing Conference

This is not a typical writers conference where you learn how to write and publish a book. The Novel Marketing Conference is focused on helping you sell more books while spending less time on marketing. Join us in Austin, TX, January 22–23, 2027.

Tickets are ticking away. The conference runs once a year in Austin in January, a great month to head south for the winter and learn book marketing. Over two days you’ll develop your own book marketing strategy, and the final session will be Jonathan’s, on productivity. There’s a real-time ticker at NovelMarketingConference.com showing how many tickets are left. It sold out last year, and we’re on pace to run out before the early bird window closes.

Will “Free” Libby Ebooks Bankrupt Libraries?

According to Jane Friedman in her Bottom Line newsletter, five major library organizations have sent a joint letter to major New York publishers expressing deep concern over increasingly expensive digital book licensing models for ebooks and audiobooks.

The Urban Libraries Council, Public Library Association, Canadian Urban Libraries Council, Chief Officers of State Library Agencies, and Association for Rural & Small Libraries signed the May 2026 statement. These groups represent the vast majority of public libraries across the US and Canada. In some large, high-circulation systems, digital licensing now consumes 50 percent of collections budgets, far higher than before the pandemic. A typical new-title ebook license costs libraries $55 or more and expires after two years or a set number of checkouts, while consumers pay roughly $13 on average for the same ebook. As one concrete example, Jefferson County Public Libraries spent $3,300 on 166 print copies of Rebecca Yarros’s Onyx Storm but $22,000 on roughly 360 ebook licenses to meet demand.

Libraries argue these models have become unsustainable. They want publishers and platforms to negotiate usage-based pricing or perpetual ownership options instead of the current time- or circulation-limited licenses that force repeated repurchases. Digital lending via Libby and similar platforms has exploded, and libraries must support print, ebook, and audiobook formats simultaneously while facing expiring digital licenses that print books do not carry. Small and rural libraries report the current pricing makes it impossible to offer the full range of titles patrons want.

These structural costs face additional strain from patron behavior patterns that some now label as system abuse or “ebook fraud.” Certain indie authors and organized promotional networks use multiple library cards or coordinated “syndicates” to check out their own books in volume, creating artificial holds and spikes in demand on specific titles. Libraries then feel pressure to purchase extra expensive licenses to clear queues and satisfy patron requests. While legal in most cases and sometimes tied to cost-per-checkout payment models that can benefit indie authors, the practice adds real dollars to library budgets already stretched by Big Five pricing. It mirrors the broader “Libby hack” trend where readers stack multiple library cards, sometimes from non-resident or reciprocal systems. What one side calls clever resourcefulness, others see as behavior that disadvantages fellow patrons, inflates licensing expenses, and undermines the shared nature of public library collections.

Traditional authors typically receive royalties based on the high license fees their publishers collect, but the money does not scale directly with every borrow the way a retail sale does, and long-term, unsustainable library budgets could shrink the number of titles libraries acquire or promote. Indie authors gain valuable discovery and, under some OverDrive or Draft2Digital library models, either upfront license payments or per-checkout revenue; aggressive self-borrowing tactics may boost short-term visibility for a few, yet they risk damaging relationships with libraries and contributing to the very pricing crisis the organizations just protested. Authors on both sides of the aisle benefit when libraries remain strong partners in discovery and literacy. This story continues to develop as libraries and publishers respond to the joint letter and as state legislation advances.

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Commentary

Jonathan: Indie authors should not do this. The system is biased against indie authors in terms of library stocking, and that’s real, but gaming the queue is a form of fraud and it doesn’t help. Libraries are slow, but their hatred lasts forever. Why make libraries hate indie titles? You’re holding up 300 flags to convince them there’s a 30,000-man army over the hill when there’s nothing there, and they won’t appreciate being lied to. They may just refuse indie titles altogether.

Thomas: I understand the indie perspective, though. It’s “the libraries have never given us money and never will, but with this little-known trick you can get money right now.” There’s a sense that they left the door unlocked, so race in. The incentive is strong. At roughly $40 to $45 per library license going to the indie author, getting 10 libraries to purchase your book is $400, and getting 100 is $4,000. Some of you listening are already thinking about putting together a syndicate.

The problem is that the long-term ban is diffused while the short-term benefit is focused. The author who games $4,000 gets all $4,000, but the unpublished indie who won’t have a book out for five years is the one who suffers, and they’re not the one behaving badly.

Jonathan: They’re also not gaining readers. Dollars spend fast, but a reader is a relationship you cultivate across all your books. If you’re doing this, you don’t have a product people want, and your methodology is already dishonest. A sophisticated AI slop author with hundreds of pen names and 1,000 library cards could have AI agents requesting their books across open-enrollment libraries. This could be millions of dollars of fraud.

Thomas: And it’s going to generate hatred. Librarians will learn the trick and armor themselves against anyone not coming from a publisher. The deeper issue is an economic flaw called the third-party payer problem. When a third party pays for what you’re buying, you have no incentive to get a good deal or to be judicious. It’s the problem with how healthcare is paid for, and it’s the problem with how library books are paid for. It’s the company credit card, so you buy yourself an appetizer. If it were your own credit card, you wouldn’t need the blooming onion.

Jonathan: Just be honest and do it the hard way. Form good relationships with your local libraries and let it happen organically.

Thomas: Novel Marketing is the longest-running book marketing podcast in the world because I’ve never recommended these shenanigans, and that’s also why my old episodes age so well. They don’t rely on algorithm hacks that forget who the customer is. The customer is the reader. The authors who endure are the ones focused on readers, because if readers love your books they’ll jump through hoops to buy them with their own money, and if they don’t, no amount of marketing will fix that.

Jonathan: There’s a difference between a tactic and a gimmick. I wrote Semper Fi for a small publisher to reach an existing Kindle Unlimited audience of veterans and men. Before that book I had about 60 Amazon followers. I now have over 600. Now every time I publish, an automatic Amazon email goes out to 10 times more people. That’s organic. Be faithful in the little things.

Publishers Panic as LGBTQ Children’s Books Sales Collapse

According to Book Riot on May 29, the outlet declared that queer books and authors have reached “a breaking point.” Just days later, on June 1, Jon Del Arroz at Fandom Pulse framed the same reality in starker terms: publishers are openly lamenting the collapse of LGBTQ children’s books as Pride Month begins. The numbers behind the headlines are brutal.

Dahlia Adler, who has tracked queer book deal announcements in Publishers Weekly for years, says those announcements are in clear decline, and even when deals still close, the language has turned coded and cautious to avoid becoming a target. Small publishers built around diverse books report sales to schools and libraries crashing by 50 percent. Jason Low of Lee & Low Books put it bluntly saying that books with a rainbow on the cover, even when the rainbow has nothing to do with Pride, are simply being left off orders. Award-winning author Adib Khorram watched his royalty checks drop 70 percent amid the shift, and other queer authors have seen titles that sold steadily for a decade quietly go out of print.

Literary agents are hearing something new from editors. Rebecca Podos said this is the first time in a decade she has received rejection letters explicitly citing “difficulty placing queer books in stores,” and Jim McCarthy of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret quoted an editor who passed on a project because of “so many book bans and so much concern about decreasing school library sales of queer content.” They no longer believe the market is big enough to justify the risk. Wholesalers that feed schools and libraries have grown openly hesitant, and the pipeline that once moved these books in volume is constricting fast.

Book Riot and aligned voices blame five years of escalating book challenges, political pressure, and censorship for the pullback, describing exhausted authors, librarians, and teachers under siege. Fandom Pulse and other observers see something simpler. A market that finally pushed back against content many parents viewed as inappropriate for children, with the industry now paying the price for years of overreach. Both sides agree on the facts on the ground; the disagreement is only over why it happened and what it means.

If you write or hope to write traditionally published LGBTQ children’s or YA books, the acquisition environment has tightened dramatically. Lower advances, smaller print runs, and higher rejection rates are the new baseline for this niche. School and library sales, once a reliable backbone for middle-grade and YA, now carry real commercial risk. Indie authors have a clearer opening than they did five years ago, because readers who want these stories can still find them directly from authors who control their own platforms; the institutional gatekeepers are stepping back. The bigger lesson is brutal but useful. Cultural and political battles over children’s content create real winners and losers in the marketplace. Authors who build strong email lists, direct sales, and audience ownership insulate themselves from whichever way the institutional wind blows next.

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Commentary

Thomas: I was talking with a dad about this just yesterday. Our local library system in Austin has a bookstore attached to each branch, and he was telling me that all the books they can’t move are what he called “rainbow vomit.” That’s the consumer attitude right now. Someone sees a rainbow on the cover and has an immediate, visceral disgust reaction, even when the book is about unicorns, ponies, and fairies, just a 1980s rainbow with nothing sexual or gender-related about it.

The store had other books in the back they’d bring out if you asked, but they’re trying to get rid of the rainbow books because there’s no market for them. Nobody wants to buy The Gay BCs, which is a real book.

This kind of sexualized content for children had a moment around 2020 when, for a short time, people were okay with it. Now they really aren’t. The reaction is “Why are we putting sexualized content in front of children? We don’t want this,” and the stores can’t sell it. It’s poor consumer demand. It’s also demographic.

The people who support this and would buy these books aren’t having many children or have already had them. The core market for these books isn’t having new children and isn’t buying these books. On top of that, libraries are running out of money because of the indie syndicates draining their budgets. Libraries would absolutely buy this content, because they support it philosophically, and every month is June in a public library. But they’re hurting for money.

These publishers are getting hit from both sides, by collapsing consumer demand and by shrinking library budgets, and there aren’t enough libraries to keep these publishers in business.

Jonathan: Before everyone celebrates the fall of LGBTQ literature, remember the pendulum swings. It’s on this side now, and it’s likely to swing back, so don’t get too excited. I see it all the time with people who win one fight and then lose their next five because of it. The worst thing for a young man can be to win big at poker when he’s young. It’s a life-destroying victory.

Audiobook Market Share War Update: Audible Reacts to Audio Wars with Loyalty Program

According to Audible’s official newsroom announcement and Mathew Bowman on AuthorMedia.social, Audible rolled out its new Audible Rewards program starting June 2, 2026. The free loyalty initiative now appears in the US Audible app and website for both Standard and Premium Plus members. The move comes as Spotify’s audiobook bundling continues to expand the overall market and chip away at Audible’s long-held lead; recent industry analyses put Audible at approximately 63 percent US market share by revenue, while Spotify’s inclusion of audiobook hours in Premium plans has driven double-digit audio growth for multiple major publishers.

Members enroll directly in the app or on the website, and early participants receive an extra discount on a future title. The program includes a dedicated Rewards Hub that tracks progress, with Listening Day Rewards at the center. Any day with five or more minutes of listening counts toward milestones, even if the days are not consecutive. Other mechanics include “Spend 3 Credits, Get 1 Free,” referral bonuses of $15 for the member after three successful referrals plus $5 for the new user, and an anniversary reward of a free credit or voucher after 12 months of active membership. Gamified elements feature tiered badges for completing 3, 4, or 5 titles within four months, named Engaged, Enthusiastic, or Dedicated, plus special series challenges; launch screenshots highlight a Harry Potter full-cast edition challenge that awards an exclusive badge upon completion of all seven books, with additional franchise challenges planned. Members can pause for up to 90 days without losing tier status or rewards.

Increased daily listening streaks and challenge participation should drive higher credit usage and title completion rates, especially for series and backlist titles. The Rewards Hub and milestone discounts give Audible another tool to raise switching costs and keep high-engagement listeners inside its credit ecosystem rather than drifting to bundled competitors. Authors running series or planning launches should consider how challenge tie-ins might spotlight specific titles. Long-term, sustained competition between credit-based and bundled-subscription models may create new promotional opportunities or pressure points on royalty structures and exclusivity terms.

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Commentary

Thomas: Audible is really losing share. That 63 percent figure used to be around 80 or 90. The timing is interesting, because I was just listening to the full-cast dramatizations of the Dresden Files being re-released as tightened audio dramas, about nine hours each. Nine hours is a lot to spend an Audible credit on, and as a Spotify Premium member I realized I could listen to a whole one free on Spotify.

That’s a huge tectonic shift.

Audible has been able to treat authors terribly because it effectively held all the market share, and the final 10 or 15 percent was split 100 different ways, so none of it mattered to indie authors. Now that Spotify is taking a real chunk, that changes.

That said, I’ve been an Audible user long enough to remember the last time they did something like this, back around 2010 in the Foursquare era, when you earned badges for listening. I was reading about 100 books a year and earned a ton of them, and then an app update wiped them all out. Now there are different badges and I have no progress toward them. My instinct as a reader is to ignore the game and just listen to enjoy the books. I don’t trust Audible to treat me well with this, so I’ll take their free stuff, but it won’t keep me from leaving for Spotify.

Jonathan: Competition is always good. Audible’s shrinking share is fantastic because it means they’ll actually have to compete and possibly offer incentives to the indie authors who provide all their content.

Author Alerts

June is Patron Appreciation Month

All Novel Marketing patrons get these benefits starting at just $4 a month:

  • Bonus episode every month
  • Patrons-only episodes too controversial for the public
  • Free access to AuthorMedia.social with a special patron badge
  • Seat at the live monthly Q&A plus video and audio replay
  • Over $1,000 in discounts on Author Media courses
  • Free ticket to the annual Patrons Appreciation Ice Cream Social in Austin, Texas
  • June only: The $249 course How to Get Booked as a Podcast Guest, free

Become a Novel Marketing Patron today!

Thomas: I first made June patron appreciation month as a reaction to June being so many other things. I was tired of it, so I decided to make it the month I give all the patrons a free gift, and I’ve done it every June since.

AI Traffic Surpasses Human Traffic on Internet

According to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, agentic traffic has now passed human traffic online for the first time in internet history. Cloudflare Radar data shows bots at 57.5 percent of HTTP requests to HTML content while human traffic sits at 42.5 percent as of early June 2026. Authors must now optimize sites and content for AI agents as the primary visitors rather than direct human readers.

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Commentary

Thomas: The dead internet theory has been around for years, but now we have it from an authoritative source. This isn’t 51 to 49. We’re almost at 60/40, where six out of 10 visits to your website are agents, meaning someone asked ChatGPT or Grok a question and the AI is pulling up your site. Not Claude very much, though. Claude is the laziest grounder of all the AI models. You have to ask it pretty please to look up a web page, and even then it often reads only the first half before giving up. Grok, on the other hand, will read 100 pages to answer your question, so I’m curious how much of this traffic is just Grok looking up pages to synthesize answers.

I have tools in the patron toolbox that scan your author website and give you tips on making it more AI-friendly, because if the AI recommends you and your book, you’ll sell more books. People are increasingly asking ChatGPT what they should read next. You don’t have to like it to acknowledge that it’s the future.

First Ever Members Only Episode

Watch as Jonathan makes Thomas review author memes.

Commentary

Jonathan: Become a member and watch it. I made Thomas go through a whole bunch of author memes, and it was fantastic. Nothing serious, except that something triggered Thomas into a lecture on marketing history and Ancient Rome, so you’ll actually learn something too.

Technology News

Atticus, Scrivener and Vellum Have New Competition: Deckle Is the Newest Cheapest Entrant Into the Word Processor Wars

Deckle announced the early access launch of its native desktop application for Windows and Mac today. The tool gives indie authors a single offline app that takes a manuscript from first draft to publish-ready file for a one-time payment of $107. Co-founder Ezzy says writers deserve one app that feels like home: “No switching tools, no wrestling with formats, no subscriptions eating into your royalties. Just you and your book.”

Most indie authors run a three-app workflow. They draft in one program, format in another, and spend hours troubleshooting file compatibility right when they should finish the book. Scrivener excels at organization, yet many writers then buy Vellum for $249 on Mac only, or Atticus for $147, just to get polished output. That totals near $298 plus two separate learning curves for a process that should live in one tool.

Deckle works as one offline desktop app for Windows and Mac. Authors buy it once, every feature ships today, and all future updates arrive free forever. It offers a binder-based organizer with Draft, Notes, Research, and Trash folders where authors drag and drop to reorder chapters, scenes, and notes. There are four view modes, including Editor, Outliner in grid or list, Continuous View for the full manuscript, and Live Preview that shows the actual EPUB or print layout in real time. Fiction-specific block types cover scene breaks, verse, dialogue, inset text, epigraphs, and images with captions. The app autosaves on every keystroke and supports named version snapshots with one-click restore, lets writers split up to four panes at once, and includes a research panel that imports PDFs, images, and documents directly into the project. One-step import from Scrivener .zip files, DOCX, and EPUB preserves chapters, scenes, synopses, notes, and research.

Authors can pick from 26 done-for-you style presets with complete typeface pairings, color palettes, and layouts, or switch to advanced mode with over 60 granular controls for typography, margins, running headers, drop caps, and chapter ornaments, with every change previewing instantly. The software auto-typesets front and back matter including title page, copyright, dedication, table of contents, about the author, and acknowledgments. Exports include EPUB 3.1 files validated by EPUBCheck and optimized for Kindle, Apple Books, and Kobo; a print PDF generated via the Typst engine that passes KDP preflight and works for IngramSpark; and clean DOCX in standard manuscript format for agents and editors.

Early access costs $107 with a 30-day no-questions-asked refund. The price rises to $157 at full launch. No subscription is required, and the app runs entirely offline so manuscripts stay on the author’s machine, though iOS and Android versions sit on the roadmap. Indie authors eliminate the multi-app tax in both dollars and time, Windows users finally receive a strong Vellum alternative, and the live preview and unified workflow cut hours lost to file troubleshooting.

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Commentary

Thomas: We renamed this third segment from the AI segment to technology more broadly, because there are other technologies worth talking about. This week’s is a new word processor built specifically for authors. Some of you are still using Microsoft Word, and you have my pity. There are many word processors for writing full-length books that are all better than Word.

Jonathan: I write and edit in Scrivener. I used to port over to Word because ProWritingAid only worked there, but now it works in Scrivener, so I export to Vellum as a Word document to get my EPUB. Deckle would let you do all of that in one program, and it works on Windows.

Thomas: There’s an even darker dungeon than Microsoft Word, and it’s the Word clones like LibreOffice. Word is like trying to prepare a meal with a Swiss Army knife. Can you chop a chicken with it? Yes, but it’s not the right tool. Word was originally created for memos, and that short-document core is still its essence. For a 300,000-word novel, it just doesn’t have the tools you want.

There’s a pro and a con to using something brand new. The developer reached out and gave us both access to test it. The con is that a new tool is buggier and missing features. The pro is that while it’s in active development, a responsive user can shape it to their own way of writing. The developer is far more willing to add a feature now than five years from now when the tool is established and there are tutorials teaching the old way. I’m not ready to recommend it yet. We’re just reporting the news.

Jonathan: I went through the tutorial. In theory it runs like Scrivener and Vellum combined, though I haven’t stress-tested it. It has a live preview of your typesetting as you type. Vellum does the same thing, but Vellum is Mac-only, and Deckle claims to do it on Windows. It also has a live page and word count.

Thomas: The live page count is genuinely useful because “how many pages will my book be?” is a surprisingly hard question to answer. Normally you export from Scrivener into Vellum and discover at 350 pages that you’re only halfway through act two, and your book is already too long to be profitable. For indie authors, the sweet spot for maximum money per book is 200 to 275 pages, ideally 200 to 250. Once you go over 275 pages, your printing cost rises much faster than the amount you can charge. You make twice as much money off two 250-page books as off one 500-page book, and actually more than twice, because your costs are lower. Brandon Sanderson can get away with tomes because he’s offset-printed at massive scale, not printed on demand.

Jonathan: A 500-page book is fantastic in Kindle Unlimited, which pays on page count. Big books do well there. But sometimes you split anyway just to get more covers, because readers like seeing a new cover. It depends on how your audience reacts.

AI Brain Fry Is Real and Hitting Authors Hard

According to Harvard Business Review, researchers from Boston Consulting Group and the University of California, Riverside coined the term “AI brain fry” in a March 5, 2026 study. They define it as mental fatigue from excessive use, interaction with, or oversight of AI tools beyond one’s cognitive capacity.

The team surveyed 1,488 full-time US workers. 14% of AI users reported AI brain fry, with rates exceeding 25% in marketing, operations, and creative-heavy roles. Productivity peaks with three or fewer AI tools, while four or more trigger sharp drops in output. Oversight of autonomous AI agents creates the worst strain.

YA author Chaylee McCleese posted May 9 that she has “AI fatigue” and plans to start blocking accounts and companies heavily using it. Writer @theotricality described an identity crisis that forces her to change her natural style to avoid AI detection, saying writing is no longer fun and now gives her a great deal of fatigue. Broader writer chatter highlights constant task-switching, verification, and decision-making as the real drain that turns AI from a helper into a cognitive burden.

Many indies juggle multi-tool stacks for drafting, research, covers, editing, and marketing, and excessive use risks cognitive offloading that weakens original thinking and unique voice. The result is burnout, generic prose, and less ownership of creative work exactly when readers reward distinctive storytelling. To avoid brain fry, cap your active AI tools at three, block dedicated AI-free deep writing sessions on your calendar, use AI as a first-draft partner rather than a replacement and always edit with your own critical eye, and monitor your energy so you can step away when verification starts to feel exhausting.

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Commentary

Thomas: There’s a phenomenon with people who use AI heavily. They’re busier than ever and tend to be happy, but they’re not getting much sleep and they’re working harder than ever. I heard Marc Andreessen describe the same thing on Joe Rogan’s podcast. AI doesn’t take work away from you. It lets you do more work, and doing more work faster makes you want to do even more.

Zach Russell, host of the Lorehaven podcast, had a great observation, saying that the pro-AI and anti-AI factions are fading. What’s emerging instead are people who try to use AI to do the work for them, and people who use AI to help them do the work. The promise that you’ll have an army of AI agents and get to sit on the beach is false. It’s more like having a dozen employees you now have to manage.

The people struggling most with the transition are the ones without management experience, who are used to being workers with a manager making the decisions. When you manage AI agents, the agents do the tasks but the decisions are still yours, and a larger share of your day becomes decision-making. Decisions are mentally fatiguing. As an artist, the judgment has to be yours, or it isn’t your art.

We use AI to generate the thumbnails for these episodes, and we get a negative comment on about every other video from someone reacting only to the thumbnail. But we guide the art collaboratively. Jonathan thought he could do better than my thumbnail for this episode and battled with the tool until he made a better version. That’s judgment and decision-making, and it’s tiring. AI fatigue is like running on a treadmill all the time and then running a 5K outside. Most of your muscles are strong, but the ones the treadmill never trained are suddenly screaming.

Jonathan: I have a video game metaphor for this. In most games you spend mana to cast spells, and the spells are you getting work done. If you stack ability haste you can cast more often, but you run out of mana faster. You think you’re winning because you’re casting more spells, but you’re killing your ability to stay in the fight because you have no mana. That’s what AI does to your workflow. It runs you out of mana faster, because you have to make all these creative decisions back to back.

Thomas: This is the future, and everybody is using AI more. Some people and companies use it poorly. I went to Home Depot with specific questions about shed construction, and I got a young employee who had clearly never labored in his life. I asked a basic question, whether their shed construction includes building the foundation or whether I build it myself, and he typed my question into Google with me standing right there and scrolled down for the AI answer.

I can do that at home. I needed him to give me answers from actual knowledge. Home Depot could be using AI to mentor that kid, to teach him the difference between titanium and steel drill bits or steel versus composite sheds. Instead, they hired someone with no training and told him to Google it. Customers still expect some level of expertise.

Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist: Gen Z Men See the System Rigged Against Them And They Are Starting to Burn It Down

Two stories broke this week that look unrelated on the surface. One in the UK. One in Oregon. Both reveal that a growing number of Gen Z men believe the institutions around them, including schools, police, corporations, universities, and the media, hate them and want them dead. And when young men reach that conclusion and feel they have nothing left to lose, history does not end well. This is the most underserved section of the readership and the one most likely to bring about societal change.

Background

These were young men raised in school by social justice-oriented teachers who used the words “privilege” and “endemic racism” against them like weapons throughout their entire education. Every organization around them encouraged girls to succeed and lead, or encouraged minorities, but there was no boys’ math club. If they tried to start one, they were told to check their privilege. All of this was code for “We want everyone to succeed except for you.”

They emerged from high school with the perception that the institutions were tilted against them, that companies didn’t want to hire men, and that universities didn’t want to recruit men.

Many of them are underemployed while they watch jobs they are qualified for go to less-skilled hires who help fill a diversity quota. According to University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson’s analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics household survey data, the US added a net 369,000 employed people from the start of President Trump’s second term in January 2025 through roughly March 2026. Women accounted for 348,000 of those positions. Men accounted for 21,000. That split equals roughly 94% of the net employment growth going to women. Young men are being systematically excluded from the economy, and it is no surprise they want to see it burn.

Henry Nowak “I Can’t Breathe”

Henry Nowak was a Gen Z British man walking home from school when Vickrum Singh Digwa stabbed him multiple times. The police were told that Henry was racist, which in the context of the UK’s two-tiered policing system made him less than human in their eyes. Henry told the police “I’ve been stabbed. I can’t breathe.” The officer responded “I don’t think you have, mate,” and they handcuffed him. He fell unconscious from loss of blood and died on the scene.

This bears a strong resemblance to the death of George Floyd, except the message that Gen Z men are receiving from the media and the institutions is “we don’t care if you die.” There has been almost no mainstream coverage of this story. These Gen Z men are marching on a path to civil war in Britain, and history tells us when things get bad, they get very bad.

Bricks & Minifigs

There is a company called Bricks and Minifigs that agreed to sell over $100,000 worth of rare Star Wars Lego on behalf of a dying 84-year-old man. Then they didn’t give the man his money and refused to return the Lego. The legal framework is complicated by the franchiser-franchisee structure, and the legal process is slow. So a Gen Z YouTuber got on the case. But Gen Z men don’t believe in institutions, or put another way, they believe those institutions will always rule against them. So the YouTuber waged an asymmetric campaign against the corporation to get the stolen merchandise back. The corporation called the cops, got him swatted, got him arrested, and threatened to sue. But how do you threaten someone who already thinks you want him dead? The threats and police involvement did not work.

Mormon Mafia

What followed could best be described as a mafia war between the YouTube Mafia and the Mormon Mafia. The police department that arrested him may go down due to what appears to be numerous civil rights violations. No one has confidence that the courts can settle this fairly.

So what is the off-ramp? This is where storytellers come in. Resist the urge to write young men off. Most people have been trained to automatically ignore them. Resist the urge to say “They don’t buy books anyway so why should I care?” Historically there are two solutions for a generation of restless men.

One solution is expeditionary wars. Send them to Troy to fight, or send them out in longboats to raid the British Isles. “Go west, young man” is the more recent version of this approach.

The second solution is marriage. Novelists and culture more generally have been discouraging young people from getting married. We tell them to give the fruit of their youth to a corporation and start a family later. If we don’t reverse this, war will burn our civilization down.

Once a man has a wife and a child, he calms down. Many Gen Z men believe that Gen Z women are disloyal. There are good Gen Z women out there, but many are practicing hypergamy. Gen Z women are sharing high-status men rather than getting married to one man and becoming faithful wives and mothers. Both Gen Z men and women are led to believe that marriage will make them miserable. This is not true. Married people are far happier than unmarried people by every study available.

These young men don’t care about identity. They care about survival. They need hope. They need agency.

Sources

Commentary

Thomas: Before the individual stories, you need to understand the world young men are in. By young men I mean Gen Z, roughly 18 to 29, people mostly in their 20s. They were raised in school by social justice-oriented teachers who used words like “privilege” and “endemic racism” against them like weapons.

Every organization around them encouraged girls to succeed and lead, or encouraged minorities, but there was no boys’ math club. If they tried to start one, they were hit with “racist, sexist, misogynistic, privileged,” and made to apologize for privilege they never actually experienced. The message they absorbed was “We want everyone to succeed except you.” They left high school convinced the institutions were tilted against them. Currently, two out of three PhD graduates are women because of a strong anti-men recruiting bias in universities.

Jonathan: A lot of this started around 2015, when these were kids being told it was fine that life was unfair for them. Whatever you sow goes into the ground and grows without making noise, and now we’re getting the fruit of it.

In online chatter, which I’ve been trained to track, racism is surging in response to DEI hiring practices. The people who preached those practices and suppressed these young white men sowed seeds of hatred, because the message they sent was “If life is just going to be unfair to you, fine, I’m getting my sword.”

Thomas: Seeing a less-qualified person get a job you were more qualified for, because they fill a diversity quota, is demoralizing the first time. It becomes soul-crushing when it happens year after year.

The Henry Nowak story is the one everybody can immediately understand. The UK has what’s politely called a two-tiered police system, which is an extremely soft phrase for the reality that you are not treated equally under the law. In that system, the worst possible crime is a hateful or racist word, treated as worse than stabbing or raping someone.

Henry had been accused of saying something racist, an accusation that turned out to be false. He hadn’t said anything racist, and I don’t think he’d even spoken to his killer. But the accusation made him less than human in the officers’ eyes, and their job, as they see it, is not to protect white men. He told them he’d been stabbed and couldn’t breathe. They said, “I don’t think you have, mate,” and handcuffed him until he bled out.

What turns a bad murder into a zeitgeist event is the silence. The death of George Floyd resulted in thousands of articles and news coverage. Nobody covered Henry Nowak until Elon Musk asked whether people were seeing what was happening, which forced some media outlets to cover it, often in the most biased way possible. The framing and photos frequently made it look like Henry was the attacker. You had to read paragraphs in to learn he was the victim.

There is now video of fires and Gen Z men fighting police in Britain, and they are marching toward civil war. The boomers who run Britain don’t realize that all these young men need is a leader to call them to war, because they’ve already decided war is the only solution. No sociopath has yet realized that calling them to war is a path to power, so for now it stays latent, bubbling, and getting hotter every year.

The Bricks and Minifigs story in Oregon is the same story. A local franchise took an 84-year-old dying man’s Lego collection, worth as much as $200,000, on consignment. It went well at first, but then those franchise owners were pushed out. New owners came in who refused to recognize the contract, wouldn’t return the Legos, and kept selling them.

They stole them.

The man’s grandson looked at the options and, being a Gen Z man, didn’t believe any of them would work in time. Five years in court and $150,000 in legal fees to recover $200,000 after your grandfather is already dead is not a solution. So, he reached out to a YouTuber whose whole thing is infiltrating cults and burning down institutions through asymmetric warfare. The resulting video is some of the best YouTube storytelling I’ve ever seen. At one point, the YouTuber uses brainwashing techniques he learned infiltrating cults to turn a store employee into a source.

The store kept calling the police, got him swatted and arrested, and threatened him with civil liability. Here’s the lesson you must understand about dealing with young men right now: you cannot threaten someone who already thinks you want him dead. Gen Z owns about 2% of the assets in the United States. Boomers spend more on cruises in a year than Gen Z’s entire asset holdings. Many of these young men followed their parents’ advice to go to college and now carry student debt they can never escape, because bankruptcy cannot resolve student loans. The balance grows faster than their minimum payments. Threaten a man like that with a lawsuit and the answer is “Sue me. I have nothing to lose, and I’ll burn this institution down.”

Gen Z men watching that video are going crazy because they feel the same boot on their neck, and Bricks and Minifigs becomes a symbol of the whole society they want to burn. What’s striking is that the cultural leaders of the Gen Z manosphere on both the left and the right, people like Hasan Piker and Asmongold who agree on essentially nothing, are both saying, “Burn it down.”

Almost all the physical violence throughout human history has been done by young men. They are most of the violence done by and against police, and on both sides of every military conflict. Militaries have old men, but young men are the ones in the trenches, going out of the boats at Normandy, willing to kill to accomplish their goals. Nobody wins a civil war. The people who don’t lose are the people who have nothing to lose.

Jonathan: It’s like trying to fight a drunk guy who doesn’t feel pain. Normally you end a fight by making someone hurt enough that they decide to stop, because pain is the lever for turning off desire. But with someone who feels no pain you can’t touch the desire, so you have to structurally stop him. That takes serious force. You can’t convince these kids to stop.

Thomas: Accepting that there is a problem is the first step. And it’s not just young men. I was just having a conversation with a Gen Z woman who wanted nothing more than to be a stay-at-home mom. She just had her third child, their family budget was short $800, and they couldn’t make up the difference. The only reason she needed that extra $800 was school debt, a psychology degree she didn’t need, on top of her husband’s degree he didn’t need either, because they both listened to their boomer parents who told them to go to college.

Meanwhile, her husband’s wages are being garnished 10 to 15% for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, most of which goes to their parents, who get free medical care and a government check every month and are living a very nice life. Gen Z women are feeling this pressure too. They’re getting desperate.

The first historical solution for a generation of restless men is expeditionary wars. You put them on a longboat and say “Go raid the British Isles and make your fortune. Come back when you have enough gold to survive in our society.” You send them to Troy and say “Fight until you’re done.” There’s also a theory that the Crusades were largely about getting restless Normans and criminals out of Europe, since chivalry wasn’t working on them. But this solution is obsolete. Guess how wars are fought now. Drones. Guess what you don’t need when you send drones. Restless young men. Russia is trying the old approach anyway, feeding its restless young men into the front lines in Ukraine and sacrificing them. That’s not an off-ramp. That’s a meat grinder.

Jonathan: When I was in the Marine Corps, they made our lives miserable on purpose. I had an interview with a gunnery sergeant who said, “Why do you think we make your lives suck? So that when we take you overseas and say, “You’re allowed to go kill those guys,” suddenly an island that couldn’t have been taken in 100 years with 100,000 men gets overrun in two days by psychopaths.” That’s the mechanism. Restless young men soaked in hatred become extraordinarily effective fighters. That’s not something we want to replicate.

Thomas: The second and better solution is marriage. It is vital that we lower the average marriage age to around 20 in the United States if we want to avoid war. Right now, old people universally discourage young people from getting married young. “Oh, you’re 18 and in love? Don’t get married. That’s the worst thing you can do.”

The message we give young people as a society is “Give the fruit of your youth to a corporation that does not care about you, then give the leftovers to your family.”

Jonathan: There’s a second problem, which is the culture of Gen Z women around body count, meaning sexual history, versus the reactionary Gen Z male culture of “Don’t stay with a woman who’s been with a lot of men.” These run directly counter to each other.

Thomas: This is where romantasy and similar fiction is part of the problem, because it encourages female hypergamy.

Hypergamy is the female tendency to share high-status men. The top 20% of men get the top 80% of women, who share them. You have one NFL player with a dozen girlfriends. The 11 men those women might have matched with are now becoming restless young men motivated to burn it all down.

The civilizational hack that Rome had, one of its core advantages over all its neighbors, was monogamy. The Romans were actually very virtuous for hundreds of years before their famous decadence. Every Roman citizen could expect a wife, because even the Consul of Rome could only have one wife. High-status men and low-status men alike were constrained to one wife, which is what stabilized their men and made them willing to fight for civilization rather than burn it down.

Monogamy is one of the biggest differentiating factors between Western civilization and other civilizations throughout history, and the boomers rejected it in the ’60s with the sexual revolution. We are now harvesting the fruits of that rejection.

How do we fix this? Not easily with laws. The way you enforce it is socially, through women putting pressure on other women to be monogamous. We used to call that slut-shaming, and it’s a word that’s been treated as purely negative, but it actually serves a cultural purpose.

If women don’t police other women’s behavior, high-status men are very happy with a system of having a dozen girlfriends. The NFL player loves this arrangement. The only check on it is social pressure from other women. You can also see this in fiction, where the hypergamous value system is supported and any critique of women is harshly punished.

Churches will preach against male sins like lust but won’t address female sins like anxiety. Yet Jesus condemned both in the same sermon. The Sermon on the Mount condemns lust and anxiety in the same passage. They’re treated as the same kind of failure of faith. In the old film Sergeant York, set in the 1910s and made in the 1940s, an old woman explicitly chastises a young woman for the sin of worrying. That was Hollywood. That was normal. It’s gone now.

If you have a Gen Z man in your life, you’ll find it hard to get him to open up because he’s been sniped at his whole life. But if he does, listen.

Young men are actually one of the most lucrative audiences to write for, because almost nobody is doing it. I interviewed Seth Ring, who has sold a million copies of his books indie, and I’d never even heard of him. He writes for Gen Z men. His protagonists are very powerful. His sexual ethic is monogamous. It’s the ultimate fantasy for a Gen Z man, a world where he gets to be powerful and the women are faithful. He’s quietly making a lot of money. Many authors writing for Gen Z men are. They don’t care about identity. They care about survival, hope, and agency.

Jonathan: You always leave your opponent hope. That’s what mercy is for in a fight. If they know there’s no mercy, they have no reason to stop, and then they get savage and break every rule, and you’re not ready for what you started. The Bible says “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” These young men need hope. They need to know there’s a place in the village for them, and that has to be a true statement.

Thomas: During the Byzantine Empire there were ascetics, holy men who would live on top of a pillar for years, barely eating. When one of them criticized the emperor, the emperor realized there was nothing he could do. If you kill the holy man you create a martyr. You can’t threaten him with starvation because he barely eats. You can’t take his money because he owns nothing. His life is already more miserable than anything you can impose.

At one point in Byzantine history an emperor had to come and apologize to an ascetic, because the power inversion was so complete that the emperor had no coercive tools left. He could only use carrots, because every stick failed. That’s where Gen Z men are. They have nothing to lose and can’t be coerced.

Jonathan: People focus too much on generational labels. Labels lump everyone into a massive data set and assume they all behave the same, and people don’t. Not all Gen Z men feel this way. Some of them are the NFL stars. But the behavior we’re talking about is reaching enough critical mass to create a weather front that, combined with other fronts, is going to create a serious storm.

Thomas: Most Swedes during the Viking Age never left Sweden. Most Danes never left Denmark. It was only a small percentage of young men who left, and that was enough to create the entire Viking Age. A longship had maybe 50 to 100 men on it, but they could land, do incredible damage, steal everything, and vanish. For 150 years, a prayer was said at every mass in England: “Save us from the wrath of the Northman.” A small percentage is all it takes.

People hearing this also like to say “Well, I know an exception.” If all you’re doing is saying you’re the exception, you’re not listening. You feel attacked and you’re trying to separate yourself from being shot at, instead of asking why you’re standing somewhere you’re getting shot at.

Boomers also blame Gen Z for participation trophies. Who gave them participation trophies?

Young people desperately wanted achievement trophies where there were real winners and real losers. They were robbed of the chance to succeed because they were robbed of the chance to fail. They didn’t choose the participation trophies. The boomers did.

For young men, dwelling on it too much is unhealthy. There’s something to the “firm handshake, hard work” advice, even if it’s incomplete. It comes down to internal versus external locus of control. Someone with an external locus of control sees themselves as a victim of fate and nothing they do will change their circumstances. That worldview is a trap.

You have to hold two things in tension. The world is tilted against me, and there are still things I can do.

Can you guarantee success? No.

Can you be more successful than you are right now? Absolutely. Clean your room. Go to the gym. Embrace discipline. Take control of the things you can control. And go find a wife. There are Gen Z women out there who are not practicing hypergamy.

Jonathan: Choosing ruthlessness because you’ve decided mercy is a mistake does not make a better world. You’re just trading long-term sustainability for very short-term gains. Everybody has made mistakes here. Gen Z is angry, millennials are angry, boomers are angry at being targeted, Gen X is angry at being ignored.

There needs to be grace shown. There needs to be a reset. Grace is the single most attractive thing about Christianity. The fact that you can be forgiven, that you can change. A person who has done bad things is not doomed to always do bad things. Grace takes maturity and strength, which is why the Bible says, “Be strong and courageous.” Show people grace, even when they repeat things they’ve heard 50,000 times from AI bot farms designed to make everything burn down, which only benefits a small number of people.

Thomas: What these young men ultimately need, and young women too, is hope, a belief that there is divine providence guiding the affairs of nations and that things can be reset and fixed. As an author, you can point them toward that. For young men it means embracing discipline and resisting lust. For young women it means embracing discipline and resisting anxiety and manipulation. There are things trying to manufacture both in them.

We have been protected by the fact that no one in the UK has yet realized how much power they could gain by saying “Let’s burn it down together.” This window may not last. I was encouraged this week watching footage from a large pro-UK, anti-immigration rally. The organizers were bringing in preachers who had been arrested for praying silently in public, since in the UK you can be jailed for a year for praying in the wrong place for the wrong reasons. These preachers were seeing tens of thousands of young men gathered, and they were preaching the gospel clearly. One of them didn’t say “If you want to follow Jesus.” He commanded the crowd, “Pray with me.” And he led them all in a sinner’s prayer. It was very masculine. It was a command, not an invitation.

Jonathan: There is a way to speak to an angry young man, and it isn’t going to him and hugging him and telling him Jesus is love. He will swing at you. I’ve done this a lot with Marines in the worst emotional places people can be. You need to be ready to be swung at.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone in to give a guy a hug and been blocking punches the whole time. I don’t hit back. I just block, divert, and move, until he respects me enough because he can see I’m strong enough that I don’t need to hurt him. That’s why the Bible says older men need to teach younger men. Stronger men need to teach young men to be strong.

Thomas: And older women need to do the same for younger women, just like in Sergeant York where the old woman told the young one not to worry. That message has to come from a fellow woman who has struggled with the same temptation. Worrying about a possible future brings the possible evil into the present as real evil today, when it may never actually arrive tomorrow.

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