Links of Interest: March 27, 2024

Audio

• Audiobook publisher Dreamscape grows by striking deals with independent authors. It saw a revenue increase of almost 40 percent last year, with the largest amount of growth coming from libraries and other benefits tied to its dedication to wide distribution. The publisher offers a distribution program called Dreamscape Select for independent authors and publishers, and it sees opportunity for growth in the indie author space. Read Ed Nawotka at Publishers Weekly (subscription required).

Trends

• The queen of faerie fantasy: Author Holly Black has been writing romantasy for two decades and comments on the current rise of the genre. Read Shasha Léonard at Slate.
• The Canadian perspective on romantasy bestsellers: The article features the usual suspects, but also Canadian author Nisha J. Tuli and others in the Canadian literary community. Read Brandie Weikle at CBC.
• Popular middle-grade novels get turned into graphic novels. The graphic novel market is one of the biggest growth markets in the children’s space. Read Brigid Alverson at Publishers Weekly.
• An intellectual exploration of the reputation of the historical novel. Is the appeal primarily pedagogical, moral, or escapist? Read David Schurman Wallace at The Drift.

Marketing & Promotion

• Midlist pyramid theory: Are you trying to grab the attention of other writers, of celebrities or influencers, or your readers? Read Leigh Stein at Attention Economy.
• Filling out your publisher’s author questionnaire: The pain and necessity of doing it, as described by a literary agent. Read Kate McKean at Agents and Books.

Culture & Politics

• Did you know there’s a “Taylor Swift as Books” Instagram account? Here’s a three-question interview with the creator. Read Cassie Mannes Murray at Pine State.
• An interview with a relatively new BookTuber: Jalen Saunders says, “So my main thing was to try and get more men, more Black men to read. And what’s made me so happy over these past couple weeks is that I’ve accomplished what I came to do.” Read Kate Lindsay at Embedded.
• More on Authors Equity: A scholar on the history of publishing, Dan Sinykin, offers a take that’s mostly useful for the background he offers on the major players at Authors Equity. But like some other pundits, he also positions the use of freelancers as somehow nefarious, even though most full-time freelance professionals in publishing do not classify themselves as gig workers. Read at The Baffler.

AI

• Few publishers have formally or publicly defined their AI policies. Industry analyst Thad McIlroy urges them to do so: “They must be brave in countering the many objections of most authors at this time of fear and doubt.” Read at the Future of Publishing.
• Novelists sue Nvidia over AI training data. Nvidia is a chipmaker that’s profiting enormously from the growth of AI. Read Ashley Belanger at Ars Technica.
• The growing privacy problem with AI: Large language models are collecting personal information from across the web without permission. Read Ina Fried at Axios.
• There’s now a large training set of publicly available and rights clear source materials. It’s called Common Corpus and doesn’t violate anyone’s copyright; it is possible to train a large language model without using content still protected under copyright, according to the company Hugging Face. Learn more.
• Europe passes the Artificial Intelligence Act. Systems must meet certain transparency requirements and comply with EU copyright law. Here’s an explainer by Elizabeth Gibney at Nature.

Legal

• What’s up at the Copyright Claims Board? We’re grateful that someone is continuing to track this activity—the updates are insightful. Read Michael Capobianco at Writer Beware.