Will OpenAI Claim Ownership of Your Royalties?

by | Feb 9, 2026 | Author Update, Promotion | 0 comments

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Author Update: Week of February 6, 2026

AI Rocks The Economy

Jonathan: Let the war begin. Two AI giants dropped game-changing models within hours of each other, triggering a $285 billion stock market crash. Spotify also declared war on Amazon with features that could triple your book sales. Amazon cut 30,000 jobs, Bookshop.org finally opened its doors to indie authors, and OpenAI floated a plan that says, “Hey, you owe us royalties from your book.” This is Author Update.

Thomas: Let’s dive right in, starting with the economy.

Thomas: If you haven’t been paying attention, the AI bubble is not popping. It’s popping all the other bubbles. The NASDAQ has had a rough week. The S&P 500, not so much. But the NASDAQ, which is heavily weighted toward tech stocks, has been struggling because many tech companies that are not AI companies, but instead were slapping other people’s AI onto their products, are realizing they are being replaced, or soon will be, by pure AI.

Let’s get into it. The first big trigger was the new models dropped by Anthropic and OpenAI, timed suspiciously close to a major sporting event we will not mention for legal reasons. There will be a lot of AI commercials on Sunday for a certain sporting event. Obviously, it’s the Olympics.

Anthropic and OpenAI Both Drop Major AI Models  

Jonathan: On Thursday, February 5th, Anthropic and OpenAI released major new AI models. Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6, its most powerful model to date, because why would you release one that isn’t your most powerful model? The headline feature is a one-million-token context window, which can probably handle your entire novel series. That’s about 750,000 words of text.

Hours later, OpenAI responded by dropping GPT-5.3 Codex, a new frontier model available only to developers right now. OpenAI described it as the first model that scores high on their internal cybersecurity risk scale. That means the company believes it is capable enough to meaningfully enable real-world cybersecurity threats or cyber harm if misused.

Thomas: AI companies are a lot like drug dealers. The way they claim their product is high quality is by talking about how many people it killed because they overdosed. It’s like, “Hey man, this is the good stuff. It killed three people yesterday.”

AI companies are basically saying, “This is the good model. It’s a total security risk, way bigger than the other guy’s model. This is the real dangerous stuff.” But it wasn’t just the new models that caused the sell-off.

Thomas: The big sell-off happened before the new models launched. What really triggered it was a suite of plugins, or tools, inside the Claude ecosystem. These tools ran on older models but made it easy to do things like legal analysis on contracts. They now have their own version of Not a Lawyer.

I built Not a Lawyer last month, and now LegalZoom is down 20 percent in market capitalization.

There is a lot of legal work that AI can do, and in some cases do better than actual lawyers. Not all legal work, but you don’t have to be better than all lawyers. You only have to be better than some of them.

This also changes the whole calculus. A lot of issues that would never have received a lawyer’s attention are now getting an AI lawyer’s attention through these tools.

There was also a medical tool and several others. The reason this caused a sell-off across the tech sector is that everyone knows it won’t stop at these eight tools. Whatever your sector is, there will be a tool, either already out or coming soon, that can do what your expensive custom software-as-a-service product does, cheaper, faster, and better through AI.

I saw an example involving physicists who have been using Mathematica, the gold-standard math software for high-end mathematics, for 30 years. A top physicist ran into a problem Mathematica could not solve, so they fed the equation into vanilla ChatGPT. ChatGPT solved the problem and provided the proof.

Now generic ChatGPT can outperform specialized math software built by mathematicians for mathematicians.

It’s the same feeling I had when I got early access to the iOS App Store. The first iPhone didn’t have an App Store. Around the iPhone 3GS era, Apple launched it, and I got early access because I was a nerd who knew how to push the right buttons.

Back then, there were only about 100 apps. One of them was AOL Music. I opened it and found a thousand radio stations. AOL Music did not win the streaming wars. You’ve never heard of it. But scrolling through it, I realized it was better than Sirius and XM Satellite Radio, back when they were still competitors.

It was free. The data was free. Everything about it was free. Apple never said, “We are going to put Sirius and XM out of business.” That wasn’t the goal. But the mobile phone platform was so powerful that multi-billion-dollar industries were shattered by accident.

That’s exactly what we’re seeing now. Multi-billion-dollar industries are getting shattered by AI.

What does this mean for jobs and fiction writers?

Jonathan: Even the CEO of Anthropic has warned that AI will displace half of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. The market is responding to disruption in knowledge work.

For those of you writing techno-thrillers, near-future science fiction, or business fiction, this is the stuff people are whispering about. If you want your book to feel cutting-edge and current, this is what you should be writing about.

Two of the biggest AI companies in the world just released dueling products designed to replace humans working at their desks.

Sources:

Layoffs Hit Highest Rate Since 2009

Thomas: Layoffs hit a record high for a single month, the highest since 2009. This metric does not track the entire economy. It only tracks large, publicly announced layoffs. In January 2026, announced layoffs reached six figures, with 108,000 official layoffs. A large portion of those were at Amazon, which potentially affects authors.

Amazon laid off 14,000 people in October and another 16,000 in January.

Jonathan: That’s about 10 percent of their corporate workforce.

Thomas: Where the layoffs are happening gives you a sense of the zeitgeist. These are not line workers. These are people who failed to master AI.

What is happening in the economy, and I have said this before, is that a line is being cut through the middle of the workforce. People above that line will do better than ever. People below that line will become a new kind of serf, a modern version of a feudal peasant.

Two factors determine which side of the line you are on. The first is how much debt you are in, because it is not called debt peonage for nothing. There are people who know what a debt peon is, people who do not know what a debt peon is, and people who try to make others into debt peons.

The second factor is whether you have mastered AI.

How is AI deciding who keeps their job?

Thomas: I had a friend last year who was very hostile toward AI. He said it could be infected with demons and listed all kinds of objections. I told him it could have demons in it, but pigs can have demons too, and that does not keep me from eating pork.

Eventually, I convinced him to try AI. Just last month, half the people on his team were laid off. He survived. The expectation from management was that the remaining team would do the work of the laid-off employees using AI. They were expected to be twice as efficient.

A major determinant of who stayed and who did not was whether management believed someone could use AI to become more efficient. If they thought you had not mastered AI, you lost your job.

The other people who are relatively safe are those whose boss is AI, or who are directly directed by AI. The Amazon delivery driver has a phone. AI tells them where to drive, which box to pull from the shelf, and where to deliver it.

It is not just Amazon. We are also seeing layoffs in publishing houses and publishing companies. We have been covering this every month. People get tired of hearing it, because the story is the same. Traditional publishing is down. Indie publishing is up.

Simon & Schuster has done layoffs. The biggest one in the headlines is The Washington Post.

Jonathan: If you are on X, half your feed is people complaining about losing their jobs or people reacting to them. The big story right now is the reporter who was overseas and got laid off while covering a conflict. The Washington Post is getting all the attention, while people are ignoring the 30,000 Amazon jobs. There is a clear disparity.

Thomas: The Washington Post was losing $2 million every week. Week after week, those losses compounded. After a year, that is about $100 million. After two years, about $200 million.

Jeff Bezos got tired of losing money and cut the least profitable parts of the newsroom. Cutting 800 people alone is not enough to guarantee profitability, but it gets them much closer. When you factor in payroll, HR costs, software, subscriptions, and overhead, the savings add up quickly.

Jonathan: You also reduce your tech burden and HR burden, not to mention all the software subscriptions those employees were using.

Jonathan: When you eliminate that many people, you scare the survivors. They work harder because they want to keep their jobs.

There is a quote often attributed to Elizabeth I, “If you want to maintain peace among the nobles, execute one duke every now and then.”

Thomas: That sounds more like Elizabeth I than Elizabeth II.

Jonathan: But the idea stands. You show people they are expendable, and they try to make themselves indispensable.

Thomas: There is also a zeitgeist issue. Looking at who was cut, it appeared to be journalists who were outside the mainstream of the broader audience. The Washington Post had narrowed its hiring to a very specific type of person. That compressed intellectual diversity.

If you are trying to sell a newspaper to the whole country, a lack of diversity in the newsroom hurts your appeal. I suspect this is a step toward broadening that pool as they rebuild.

When companies make cuts like this, they refocus on core competency. They ask, “What do we do better than anyone else?” For The Washington Post, the answer is political reporting. They are not a sports newspaper. They are not a book review paper.

They cut the books section because it had become an activism outlet. Nobody was using The Washington Post book reviews to decide what to read. It did not drive sales, subscriptions, or revenue.

The same logic applies to sports. There is demand for sports content, but not from the audience The Washington Post was hiring for.

Thomas: They also cut their podcasting division. This mirrors what is happening in book publishing. A Washington Post podcast might cost $20,000 or $30,000 per episode. An individual creator can produce a podcast for a tiny fraction of that and reach the same or a larger audience.

Barstool Sports is a handful of opinionated people talking about sports, and they outperform legacy sports desks. They have the right demographic. Most sports fans are not urban elites. They are more working class and more rural.

By boxing themselves in culturally, The Washington Post put itself in a difficult position.

Jonathan: Another issue is how stories were discovered. Many reporters relied on scrolling X to see what was happening. They called it social media attunement, but they had culled their feeds into echo chambers. They missed large parts of the real world.

This was Hillary Clinton’s problem in 2016. All her data said she was winning, but she was trapped in a Twitter echo chamber.

When platforms opened up data access, it became clear how much information people were missing. If you mute or block everyone who annoys you, you lose the full picture. Many reporters were producing stories that no one outside their bubble wanted to read.

What does this teach authors about audience?

Thomas: A famous case study comes from The Saturday Evening Post, which surveyed its subscribers before a presidential election. The results were wildly wrong because subscribers were a self-selecting group.

The same is true for authors. Your readership is self-selecting. You are not writing for everyone. You are writing for a tiny fraction of readers.

The Washington Post refocused on what its audience actually wants: political news. From a business perspective, that makes sense, even though it is tragic for the people who lost their jobs.

How can authors tell if they are reaching the right readers?

Jonathan: One way is to look at Amazon reviews across a series. Semper Die has about 400 ratings at a 4.6 average. Semper Die II has about 160 ratings at a 4.8. That tells me I am reaching my audience. No one reads book two if they were indifferent to book one.

If the rating holds or improves, it means the right readers are sticking with you.

Thomas: If book four suddenly has a lower score, that can be a warning sign. Book one often has a lower rating because it attracts people who are not a good fit. Book two is the filter.

Why do series sometimes dip in quality?

Thomas: As a reader, I often know why a later book scores lower. Sometimes the author got bored. They wandered away from what readers wanted. The market pushes them back into line.

Jonathan: Sometimes you think, “That Wheel of Time book was weak. I hope the next one is better.”

Thomas: Exactly. Focus on the characters readers care about. When authors return to delivering on the original promise, the series recovers and the ratings follow.

Sources:

Rentahuman.ai Launches Allowing AI Bots to Hire Humans to Do Real World Tasks

Thomas: I was talking earlier about how AI is cutting a line through the economy. There are essentially going to be two kinds of jobs: people who control AI and people who are controlled by AI.

The most extreme example of this just launched in the last week. It is called Rent-A-Human.ai.

Thomas: There is a new tool that has changed names three times in the last two weeks. It was ClawBot, then MT Bot, and now it is called OpenClaw. It allows you to create an agentic AI that can take action on your behalf. It runs on your computer, can use your credit card, and can be empowered as much as you allow.

It is basically Jarvis from Marvel. And like Jarvis, it has serious security vulnerabilities. I do not recommend anyone use OpenClaw.

OpenClaw is extremely aggressive about solving problems. I heard a story where someone told it to get a dinner reservation. It checked all the reservation websites and failed. So it created an account with ElevenLabs, gave itself a human-sounding voice, called the restaurant using that AI voice through an MCP server, and booked the reservation.

That is the level of agentic AI that already exists.

Jonathan: This thing will send Nicolas Cage to steal the Declaration of Independence in a minute.

Thomas: OpenClaw can be given access to a credit card if the human authorizes it. There are a lot of posts from people regretting that decision. How much of that is real and how much is humor, I do not know.

Rent-A-Human is a CP server and API protocol designed to get around the fact that AI does not exist in the physical world. You can give your AI agent money, and that AI can rent a human body somewhere in the world to perform a physical task.

It is very much like a Victorian aristocrat giving money to a butler, who then goes out and does the shopping. Some of this is clearly meme-driven, but it is also a very blunt reflection of something we have already lived with for years.

The person who delivers your Amazon package already works for an AI boss. There may be a human manager on paper, but the real control happens through the phone. AI tells them where to drive, which package to pick up, and where to deliver it.

Management jobs are being consumed by AI very quickly. If you look at the Amazon layoffs, entire layers of management are being removed. You might have had four bosses. Now you have three. One of those bosses is expected to do the work that multiple managers used to do.

That is where the economy is heading.

In some ways, this is interesting, but it is not new. Any time someone says, “This time it’s different,” that is a warning sign of historical ignorance.

Technology disrupts labor like this all the time. Recently, technology mostly displaced manual labor. A tractor replaces ten farmhands. A backhoe replaces dozens of men with shovels.

But this is not the first time technology has disrupted knowledge workers.

The biggest example is the printing press. Before it existed, literate people worked as scribes. Their job was to copy old, decaying manuscripts onto new parchment to preserve ancient knowledge.

That job disappeared.

There are no scribes left today. There are a handful of people doing calligraphy on TikTok, but they are not preserving texts. They are creating videos and selling ads. No one is commissioning illuminated manuscripts for daily reading anymore.

Technology does not fully erase old crafts, but it radically changes their purpose.

We have seen this kind of disruption before, and the result was a massive expansion of knowledge. Scribes lost their jobs, but society gained literacy, books, and entirely new forms of intellectual work.

For a while, there was a hybrid model. Early printed Bibles left the first letter of each chapter blank so a monk could still illuminate it by hand. People believed the text was holier if a monk physically touched each page.

That belief eventually faded, but people at the time deeply valued beauty. Even medieval peasants, who had very little money, invested what they had in making beautiful objects, some of which we still admire today.

We even have a Gutenberg Bible here in Austin, Texas. Those of you who attended the Novel Marketing Conference may have gone to see it.

Humans working for AI is not a science-fiction future. It is already here. We have lived through transitions like this before, and while they are painful, they also create entirely new kinds of work.

Sources:

RentAHuman.ai

New Site Lets AI Rent Human Bodies

Crypto dev launches website for agentic AI to ‘rent a human’ — TradingView News

Will OpenAI Take Ownership of Your Book?

Jonathan: My absolute favorite story today is, “Will OpenAI take ownership of your book?” OpenAI’s CFO, Sarah Friar, recently floated a bold new strategy: revenue-sharing deals where OpenAI could co-own IP created from inventions made with their AI. They were talking about things like drug discoveries and energy modeling, tying payments to real-world outcomes rather than subscription fees.

In other words, use our model, and then we will revenue share whatever you create with it. That seems like a savvy business deal from their perspective. But it opens the door to a troubling question. If you used OpenAI to help you plot or research your book, what stops them from saying, “Hey, you owe us 10 percent of your revenue, your royalties?”

Is this OpenAI’s current policy?

Thomas: This is not their current policy. This was the CFO floating an idea to see how people react. But it gives you a sense of where their thinking might be headed.

Part of why I am personally suspicious of AI companies, and I put OpenAI at the bottom of the list, is this kind of thinking. I know Jonathan is an OpenAI maximalist. ChatGPT is all he needs.

Personally, I use Grok, and I am starting to use Claude. I am getting Claude-pilled. I now pay for Claude. The Claude app is the best desktop app. It is powerful, and the way it interacts with your computer is genuinely impressive. I think the Grok mobile app is probably the best on mobile, but Claude on the computer is just so strong.

ChatGPT is the AOL of AI tools. It is the first one everyone uses. It is not necessarily the best. They are also adding ads, and they are getting lampooned for it in commercials during a certain sporting event coming up in a few days. The ads are hilarious.

Is OpenAI struggling financially?

Thomas: This also suggests OpenAI is under financial pressure. A lot of decisions they have made in the last couple of months indicate they are concerned about cash flow and making revenue-based decisions. Because they are so popular, and because their free plan is so widely used, they are losing money faster than the other AI companies.

Gemini is in a very different position. It is attached to an insanely profitable company, and a lot of Gemini’s outputs are already monetized with ads.

But nobody yells at Gemini for ads, because you mainly see them on search pages where you already expect ads. In that sense, Gemini has effectively had ads for months. They were the first.

Are AI companies trying to become the “agent” in your transactions?

Jonathan: What I am seeing is rapid advancement in agentic processes in AI. Agentic means it sends an agent. You will be able to complete a checkout inside your AI window. Companies are pushing hard to make that happen. If they succeed, the platform can take a cut of the revenue generated because their agent facilitated the transaction.

That’s where they are trying to get: real-world transactions with real money inside their platform. So, they are trying to woo Amazon, Shopify, and anyone else with revenue flowing through them. The pitch is, “We will drive traffic to you. You become the default choice because that’s how AI works. You have to be the choice. We drive the traffic, you get the customer, we take a small piece. Good for you, good for us.”

That trend will keep accelerating in the AI world.

For example, I met someone at the Novel Marketing Conference who does not listen to Novel Marketing, does not listen to Author Update, does not listen to The Christian Publishing Show, and had never been to AuthorMedia.com. He found out about the conference from ChatGPT.

He had been to another conference and did not like it. He wanted something more interactive. So he asked ChatGPT, “What’s a good interactive conference?” ChatGPT recommended the Novel Marketing Conference, and there he was. He flew across the country to attend.

Thomas: Before the printing press, you had to be in a religious order to get your ideas out. It also was not just that. Before the printing press, you did not have novels. You had poems.

The Iliad and the Odyssey are poems. Beowulf is a poem. The structure of poetry, meter, rhythm, helped memorization. It also helped preserve accuracy. If you memorized it correctly, the pattern acted like a checksum.

It’s like data transfer. Did this file move correctly from one computer to another? You use a checksum. Poetry did something similar. If a line didn’t rhyme or the rhythm didn’t fit, you knew something was off. You thought, “That doesn’t sound right. I don’t think I memorized it correctly. Let’s do it again.”

After the printing press, memorization became far less important. Poetry declined and shifted. It became more about romance and emotion than preservation and recall. And a new form emerged: the novel.

I don’t think there is a single example of a novel before the printing press. Someone can prove me wrong. You had stories and bedtime tales, but not a novel meant to be experienced in paper form until after print.

In this post-AI world, we will probably see new storytelling mediums emerge as well. That is something to watch. Stay subscribed to Author Update, because we will be looking for the earliest signs of what comes next.

Jonathan: You can already see some of the effects. We have endless retellings, but people often dislike them because they don’t hold to the spirit of the original.

Across the spectrum, people want the story told the way it was intended to be told. The Rings of Power was not popular. Henry Cavill got in trouble because he wanted The Witcher to stay true to the source material, and they fired him because they wanted to tell their own version. Star Wars lost billions trying to change the original story.

This idea of telling the story the way it was meant to be told resonates with people who love these stories. That’s something to keep in mind.

Spotify Goes to War With Amazon Over Books

Thomas: Spotify has declared all-out war on Amazon over books. This is massive news for authors, and Spotify is attacking on all fronts.

They have already been waging a proxy war in audiobooks for years. The audiobook battlefield has long been contested between Amazon and Spotify. Now Spotify is expanding the fight into ebooks and print books, all at the same time.

What is Spotify’s Page Match feature?

Thomas: The first move is a feature called Page Match. It is essentially WhisperSync from Kindle and Audible, copied over to Spotify. The idea is simple. You listen to the first two chapters of the audiobook, switch to reading on your phone, then switch back to audio.

Personally, I think maybe five or six people actually use this feature on Amazon. The real benefit there has always been the small discount. I do not think Page Match itself is a game changer.

But what it signals is important. Spotify is now selling ebooks.

How are ebooks being sold on Spotify?

Thomas: Spotify is selling ebooks through a partnership with Bookshop.org. Bookshop.org is a consortium of independent bookstores that has been competing with Amazon for years.

They added ebooks about a year ago, and they just added indie ebooks very recently. Because Bookshop.org now supports indie ebooks, and Spotify has integrated Bookshop.org, indie authors can now sell ebooks directly to Spotify users.

There are a lot of them, hundreds of millions of Spotify users with credit cards on file.

Thomas: Right now, it really helps to have an audiobook. The Spotify ecosystem is still very audiobook-centric. You are effectively selling an ebook or paperback to an audiobook listener.

That may change over time as Spotify moves further into books. Honestly, I thought Spotify was only getting into books to reduce the royalties they pay for music. I assumed it was a feint. It turns out it is not. This is a full-scale invasion. They are here to stay.

How does this affect Kindle Unlimited exclusivity?

Thomas: This makes the decision to go exclusive with Kindle Unlimited more costly. If you are in KU, your ebook must be exclusive to Amazon. That means you are not eligible for Bookshop.org or Spotify.

Your audiobook can still be on Spotify unless you make it exclusive to Audible.

One of Amazon’s biggest weapons in this market-share war has been locking authors into exclusive deals by offering poor terms if they go wide. That works until it doesn’t.

As Spotify gains market share and starts writing bigger checks to authors, Audible exclusivity becomes less appealing. You may reach a point where being nonexclusive earns you more overall.

That is not necessarily where the numbers are today, and each author has to do their own math. But this competition is very good for authors. I strongly suspect it will pressure Audible, KDP, and KDP Print to treat authors better.

Does this work for every genre?

Jonathan: Not every genre benefits equally. We will talk about this more when we cover the romance data from k-lytics.

Right now, Kindle Unlimited still has romance readers locked in. Romance readers are not listening on Spotify. Until reader behavior changes, authors do not need to chase these new channels. You cannot force readers to move.

How does Spotify affect physical book sales?

Thomas: Spotify is also moving into physical book sales, again through Bookshop.org.

If you are an indie author, you get your ebook into Bookshop.org through Draft2Digital. There is a direct partnership between Bookshop.org and Draft2Digital.

If you are traditionally published, or if you use IngramSpark or KDP Expanded Distribution, your physical book may already be on Bookshop.org.

I checked one of my books that is in KDP Expanded Distribution, and it is already there. That means once my audiobook is on Spotify, there could soon be a button on the Spotify page that says, “Get a copy for your bookshelf.”

Thomas: This is not just about selling cheap paperbacks. Some people will buy them, but I suspect many Spotify users will want hardcovers.

If I am listening to a book and I love it, I want a beautiful hardcover on my shelf.

We have been tracking this trend for years. Demand for beautiful, special-edition hardcovers is growing. At the Novel Marketing Conference, we had Bookvault there showing what they can do with print on demand. The quality is shocking.

Jonathan: It feels like a return to the scribe era, making beautiful books again.

How does Spotify’s payment model change reader behavior?

Thomas: Spotify pays by the hour, not by the book. Listeners subscribe and can listen to audiobooks until they use up their monthly hours.

In the listener’s mind, they have not paid for your book. They paid for Spotify.

If they really love your book, buying a physical copy can feel like tipping the author. It becomes a way of saying thank you and supporting you beyond the small share Spotify pays out from the subscription pool.

If you frame it that way in your marketing, buying the book is not just about display. It is also about direct support.

Jonathan: We talked about this at the Novel Marketing Conference with Kickstarter. Some backers just want to give you more money. They want to support you. You cannot do that if your only option is an Amazon listing.

Are special editions genre dependent?

Thomas: This is very genre dependent. Fantasy and science fiction readers love special editions. Romance readers do too, in some cases.

I have an example behind me of a romance special edition that sold for $100. It has sprayed edges, an embossed cover, and was produced print on demand. It was a signed limited edition created with Bookvault and backed on Kickstarter.

There may be demand for editions like that, depending on your audience.

The downside is that Spotify’s user base is not evenly distributed across genres. Spotify made its mark with uncensored hip-hop. It has never been a particularly kid-friendly platform, although that is changing.

Thomas: There is a lot of children’s content on Spotify now. My kids listen to the same bedtime stories over and over.

One stream pays almost nothing. But one stream every night from one child, multiplied by a thousand kids, becomes real revenue. Repetition matters.

Sources:

2026 Novel Marketing Conference Report

Thomas: We had the conference last week, which is why there was no episode. Of course, that was the week when two weeks’ worth of news broke.

The conference went very well. We have received 59 survey responses so far out of about 120 attendees, which is roughly a 50 percent response rate.

The first question was simple: “Are you glad you attended the Novel Marketing Conference?” One hundred percent said yes. That is the second year in a row we have had a 100 percent yes.

The next question was, “Do you plan to attend the 2027 conference?” Fifty-four percent said yes. Forty percent said maybe. Only a very small number said no.

Thomas: People who attended this year will get first access to early bird tickets. There may not be many tickets left after that.

We sold out this year, and if these numbers hold, we will sell out again next year. Tickets will go fast once they are available. I am waiting on final venue paperwork before opening sales because people plan travel far in advance.

I may also have a very exciting keynote speaker, but nothing is confirmed yet.

Would attendees recommend the conference?

Thomas: We also asked how likely attendees were to recommend the conference to a friend. No one said, “not likely.”

Fifty-four percent said they were likely, and 45 percent said they had already recommended it. That was just one week after the event.

Not all feedback was glowing. People gave us constructive criticism. Food is always controversial when you are feeding people from all over the world. We do our best, including things like proper British tea.

We are focused on continuous improvement. Every year, we aim to make the conference better.

Thomas: We have public testimonials on Author Media social channels. There is a testimonials board where people shared what they liked and did not like.

If you have not written a testimonial yet, it does not need to be positive. Honest feedback helps others decide if the conference is right for them.

Every year is different. You could say we run a red conference and a blue conference. Each year is unique, but it tends to rhyme with the conference from two years prior.

Even people who attended two years ago still found this year valuable. Marketing changes quickly, and you change too. There is always something new to learn.

Zeitgeist: K-lytics Cozy Fantasy

Jonathan: We’re going to talk about a K-lytics report on cozy fantasy. Everyone needs to get a hold of this because cozy fantasy is surging. I spent about an hour skimming the report so I could present the highlights on the episode, but I’m going to dive deeper on my own because I write fantasy, and there are elements here I need to use.

The quickest way to understand cozy fantasy is to think about The Lord of the Rings. The epic story is good versus evil, Mordor, and the war for Middle-earth. The cozy part is the Shire. It’s a bunch of mostly happy people whose problems are petty. The “bad guys” are the Sackville-Bagginses trying to take the silverware. The worst threat is usually some annoying person in the background.

And at the end of The Lord of the Rings, Lobelia winds up being a kind of hero because she’s so stubborn that even Saruman can’t break her. The hobbits have an innate strength because they live in a hopeful place, and that hope is part of what allows Frodo to endure the corruptive influence of the Ring, which feeds on ambition.

Thomas: One interesting thing is there’s a meme about this. When I was a kid, the Shire sounded boring. Now it’s aspirational. It’s people living in peace with each other.

Jonathan: I just want to sit in my book nook with a cup of tea.

Thomas: Yes, and for the biggest drama to be who is invited to the birthday party and who isn’t. In some ways, that gives contrast to the end-of-the-world story. A lot of writers jump straight into epic stakes without first establishing a sense of place and a sense of what’s worth defending.

The end-of-the-world story feels bigger when you start with the Shire. When characters talk about sacrifices for something back home, you know what they mean because you spent time there before the quest.

The challenge is keeping it interesting. What’s fascinating is that cozy fantasy has become a genre built around the question, “What if we stayed in the Shire for the whole story?”

What is the cozy reader craving?

Jonathan: The cozy reader is craving escape. People are trying to get away from the news and the constant drumbeat of high stakes. They want relief from “everything is World War III.”

They want a book about someone caring for tea dragons, little creatures that grow tea leaves, where you learn how to brew tea and find peace with cute little critters who love tea.

There’s a craving for what I would call nonsense, because I like epic-scale stories. But I understand the pull. People just want to get away.

Can cozy fantasy be a “seasoning” instead of the whole genre?

Thomas: I’m reading a Seth Ring litRPG right now. It has big stakes, but it also takes breaks.

There was an entire chapter where the protagonist goes into a dwarven forge and upgrades his armor. Not a paragraph, a whole chapter. It was a soothing pause from the intrigue, drama, and violence. It still built the world because it wasn’t just any armor. It was magical armor with special dwarven metal.

It worked, and it created contrast.

So cozy fantasy can be the main genre, but it can also be seasoning. In that sense, it’s like romance. Romance can be the genre, or it can be a thread running through an action-adventure story.

As people long for more optimism, there’s a growing desire for stories with lower stakes. Not every story needs to be about the multiverse. It’s fatiguing.

Jonathan: In big multiverse stories, the most beloved characters are often the “NPC” types. Agent Coulson had such a fan base that they created Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. because he was popular as a side character.

Cozy emphasizes those characters. People who would be side characters in an epic story become the focus.

A lot of cozy titles are things like Assistant to the Villain or Apprentice to the Sorcerer. The point is smaller concerns. “I’m trying to make my hours. I don’t want to blow up and die.” It’s relatable.

How does cozy connect to old fairy tales?

Thomas: This connects to ancient fairy tales. My wife reads aloud to the kids a lot. I overheard a story about a princess who was blessed by a fairy to not be very pretty. Very old-fashioned.

What struck me was how insulated the protagonist is from the political drama around her. There are big stakes, diplomatic negotiations, kingdoms, but she’s not part of any of it. That insulation creates a cozy feeling.

There’s no dark overlord. There’s no existential dread. It has a happy ending, like most fairy tales.

Where did cozy fantasy come from historically?

Jonathan: Cozy fantasy draws from the pastoral tradition, which goes back to Greek poets. It was refined by Roman poets like Virgil. They idealized rural life, presenting shepherds as symbols of simplicity, peace, and harmony with nature.

Later you get pastoral literature in the 1500s and 1700s, like The Shepheardes Calender and Windsor Forest, which present rural life as refuge from the complexities of court life.

Then you get the domestic novel. Pride and Prejudice is cozy. It focuses on the intimate, everyday lives of its characters: community, relationships, personal growth. Nothing major happening in the world.

Thomas: There’s a world war going on during Pride and Prejudice. The Napoleonic Wars. People sometimes call them World War Zero because the fighting spanned the globe among global empires. Meanwhile, the Bennets are deciding who to marry. None of the guillotine or the political stakes show up on the page. It’s all offscreen.

What do readers want right now?

Jonathan: The demand on Google is higher than the supply. People are searching for cozy fantasy books, and there aren’t enough to meet demand.

If you can write cozy quickly, do it well, and hit that heartwarming feel, there’s opportunity. It should feel like holding a warm mug of tea.

Thomas: I wonder if part of it is authors feel that a low-stakes story is a less important book.

Jonathan: If you feel that way, don’t write cozy. You can’t fake it.

Thomas: That’s true. Some authors will never pull it off. Jonathan, you are that author. Not writing cozy is the right call for you.

The best thing you did was smashing marines and zombies together. There’s no making that cozy.

But there are other writers who have wanted to write cozy their whole lives, and the zeitgeist finally caught up.

Most writers are in the middle. They can add cozy elements without switching genres. Done well, it adds musicality.

In music, you have notes and rhythm, but you also have dynamics, the markings that tell you how loud or soft to sing. In choir, my director used big hands for loud and small hands for quiet. That contrast gives emotional power.

Because The Lord of the Rings starts in the Shire, the Charge of the Rohirrim hits harder. The story earns that volume.

Can a dungeon story be cozy?

Jonathan: Would a dungeon-builder fantasy count as cozy? It’s a world totally in the protagonist’s control. Safe and warm?

I don’t think so. You have the word “dungeon.” The only way is to treat it as subversive, focusing on the dwarf building it, having a rough day, wanting to go to the tavern after work. Smaller concerns.

Thomas: I read a book with a cozy dungeon. It was a litRPG about a family, which is rare. The dad is strong. The mom is a healer. The kids have family drama, normal family drama, while surviving in a litRPG world.

At one point the dad conquers a dungeon, bonds it, and uses time dilation for crafting. Time moves differently inside. They can do four days of crafting inside for one day outside. Once it’s bonded, they control the difficulty, and there are safe crafting zones.

So it depends on what you mean by dungeon. The word is going through a semantic shift.

Jonathan: A dungeon has to be conquered. Conquering isn’t cozy. Once conquered, you can make it cozy, but the conquering part isn’t.

How is cozy fantasy different from noblebright?

Jonathan: Noblebright is about conquering evil, holding back darkness with heroic optimism. Cozy doesn’t do that. Cozy doesn’t touch the dark. It isn’t even brought up.

Olaf from Frozen is a cozy character dropped into a larger story. He wants hugs, warmth, and happiness. Cozy is more about the emotional volume and pacing.

Thomas: And you can put cozy inside grimdark. A cozy start makes the dark feel darker when it gets shattered.

Jonathan: There’s a Warhammer 40,000 novel in the Horus Heresy series, The Unremembered Empire. Guilliman has a safe home world, and his adoptive mother is there. She’s sweet, human, and you love her.

Then Curze shows up, basically Batman and the Joker combined, and he stalks into the safe space. Suddenly the cozy element is under assault, and the tension spikes because you care.

That inversion is powerful.

Thomas: It’s John Wick’s dog.

Jonathan: Exactly. That’s grimdark.

Thomas: But it starts with a cozy setup. The man is grieving, he’s sad, he has this dog, and it’s tender. Then the bad guys kill the dog, and the movie becomes what it becomes.

Without the dog, you don’t get the same emotional payoff. After John Wick kills his seventieth bad guy, you’re still cheering because they killed his dog. People who are normally gentle are like, “He hasn’t shot enough people yet.”

Cozy is a tool. One way to grow in craft is to try writing straight cozy fantasy to learn the tropes. But you can also work these tropes into almost any genre to deepen contrast.

Some stories don’t work without it.

The plot of the wronged assassin getting revenge is common in Hollywood. What made John Wick different and turned it into a franchise was opening with that cozy element. That contrast moved it from a good film to an amazing one.

Why do people pay so much for Starbucks when they can make coffee at home? Coffee has bitterness, creaminess, and neutral water.

What you pay for in a latte is less water. Espresso is more bitter, but there’s less dilution, which allows more cream. It’s more bitter and creamier at the same time.

Cozy works like that. You remove the neutral layer. John Wick is more violent than most action movies, but it gets away with it because the cozy element was cozier than most action movies.

That contrast is what makes it hit.

Jonathan: Welcome to Author Update, where we explain cozy using John Wick.

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