Links of Interest: Feb. 25, 2026

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Trends

  • Authors Equity says it’s not hybrid. I agree. For the large majority of hybrids, if you can pay, you can play. Authors don’t pay Authors Equity, and AE takes on more financial risk than a hybrid. That means they have to be as selective as a traditional publisher in the end. Read their explanation of how they work.
  • A subscription box service that offers deluxe editions of histories. Millennia Books launched in September 2025 and now has three exclusive editions on sale. Personally I’d love to see more deluxe treatment for nonfiction books—why should fiction readers have all the fun? Read Katie Fraser at The Bookseller (sub may be required).
  • There’s now a subgenre called “solarpunk.” These books imagine what happens when our climate changes—but without the dark and doomerist dystopian angle. (Also, what a far better marketing term than cli-fi.) Read Clive Thompson at Mother Jones.

Social Media

  • Goodreads establishes DNF (“did not finish”) shelf. In an email to users, Goodreads announced that DNF shelves will be coming soon. If you’re a Goodreads user and already have your own custom DNF shelf, it will be automatically converted to the new default DNF shelf. (Reviews, ratings, and reading history remain with the book.) Learn more.

Audio

  • A global perspective on the audiobook market. An industry event in Madrid discussed how publishers can take advantage of the growing audio market, including via the use of AI. Read Erin L. Cox at Publishing Perspectives.

Media

  • Learn about the young people passionate about keeping criticism alive. Passion does not mean they have any business model in mind, but only a middle-aged person like me is cranky enough to point this out. Still, note where this article’s conversation is taking place: NYC. Read Carolina Abbott Galvão at the Columbia Journalism Review.
  • What is it like to have Hollywood adapt your work to the screen? One (literary) author says, “The days of hyper-preciousness are gone. There are so few ways for writers to make money now.” These are all literary writers in elite circles, so that does skew the overall tone and takeaways. Read Emmeline Clein at Cultured.
  • This year’s trend of microdramas: The Full Set newsletterrecently commented, “Microdramas are getting a lot of press attention—possibly because some of them have been seeking investment. These low-budget, vertical video series have boomed in China and are growing elsewhere. I enjoyed the conversation from the 12 February episode of The Town podcast hosted by Matthew Belloni with Shicong Zhu, head of West Coast Studios at DramaBox, which is one of the largest makers of these dramas in the US. One nugget: An hour costs as little as $2,000 to make, a fraction of the cost of Hollywood films or cable/streaming TV shows.”

Culture & Politics

  • A story as old as time: Literary writers will work very hard for prestige and no pay. Even if you have no stake in the LA literary scene, the situation at the LA Review of Books highlights a common problem at nonprofits in particular: They rely on interns, low-paid staff, and writers who will work for little to gain status and exposure. But there are other problems demonstrated here that are, unfortunately, common in the literary community. No one could pay me enough to work at a literary nonprofit today, even the ones that are well run. I speak from experience. Read Tasbeeh Herwees in No Bad Days.
  • Why you should consider joining your local library board. The executive director of the Book Industry Study Group advocates for people in publishing joining library boards. Read Brian O’Leary at Words & Money.
  • Amazon now sells more than Walmart. Amazon’s cloud computing business helped it beat Walmart, with a total of $716.9 billion in revenue for the year ending in December. Read Alina Selyukh at NPR.

AI

  • Here’s an op-ed about AI disruption by someone I respect. I’ve been reading Paul Ford for a long time, so I could not be more thrilled to see him appear on this topic in the New York Times. Many people ask me about others’ extreme predictions about what AI will do in the future (and how quickly that future will arrive), and it’s hard for me to offer a qualified opinion because I know so little about the writers or the source (or their motivations). But that is not the case here; I trust what Paul says. So please read Paul Ford (gift link). And then take a look at how engaged and thoughtful he is in the comments.
  • Microsoft has new tech to help distinguish real content from AI-generated content. Part of the effort is to comply with California’s AI Transparency Act, which takes effect in August. This article goes into detail about the challenges of determining what’s real, what’s not, and the political complications involved. Read James O’Donnell at MIT Technology Review.
  • Several Big Tech companies are trying to form marketplaces for AI licensing. Microsoft, Amazon, and others are giving it a shot. An executive at Time says, “The one-off deals are always going to be desirable, they’re just not readily available.” For now, these marketplaces are focused on news publishers, not book publishers. So far, I have yet to see a marketplace like this create any demand. Read Alexandra Bruell at the Wall Street Journal (gift link).

Readers respond

  • Columnist and public speaker Bonnie Jean Feldkamp wrote in about the New York Times’s Paul Ford op-ed: “I find it wild that he participated in the comments section. Mainly because when I sold an essay to the New York Times (this was in 2014), the contract I signed explicitly said that I was not to participate in the comments section of my essay. I should go back and find that contract for the wording, but I remember it clearly because it was a personal essay for the Motherlode section and my ex-mother-in-law felt it necessary to weigh in on it as a subscriber and oh I wanted to respond so badly.”
  • In response to the solarpunk trend piece in Mother Jones, writer and editor Sally Collings wrote in, “It’s interesting to see solarpunk framed as ‘new,’ when it feels more culturally convergent than emergent. (My son has been enthusiastically explaining solarpunk to me for six years or so, since he was 15.) I see the term showing up in several Publishers Marketplace deals post-2022, which suggests editors have been paying attention for a while—even if writers like Becky Chambers aren’t always labeled that way. The label may be the tip of the iceberg. But what really strikes me is the appetite for optimism that seems to be shaping acquisitions across categories right now. I’m seeing a broader tonal shift in nonfiction deals (esp self-help and some business titles) toward gentler, more sustainable, emotionally stable frameworks. Maybe a lot of readers are feeling the last words of the Mother Jones piece: ‘I need optimism right now.’”