- Short stories: bridging the gap for Hollywood? The co-founder of Run-A-Muck is investing in short stories as a way to build on and continue popular TV series, and maybe those shorts will turn into serialized video or novels. As the article notes, “If the concept sounds like a snake eating its own tale, it’s meant to. … Short stories, newsletters, digital shorts, podcasts, and other comparatively quick-turnaround projects can help bridge the gap between consumer interest of the moment and the final release of a movie or TV series.” Read Katie Deighton at the Wall Street Journal (gift link).
- The head of the New York Times Book Review steps down to become “canon editor.” In other words, the paper is doubling down on listicle-style content that’s been growing for years now. (Anyone else notice the uproar over their greatest 30 living American songwriters? Is that what we have in store?) Learn more.
Traditional Publishing
- How book prizes actually work. Rebecca Makkai says the process is more pure and more random than you might guess. She writes, “Not being a finalist for something doesn’t mean that a whole organization found you lacking. It means that three or five individual human judges with idiosyncratic tastes didn’t mutually judge yours to be one of the very, very top books in the pile.” Read at SubMakk.
AI
- A new paper examines the narrative tells of AI writing. The researchers write, “AI stories over-explain themes and favor tidy, single-track plots, while human stories frame protagonist’s choices as more morally ambiguous and have increased temporal complexity. … Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description.” Read the paper.
- Everybody hates AI. Brian Morrissey writes, “We are in an extended and belated trough of disappointment over the entire nature of consumer AI as a result of the social media and mobile era being widely seen as a societal disaster. The scorecard is actually far more mixed, but the issue of social + phones on kids is enough to give normal people pause about handing too much power to the very same people.” Read at The Rebooting.
- The New York Times has spent $20 million fighting OpenAI. Meanwhile, keep in mind the Times has also struck licensing deals and uses AI internally, despite its prohibition for freelancers. Read Bron Maher at A Media Operator.
Culture & Politics
- New Ohio bookstore is devoted to local and indie books. The Book Nook in Warren (outside of Cleveland) exclusively stocks self-published and local authors. The store grew out of its owner’s TikTok account highlighting self-published books. Read Alex Imwalle at WKBN.
- A YA author discusses the early wave of cancel culture in the YA community. Kat Rosenfield writes, “If I had to identify the moment when the writing was on the wall vis-a-vis the YA Woke Takeover, it would almost definitely be the summer of 2015, when the author John Green—who was the closest thing in that world to a bona fide literary celebrity—made national news for being anonymously accused on Tumblr of having pedophile vibes.” Read at the Usual Palm Tree.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.