Links of Interest: March 11, 2026

Legal

• A New York Times bestselling memoirist, her publisher, and her ghostwriter are sued by a former classmate. The Tell by Amy Griffin shares childhood sexual abuse memories recovered using a drug known as MDMA. Last fall, the New York Times revealed that the author and her husband are investors in a company focused on MDMA. The article also revealed that Griffin may have based her book on the experiences of a classmate. Read Katharine Rosman and Elisabeth Egan in the New York Times (gift link). Another black eye for memoirists’ reliability for telling the truth.
• Publishers sue pirate site Anna’s Archive. Thirteen publishers and the Association of American Publishers have filed suit against Anna’s Archive, a site full of pirated books that’s been used for AI model training. The lawsuit accuses the site of violating copyright on more than 61 million books. Read Jim Milliot in Publishers Weekly.

AI

• Should books be certified as human created or labeled as AI generated? In regard to the Authors Guild’s human-authored certification program, the author writes, “I think the Authors Guild has this notification system backward. It should be suggesting that it is the AI-created books that be labeled as such. We should always be informed when creativity has been by a machine or is computer generated.” Of course, it’s not an either/or situation, but I agree that wholly AI-generated content should be labeled as such, and that is already taking place in some areas. Hopefully it becomes the standard. Read Avi.
• New book releases tripled between 2022 and 2025. A new research paper finds that AI tools have boosted the number of books in the market. The researchers write, “We develop a ratings-based usage measure that is comparable across book release vintages, and we find that the vintages from the AI influx period have lower average quality. Yet, the top 1,000 monthly releases per category—albeit not the top 100—have higher quality than before; and the effect is larger in categories with faster growth in new titles. Authors entering since the LLM influx produce predominantly low-quality work; and the higher-quality output of pre-LLM authors entrants has risen. A nested logit calibration shows that LLM-enhanced book production could, in steady state, raise the surplus that consumers derive from book markets by a quarter to a half.” Not everyone will be able to download this NBER paper, but it’s worth putting in some effort to get a copy. Tip: Run a Google search for the title of the paper.
• Related: What happens to writing now that LLMs can do a mass-adequate job? A historian who uses AI to build games writes, “It’s not just that AI slop is replacing some of the lower-rung forms of fiction and prose. It’s that the audience share for writing as a whole will be increasingly displaced by interactive ‘writing-adjacent’ things like the MKULTRA game or interactive text-based simulations of life as a Florentine toymaker in the year 1500, or whatever else you can imagine. Gemini’s outputs for these scenarios read like a bad attempt at historical fiction. But the dynamic nature of these sorts of tools—their ‘choose your own adventure’ quality—is genuinely new. That dynamism and hand-tailored quality will, I suspect, be more compelling for many than simply reading mediocre novels about MKULTRA or Florentine toymakers.” Read Benjamin Breen at Res Obscura.
  • One commentator, Byrne Hobart, takes issue with part of this: “In some cases, writing is a pretty impersonal force: If I want to answer some specific question about my taxes, I’m not using this as a pretext to develop some sort of personal connection with whoever is going to explain the nuances of the wash-sale rule or whatever. But in other categories—ones with a substantial overlap with what we think of as ‘writing for a living’—that parasocial relationship is important. Reading a narrative means looking at the world through someone else’s eyes, and knowing something about the person whose eyes you’re borrowing is important. So it shifts the bundle, utterly destroys the economics of part of it, but might end up improving some of what’s left.” Read at The Diff.
  • While at AWP last week, I experienced the great wealth of parasocial relationships I have because of this newsletter and my website, which does in fact allow me to continue writing and earning a living, so thank you. Long live parasocial relationships!
  • Plus, read this commentary from Draft2Digital’s CEO, Kris Austin: The distributor has to reject between 40 and 75 percent of all submissions, which are clearly AI-generated nonfiction. He says stopping that flood of nonfiction titles, not AI-generated or AI-assisted fiction, is the bigger problem for the industry. He expects more verification processes around nonfiction expertise and credentials in the coming years from retailers and distributors. As for fiction, he thinks fully AI-generated fiction will “crash and recede as a trend on its own.” Read Chelle Honiker at Indie Author Magazine.

Media

• Substack gets into gambling markets. Substack announced that it’s collaborating with Polymarket, a prediction market platform. Prediction markets, according to Substack’s announcement, “are an emerging technology that aggregates real-time estimates of what will happen in the future. … Polymarket lets people trade shares of future events, like elections, economic trends, and scientific breakthroughs.” This is yet another development that will drive some people to find other platforms—such as Beehiiv, Ghost, Kit, etc.—for their newsletter. Read Dave Karpf at the Future, Now and Then.
  • Elsewhere, Kate Lindsay expresses frustration with how Substack announced the partnership when they proclaimed, “Journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets.” Lindsay comments, “I’m supposed to believe that a Substacker embedding the odds for ‘Will Jesus return in 2026?’ into their post will somehow be the turning point for media after a 30-year decline?”
• Why podcasts won’t replace books: Editor Sean DeLone argues, “Podcasting is a form that outshines books when it comes to banter between people.” But podcasts have an information overload problem that books help solve by synthesizing the vast sea of material into something structured you can wrap your arms around. Read at Dear Head of Mine.

Marketing and Promotion

• Launch three times. This isn’t book-specific advice, but consider it some of the best advice you’ll encounter on how important it is to keep spreading the word about your work. “The vast majority of the time, the single biggest problem you have is that nobody knows you exist.” Read Anil Dash.
• Penguin Random House sets its bird free. Super cute. Read Grace Snelling at Fast Company.

Culture & Politics

• Judy Blume and her biographer are no longer speaking. The New York Times has a long piece on Mark Oppenheimer, who had Judy Blume’s full cooperation on writing her (unofficial) biography. Then, after she read his draft, she sent him a 40-page memo offering suggestions, disagreements, and assorted thoughts. He says, “It really felt like a close edit by someone who could have had a career as an editor.” Read Elisabeth Egan (gift link).
• Do book bans or challenges work? TL;DR: “In terms of challengers’ stated goals, the evidence shows that book bans do not work. Interest in banned books does not decrease after a challenge or outright ban is issued—not even for the most popular books. But, likewise, there is no ‘Streisand effect’: Banned books do not benefit from the increased attention or experience any measurable sales bump. So, despite well-meaning efforts to find the silver lining, there is no upside here for books.” Read Laura B. McGrath at textCrunch.
• Quiz books are back. 2025 saw the highest level of sales for quiz books in the UK and Ireland since 1998. Read Harry Taylor at The Guardian.