Craic-er

Help In Publishing Land.

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 09:21:00 +0000

In Publishing News this week,

Good News for libraries in the United States of America this week, the appeal against the defunding of the Institute of Museum and Library Services was withdrawn. Librarians may still have jobs. Libraries may stay open, life might get back to normal in schools and institutions across the country. However, while librarians and their supporters were celebrating a watchdog agency was noting that far right book banning groups are using AI to scan books for detailed take down notices to libraries and schools. It’s a case of constant vigilance!

Publishers Weekly published an Op Ed Politicians should not be choosing what our children read. Danny Caine points out that this is the same argument used by both sides but the government is about to do just that with a new law being introduced in the US House of Representatives this week for debate.

Reuters reported that the Judge in the Bartz vs Anthropic case has frowned upon the $300 million fee to lawyers administering the settlement. And to general cheering by everyone the lawyers have agreed to reduce the fee substantially. They still pocket a lot though.

I was interested to see in the Around The Book World news roundup from Publishing Perspectives about a Japanese Manga publisher beginning to publish weekly episodes of their novels in nine languages. They also want to move into publishing their novels in English. At the recent London Book Fair there was handwringing from publishers about the rise of other countries publishing their books in English instead of going through English publishers. If we can AI translate into another language, so can they. In the end it will be the marketing of these books that will make the financial difference to the publisher bottom line.

Next week – all eyes will be on BookCon in New York. Will it be successful? Will America finally get a national book fair again? 2 days, 250 exhibitors. Publishers Weekly wants to predict smiles all round.

At the same time as BookCon, Bologna Children’s Book fair will be celebrating 63 years of existence with the guest of honour- Norway. (It could have been us except our NZ politicians dropped the ball and own goaled to the derision of the children’s book community in NZ, but we don’t hold a grudge. *CoughNovemberelectionCough*) The fair is chock full of events celebrating and discussing children’s literature and literacy and what to do about AI.

Last week I mentioned Harlequin partnering with an AI studio to produce microdramas. LitHub published an essay from Maris Kreizman Dear Harlequin: Nobody Asked For Your Weird New AI Video ‘Microdramas’. Maris doesn’t hold back. She mentions all the things they should be doing. Ouch!

Mark Williams takes a different view of the news. He points out that microdramas are an $11 Billion market in Asia. Romance is just the first genre to embrace it. Genre publishers will be looking and wondering if it is a goldmine for them.

Ossandra White has a thoughtful essay on what might be stopping you from creating. She runs through the usual physical discomfits and then into mental mindsets.

Pushing yourself out of your comfort zone was a sentence that resonated with me in the Writer Unboxed essay from Allison Winn Scotch. Five Things I Didn’t Know About Publishing Five Years Ago. Tackling a scary project could be just what you need to grow as a writer.

Dan Blank has a great essay on how to talk about your writing. We’ve all been there. That moment when someone asks you Have you written anything I’ve read? Aside from the clueless question- how would I know what you read… you demur and fail to mention anything you have written. Dan has some tips to turn the conversation around.

In The Craft Section,

How to keep the flow with Dialogue tags- Ellen Buikema

Writing Book 2- Ines Johnson- Bookmark

Seven common story problems- Collen Story- Bookmark

Internal Conflict vs External conflict- K M Weiland- Bookmark!

What Noir can teach any writer- Ruth Knafo Setton- Bookmark

In The Marketing Section

Author Photos- Sandra Beckwith- Bookmark

How to read your story aloud to an audience- Lynette Burrows

Plan your Marketing Quarter- Ines Johnson-Bookmark!

Substack as a marketing tool- Podcast and transcript Orna Ross- Bookmark

Crafting marketing emails- Pine State Publicity

To Finish,

Mark Lefebvre wrote recently about a question from a newbie writer asking for anyplace that had non-judgmental instructional resources for new writers who are worried that they were going about publishing all wrong.

This is a fast changing behemoth business and anyone trying to dip a toe in the water of publishing is bound to flail in the water while learning not to drown.

Mark kindly points them in the right directions from his vast experience of doing practically every job in publishing. You Don’t Have To Figure This Out On Your Own. This is a pin on the wall post to use when you get a plaintive wail from a newbie writer. ‘But what do I do?’ Answer: You read this post from Mark LeFebvre and maybe check out Maureen Crisp’s Craicer blog. *SMILE*

Maureen

@craicer

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Photo by Jude Mack on Unsplash

Is AI Text Destroying Our Characters Humanity?

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:13:00 +0000

In Publishing News This Week

The end of March saw the closing date for authors to claim compensation from Anthropic in the Bartz vs Anthropic class action. However, this doesn’t mean that Anthropic is off the hook. This week the Association of American Publishers, along with the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical publishers joined a class action taken by the Concord Music Group publishers. Yes, song lyrics were ripped off as well as scientific, technical, and medical information. So Anthropic might have to delve into their $300 billion wallet and find some loose change.

Over on Lit Hub, Mary Childs has an article on feeling left out of the Bartz claim…her book was in the original theft, how come It wasn’t chosen to be in the compensation?

The Guardian reports that Penguin Random House is taking Open AI to court because their Chat GPT bot plagiarized their German children’s book. This court case is being taken in Europe. This is a specific case involving a chat bot. The case is compelling and Open Ai don’t really have a leg to stand on here.

Are animated micro dramas the next big thing? Harlequin thinks so. They have partnered with Dashverse, an AI entertainment company, to produce animated micro dramas inspired by their romance titles. They have a huge back list to mine if the first forty animations do well.

Publishers Weekly interviewed agents and publishers about the Shy Girl controversy which I reported on last week. There was skepticism about Hachette’s claims that they didn’t know anything about the problem before it was brought to their attention.

There are some telling comments about the disparity of power between what publishers demand of authors and what use of AI they make themselves.

Mark Williams has been looking at the audiobook industry and finding the gaps that publishers are missing. Mark is a teacher in The Gambia, one of the poorest nations on Earth and he shares insights into a world where everyone has a smart phone but not a book or a credit card. There is a distribution model ripe for disruption. A fascinating article.

Jane Friedman has a great article about how the Bookstore Market has changed and what publishers should be doing to support them. The article is based on the recent Book Industry Study Group candid discussions at their recent event. If you know a bookseller pass it on. (I will be) Jane also has some author takeaways to think about.

Joanna Penn recently interviewed Anne Lamott and her husband Neal Allen on their new book Good Writing. Many writers will know Anne Lamotts book Bird by Bird which is one of those books on writing that every writer should read. Anne and Neal’s new book for writers is on crafting sentences. Read the transcript or listen to the interview it is fascinating.

This month Richard Charkin is reflecting on those strategy retreats that he attended when he was a publishing CEO and how quickly the high ideas and plans fell by the wayside to corporate bottom lines. This year will the strategy retreats focus on AI and will they change anything in publishing land?

Sara Hildeth writes this week about the rise of AI text generated newsletters. Her response is to question why writers would even bother to use an AI to generate text. The act of writing demands so much more from the writer. This is a thought provoking article on what it means to be a writer.

Written Word Media has an interesting deep dive article into what moves the needle as you go from Author to Authorpreneur. The transition to a business takes a different mindset and a willingness to look at marketing strategies.

Donald Maass has an interesting article on the writers toolbox of questions to make your characters and plot stronger. The important takeaway here is you can read loads of craft books but do you put the ideas into practice?

Mark Leslie Lefebvre is also looking at characters this week, specifically how your characters look at the world differently. Are you thinking about your characters world view and how they move through your story?

In The Craft Section,

15 actionable tips for writing deep characters- Joanna Penn- BOOKMARK

Ego driven vs Soul driven character arcs- K M Weiland – Bookmark

Using contradiction to create micro tension- C S Lakin

How does fear play into Character arcs- Becca Puglisi- Bookmark

Types of backstory – Gabriela Pereira

In The Marketing Section,

How to beat your newsletter competition- Jane Friedman- Bookmark

How to build a powerful email list- Sandra Beckwith- Bookmark

AI systems can rescue you from difficult marketing tasks- R J Redden

Marketing myths – Rachel Thompson- Bookmark!

Amazon A content can upgrade your sales page- Penny Sansevieri

To Finish

Recently Tessa Barbosa wrote an interesting article on Writer Unboxed about the value of craft in the art of writing. “Creativity is a practice, just like meditation. It is about noticing things, making connections and asking questions."

An AI can’t replicate your voice or point of view. Go out there and be human!

Maureen

@craicer

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If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the free Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate the virtual coffee love. Thanks.

Pic

Photo by Emilipothèse on Unsplash

Smart Ideas

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 08:10:00 +0000

In Publishing News this week,

One of the flow on effects in the Straits of Hormuz crisis is the slow down in the global supply chain. We have been here before, when a globally important canal was blocked. Suddenly everything is in short supply including books. They are stuck on a freight ship under fire in the Straits of Hormuz. Publishers Weekly looks at the rising costs due to this war.

Over the last week there has been comment over the Shy Girl book being pulled by Hachette just as it was being prepared for publication in the US. That’s a lot of pulped books as it was already on sale in the UK. The reason for the pulling- the book didn’t pass the sniff test for AI use. If so, why was it acquired in the first place? The author claims an editor must have used AI. Hachette didn’t notice anything until a New York Times article from another writer pointed it out and then they cancelled the book immediately. Mark Williams looks at the contract clause invoked and the problems this might create for authors in the future.

Publishing Perspectives writes in their news roundup about Germany launching a credit card sized book token with a link to an audio book similar to the Tonies character player for children. Publishing Perspectives went on to say that Tonies has almost a 50% take up in target families in Europe.

Over the many years writing this blog the idea of physically owning your digital books has never gone away. Reading books on devices and subscription is not owning the book. You buy a license to read it on your device, kindle, smartphone, tablet or computer. This is true for audio books as well. Various companies have started with great intentions and then have gone quiet after trying to get traction from publishing companies to make bookcover trading cards with a download link combining the idea of convenience and physical ownership. If adults can buy Tonie character stories for their kids, is there a market for their favourite characters with audiobook or eBook links?

Sweden recently had its Book Industry day and Publishing Perspectives covered the discussions. Amongst the applause at rising print book sales and the huge growth in audio, a new bookseller commented on Bookshops as social spaces.

This idea has been on my mind for a while. The Bookshop as a curated experience.

Savvy independent booksellers are embracing the idea of Bookshops as Destinations, offering experiences that enhance the readers enjoyment, Book club nights, author talks, panel discussions, book launches, themed membership nights. The Bookshop is the new literary salon. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that atmosphere?

Publishers Weekly writes about the Substack-ified books that used to make the literary community ill. Authors were doing deals with Substack to serialise books back when Substack was new. A decade on and publishers are now realizing that the literary creator economy is over on Substack and they had better factor it in now that there are no longer glossy magazines to publish stories in.

The nightmare of having your social media or publishing accounts suspended can be paralysing to an author. Becca Syme writes about how to deal with the calamity and offers helpful advice based on how other authors came through the experience.

Jane Friedman has written the comprehensive post on AI and Publishing. This is an FAQ article that will be updated constantly. In the meantime, Jane has hit every major AI question with comprehensive answers.

Writing retreats and why they are a good idea, Harper Ross writes about how you can organize one for yourself. If you are lucky enough to get away and go write somewhere with like minded people you will already know this is golden time.

Mark Leslie Lefebvre writes in praise of PLR. If you are lucky enough to live in a country that has the Library Public Lending Right – don’t take it for granted. There are plenty of authors who would like the chance to enjoy what you have. In the meantime, support your local library. I know a thriller writer who has all her book launches in the local library and they are highly anticipated affairs.

Katie Weiland has a thought provoking post on embodied writing or emotionally resonant writing. She writes “Embodied writing is an intentional return to that lived reality as the wellspring for fiction.’ This is an article that will keep you thinking for the rest of the week.

In The Craft Section,

Amplifying tension- Becca Puglisi- Bookmark

Journey of a romantic novel- Lucy Hay-Bookmark

Finding the heart of a story- Heather Webb- Bookmark

How to create a consistent Story Tone -K M Weiland- Bookmark

Focus on finishing- Joseph Lallo- Great Advice

In The Marketing Section,

Weak promotion dooms good books- Josh Bernoff

Are you overlooking potential readers- Kathy Steinemann- Bookmark

Author visibility- Rachel Thompson- Bookmark

You don’t need 10000 followers- Dan Blank

How to succeed at live events- Russel Nohelty- Bookmark

To Finish

You might have noticed the little rocket that I use as part of the Craicer branding. I write science fiction for kids so I let myself geek out a little on space things. This means that I read Andy Weirs books when they came out and watch the movies countless times. Project Hail Mary is a great story and all the scientists agree that it translated over to film pretty well. It deserves every success. Andy’s story is well known to the hard sci fi nerds amongst us. Tasmina Perry has an article on what we can all learn from Andy’s stories. Make your readers feel like smart problem solvers, they will love you for it.

Maureen

@craicer

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Readers- The New Superheros.

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:11:26 +0000

In Publishing News This Week

I am back at my desk after three weeks away and looking through the news to see what I have missed. It is all London Book Fair with side issues of AI and ways to prove human authentication on your books.

While I was away, I scheduled three articles on Copyright, Literary Estates, and Artificial Intelligence to appear on my blog. Thanks to readers who shared them with others. If you missed them and want to catch up, I wrote about

What Copyright means and what it is worth.

Why you need to understand your Literary Estate.

How Artificial Intelligence can be used ethically.

Looking over the meaty topics discussed at the London Book Fair my articles reflect some of the discussions, which is gratifying.

One of the meaty topics discussed at LBF was Joanna Prior’s keynote speech. Joanna is chair of the UK Literacy Trust as well as being CEO of Pan Macmillan and her speech was an admonishment that the publishing industry is focusing on the wrong crisis. “The decline of reading is a greater challenge to our industry than AI could ever be.” Her speech highlighted the challenges we all face to keep our readers.

Two great London Book Fair overview posts were from Tasmina Perry and Deborah Maclaren. Tasmina wrote about the publishing trends she saw at the LBF, short books are in. Deborah had a more considered overview on the big topics that were discussed, preparing for the next generation of readers. Both these articles highlight the need for publishers to be engaged with their readers.

Beside the keynote speeches, a protest book was published by 10,000 authors. Don’t Steal This Book was a direct response to the UK governments plan to allow AI companies to train AI models on copyrighted work without compensation.

Jane Friedman writes about her concern that author societies that are sponsoring certification models highlighting human authored books may be missing the point. What use is a sticker on the book if you can’t prove and AI was not involved in writing it?

Meanwhile, over in The Gambia Mark Williams writes about what it is like to be a teacher with access to AI but not printed books. His comments reflect Joanna Prior’s keynote on literacy and the challenges of keeping a reader. Without readers there is no publishing industry.

Publishing Perspectives reports on a panel discussion at LBF that highlighted the need for publishers to make licensing deals with AI. A bad deal is better than no deal was the comment. I’m not sure that should be a business maxim, but the arguments were compelling.

Recently Chelle Honiker of Indie Author Magazine interviewed Draft2Digitals CEO Kris Austin on How AI is affecting The Publishing Industry.

Kris talked about the flood of AI books in the nonfiction space that they reject. He is not so worried about fiction books authored by AI. We could be inflating AI’s ability to tell a compelling story.

Baker and Taylor have finally fallen on their sword and filed for bankruptcy. This surprised a few commentators that thought their recent fire sale of assets might have covered the creditors; however the bills were bigger than anyone knew. They owe some eye watering sums as Publishers Weekly reports.

Mark Leslie Lefvbre has an interesting article on being wide and how some authors have failed to understand what that actually means. Mark has done just about every job in publishing and is a great resource for how to run an author business. Are you publishing wide but shallow?

Ingram Spark has put together a free book marketing course. Each of the modules are under four minutes long and they cover metadata to publicity to websites to social media marketing. If you were looking for an overview on book marketing this could be for you. You get a certificate as well.

Donald Maass has been an agent for a long time. He writes an interesting article on Writer Unboxed about Reading as an Agent. What he looks for might not be what you think. This is required reading if you are submitting to agents and editors.

In The Craft Section,

Awaken your creativity- Sarah Hamer- Bookmark

Learning about genres makes you write better- Andromeda Romano-Lax

Base your story structure on principles not systems- Tiffany Yates Martin

How to write dark stories responsibly- K M Weiland- Bookmark

Writing uncomfortable scenes- Jami Gold- Bookmark

In The Marketing Section,

2 excellent posts from Rachel Thompson- Understanding Social Media Followers and Book Giveaway subscriber marketing.- Bookmark Both.

Ten tips for Newsletter swaps- Gayle Leeson- Bookmark

5 ways to make your book relevant to media- Sandra Beckwith- Bookmark

7 Kindle keywords- Dave Chesson- (Updated)

To Finish,

While I was away, I did not check my email every day. However, when I did, I was looking through my lists for emails from real people not the next scam email. (There were a few of those.) Recently, Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware went down a Simon and Schuster scam rabbit hole to see how far they would go before they realized that she wasn’t a genuine mark. What I found interesting is that the AI scammer did not flag her name or her actual job which is to write about dodgy practices in the publishing world. If you are reading my blog, you are likely quite up to date on new scam practices, it’s the newbie authors that they target and whose dreams they shatter. A kind word from you and a link to Victoria’s blog might save a newbie from an expensive and embarrassing mistake.

Maureen

@craicer

Do you want the best of my bookmarked links in a handy monthly newsletter? You can subscribe here to join our happy band.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the free Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate the virtual coffee love. Thanks.

Photo by Kyle Hinkson on Unsplash

Artificial Intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 07:49:00 +0000

I am traveling at the moment so can’t do my weekly Publishing News, Book Marketing, and Writing Craft roundup. I started the blog to learn about publishing nearly eighteen years ago, and in the spirit of always learning I’ve written some articles on important topics for a writer to consider. These are my thoughts. It is not legal advice. Hopefully, I can shed some light on the subject of Artificial Intelligence.

Last week I mentioned the Anthropic AI court case and the claims we have to prepare on behalf of the Literary Estate we are responsible for.

This week I want to talk about the tricky path we are all traveling with Artificial Intelligence.

Since I started writing about Artificial Intelligence in my weekly blog in early 2024, the specter of doom has been trading places with the angel of progress on my shoulder almost every week. I have tried to be as balanced as I can be in my weekly roundup.

All of us in publishing land have an up close and personal reaction to Artificial Intelligence, because our work was stolen to train it.

Compensation for the stealing/pirating of our work is the basis of the Anthropic court case and the cases going through the courts now. The judge in the Anthropic case deemed that if the AI was trained on a book written by Author B, so long as Anthropic had bought a copy of the book, and Author B had been paid for it, then training an AI could be seen as fair use.

When that judgement was handed down, there was a lot of soul searching among AI companies. Those that copied Anthropic know what is coming - potentially billions of dollars in claims against them for stealing pirated copyrights to train their Large Learning Models.

Some AI companies immediately started to do deals with publishers, who were happy to provide access to their backlists. Publishers weren’t doing anything much with their backlist and they could earn a tidy sum from an AI training license. They could pass on some money to their authors who opted in to the license. HarperCollins was the first big publisher to publicly say they would do this. The others are quietly non-committal.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

I asked an AI and it said AI means creating computer systems that can think, learn, and make decisions in ways that feel human, learning from data to spot patterns.

In other words, the more data you throw at the computer system the better it is able to spot patterns and replicate them to think, and learn, and make decisions as if it were a human.

Using an AI should not replace your own due diligence on research, because you can’t quite trust it to give you truthful advice. It is a machine. It can only respond to the prompt data you give it. Which is why the more you refine the prompt the more useful the answer you get back. If you ask an AI for ten problems in growing a plant, the AI will fixate on the number ten, give you three real problems and make up seven more. And you don’t know what is true or not.

As everybody begins to see the flaws in these models the AI companies are scrambling to find better research training data. Microsoft has launched a Publishers Content Marketplace specifically aimed at acquiring quick churn news stories so that AI search can improve and be seen as more responsive and reliable.

The AI that is altering the publishing world is Generative AI. That is an AI that can generate new content based on the data it was trained on. (Where those court cases come in.) This could be ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Midjourney, Sora video generator, and others springing up like weeds.

We see generative AI in almost everything online, our email, our editing software, grammar, search, assistants on our smart watches, fitness programmes, etc. As soon as you start writing up pops the spell checkers, grammar checkers, manuscript assessors, instant sentence endings in your email etc. All this using some form of machine learning.

How do we hold the moral high ground when we are using it, unwittingly in some cases, every time we log onto our computer? Trusted industry voices are saying how easy it is to use AI for all those really hard thinking jobs. Should we….

Use AI to brainstorm ideas.

Use AI to write your manuscript.

Use AI to write your synopsis.

Use AI to write your blurb and marketing material.

Use AI to create your covers.

These are the real questions for authors and publishers. How do we reconcile

the productivity short cuts that using AI brings against the way it was trained to help us.

It leaves the authors feeling icky every time we use Chat GPT. If we look to publishers for advice they have been adamant that they do not want any work submitted that used AI in the creation. However, over the last year, all the bookfairs are holding seminars for publishers on how to use AI in their business. Bit of a conundrum there.

The discussions about AI use in a creative context have become quite heated. With extreme positions at both ends of the spectrum becoming a moral yardstick to beat people over the head with. Either reject everything and be called a luddite or embrace everything and be pilloried for stealing others work. The average writer is trying to find a middle path through the minefield of opinion, when the technology is rapidly changing the written landscape. This is where the author and the publisher need to have some clear guidelines.

In the last six months there have been various calls for some sort of licensing of AI content. The Authors Guild last year promoted their Human Authored certification logo which members can use if they register their work with the guild. Author societies around the world are looking at similar ideas. Media companies are making statements about their use of Artificial Intelligence on their websites

Recently Dave Malone wrote on Jane Friedman’s blog about a proposed AI attribution and creative content license which he called a transparent framework for creators to use. Long time blogger and futurist in the publishing space, Joanna Penn, puts a sticker on her audiobooks that use AI voices. She has cloned her voice with Eleven Labs technology for narration. It’s an AI voice but she owns it because it is her voice.

AI and the law.

The European Union is putting laws in place to regulate AI use. From August 2026 you must label all work that used AI generated content and is displayed in the European Union. They are particularly concerned with deep fake videos, AI made images, and AI generated information that has not been signed off by a human. The fines are 15 million Euros or 3% of your worldwide earnings, whichever is greater. If the information has been vetted by a human and found to be misleading, then expect fines. Other countries are working their way through guidelines about AI use and abuse. Expect laws to change in the next few years following the EU’s lead.

Fake or Human

There is a backlash amongst the younger population who see AI as being fake. They call it out when they see it. The emphasis is on being real and creating real and in person events in all the spaces that young people are in.

For writers that could be interacting with their fans and showing them that they are human. Most marketers are pushing some sort of engagement in a real context as being important for writers and publishers in the age of Fakes and AI. Book influencers and their engaging in person videos are taking the place of the critical review. Those writers who have carefully cultivated their fan base are seen as genuine. Just look at Taylor Swift and how she can rally her fans for a cause.

Not every writer can be like Taylor Swift. Not every writer wants to be on a video. We are selling our stories not our souls. Joanna Penn’s says being a writer now is to ‘double down on being human.’ To somehow forge a connection with your readers whether that’s audio Q and A’s, crafting a fan competition in the real world, we must look for connection opportunities that are human centered.

Is there an ethical way to use AI?

Machine learning, Artificial Intelligence is not going away. It is disruptive technology, like the invention of the internet. As publishers license their back lists and with the first court judgement in favour of using copyright works to train it, we are going to have to live with it. AI is a tool, like a very smart dictionary. It can be the productivity hack you need. We just need to figure out our ethical guidelines in using it.

If you train the AI on your own work, you can use it to help you with blurbs, marketing copy and brain storming. Where I think authors could be on shaky ground is if you use AI to do the bulk of the writing for you. Your voice and your unique way of fashioning a sentence, explaining a concept or writing dialogue sets you apart from other writers. The machine recreates and smooths sentences to a uniformity. The messy take, the choice of words, the colour of the human life lived and expressed is what separates our writing from the machine.

Training up your own AI assistant is possible now. You can upload your own files and set strict limits for the assistant to only work on your own work. Google Notebook LM is free to use in this way, or you can investigate paid plans with your preferred AI tool. Each one seems to specialise in a different facet of language.

I would hesitate to use images generated by AI for covers. Already we have books being ruled ineligible in awards for AI images in covers. It is better to steer clear of using them for anything other than brainstorming. Translation is the next change coming with books being converted by AI into other languages. Again, I wonder if the translation will use the right words to keep the flavour of your style of writing.

Chelle Honniker has been doing excellent work around AI automations for authors and her recent article on time saving coding was revelatory. This is where training your own AI author assistant really makes a difference in your business.

What is coming and how we need to prepare for it.

Search is changing. AI is looking for trusted information so marketing your books can be as easy as writing some blog posts on who needs to read your books, the tropes, how you came to write it and making sure there are buy buttons everywhere.

ChatGPT now have partnerships with Spotify and Etsy. You can search for a product or book within ChatGPT which can then buy it and arrange for it to be shipped to you. This technology is already available in Alexa as an AI assistant in the Amazon ecosystem. However, the future of AI assistants is to surf the whole internet at your command. Your own AI personal assistant could be the office secretary, researcher, part time collaborator and office supply buyer. This is the job junior publishing professionals hold in publishing houses and that could be a problem as publishing houses outsource to AI these inhouse jobs. The training grounds for publishing professionals is being outsourced to AI.

I see this happening in my own family, the scarcity of jobs for new publishing graduates who used to do this work for publishers. They were doing the marketing campaigns, writing blurbs and copyediting. These jobs are changing or disappearing as publishers start using AI. There could be a real skills gap coming in publishing houses. As the laws around AI use are changing, publishers need to think about the ways their staff provide a human oversight on what AI produces.

As countries grapple with AI usage laws publishers and authors need to have a voice in how our industry is changing. We need to be involved in shaping these laws and making clear guidelines for AI use in creative work. If you have a voice in your own country let it be heard so that creativity is protected from the rise of the uncreative machine.

If you want to read more about what is possible. Read Joanna Penn on the AI Assisted Artisan Author. Check out Chelle Honnikers Author Automations blog. Keep an open enquiring mind. We are at the start of the science fiction future we read about as children, now where is my flying car?

@craicer

NB, I wrote every word in my messy human way. An AI fixed my spelling and helped clarify some research information.

Do you want the best of my bookmarked links in a handy monthly newsletter? You can subscribe here to join our happy band.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the free Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate the virtual coffee love. Thanks.

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Literary Estates

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 06:00:00 +0000

Last week I wrote about copyright and some of the ideas behind how it started and how it has changed over the last two centuries. This week I want to talk about Literary Estates. I touched on the subject briefly last week when I talked about the length of copyright. The length of your copyright lasts until fifty years after your death here in New Zealand or seventy years after your death in the UK or USA. So, all those books you have been selling on Amazon are your property and part of your literary estate until seventy years after your death.

Your literary estate has value. It can be used in a divorce settlement as an asset. We saw last year how authors caught up in the Unbound mess couldn’t get their rights back to their own work. Bankruptcy law deemed their acquired works an asset of the Unbound company. Bankruptcy law trumps copyright law unless there is a specific clause about publisher bankruptcy in the contract.

At the moment, our family is grappling with the literary estate of a family member who is now needing care. Our family member was a romance author and published over two hundred novels, short stories, poems and had an award-winning story turned into a film. A lifetimes literary work which still brings in royalties and remains an asset until seventy years after their death. As it is unlikely that the children will be around until copyright expires, a chat with the grandchildren was important as they will be looking after the estate.

First, we needed to find all the contracts and get them into a database. Our family member is too ill to deal with this. Luckily contracts were filed in paper and put into file boxes and then into cardboard boxes. In between moves they ended up in strange places, so we are still hunting down some boxes, but we think we have the bulk of them. We are dealing with contracts from the 80’s until the 2010’s we think. We don’t know if there are electronic contracts for books floating around that might not have been printed out and stored. It is very useful to have all your contracts in one place, printed, and easily accessible. (If the contracts are electronic, will you be able to read them in the future? Printing them out means they are still readable if technology gets outdated.)

When looking through these old contracts you are struck by the dense language first. Some contracts are twenty pages or more of legalese which strains average comprehension. You can imagine how difficult it would be for anyone inheriting such a complex task if they have no idea what a publishing contract entails. I photocopied one and then went through the copy with a high lighter explaining all the terms to the grandchildren. They are adults with degrees, and they still found it confusing. Don’t expect that your heirs will even know what a royalty means.

One of the hardest jobs we have is matching books to contracts. A lot of contracts were for multiple books named as The Work One, The Work Two, The Work Three etc. If we are lucky the contract specified the title, but often the title changed between signing the contract and publication. We must work from the publication date. This is where the imprint or verso page is important in a book. If we have a physical copy of the book, we can check copyright dates and match them up with the contracts. Then we can note down the books we think apply to each contract. If you have multi book contracts -jot down the titles on the contract, your heirs will thank you. To help us we took pictures of the cover and imprint page of every physical copy of the books. The short stories are more problematical unless they were in collected works or anthologies. We know some are buried in computer files.

The next important thing is rights. What rights are available or reserved to the publisher? Short stories often have first publication right contracts. The film that was made was from an award-winning short story. It is very common for short stories to be adapted into films. With novel contracts the publishers wanted ‘all rights for all forms of publication now and to be invented in the future.’ When you read this in a contract written in the 1980’s you have to admire the publisher’s lawyers who wrote these complex documents. They were trying to cover everything. Just think about all the publication forms and new rights invented in the last forty years and what might be invented in the next forty years.

Now you might be thinking who would want to republish a book from the 1980’s or a short story from then? Well as it happens, publishing houses. All these contracts represent Intellectual Property that they own a piece of. It’s an asset. And when there is a new publishing format they want to use as many assets as they can to earn as much money as possible.

Recently our local weekly bestseller list had six books out of ten of a beloved local children’s author’s book. They were all format variations of the original story published in 1983. The author is still alive. The small publishing house that published the original book series was swallowed up by a big publisher. They are doing very well from their Intellectual Property acquisition with the merchandise and international sales featuring the famous character.

In the 1980’s manga comics was a small niche publication only found in Japan, printed on cheap paper. In the last ten years the publishing world discovered manga. The romance manga genre is huge and they love classic tales. Publishing companies have been mining their backlists for suitable stories for the new format.

The first we knew about this romance goldmine was when some manga books arrived at the house, to the consternation of our frail family member. What were these books? We needed to translate from the Japanese to find out that they were new books using old stories. There were no letters in the package, just the books. The original stories had been first published over twenty-five years before and they were having another outing in an overseas market.

Was their publication an extension of the original contract? The books were published by the Japanese branch of the publishing house. Graphic novels weren’t specified in the original contract, but translation is. Had these stories been published originally in Japanese? We don’t know. Is this a reprint or a new format? It is probably covered by the contract phrase ‘all forms of publication and those yet to be invented.’

Periodically money arrives in a bank account. We have to go through emails and royalty statements and track which stories they might be from. All of this would be easy if the author was well but add in failing health, and severe memory issues and you have a mountain of work to make sense of.

We sat down with our family member and discussed their wishes for the literary estate. We put together a list of questions we needed answers for. Some scenarios we thought might be wildly improbable, for example would you allow your stories to be used in adult films? No. The wildly improbable can happen. No one, least of all the author, predicted that their stories would live on in Manga novels. Would you allow a film adaptation bringing the story into the present day? It depends on the story. Would you allow the original story to be updated? No.

Now we have a working document roughed out, we are using that as our plan going forward for any literary estate decisions. This helps everyone involved know what the creator wished when they are no longer able to tell us.

Literary estate heirs need to keep the literary estate current and findable. This is so people can contact the estate for reprint permissions. Sometimes this is a landing page or a website with contact details. Publishers and editors move on, so making it easy for anthology editors to contact the estate is important. The second is a bank account for ongoing royalties and to deal with taxes. This can be tricky if the estate is for a deceased author. This is where lawyers and trusts come in.

There is a lot to figure out with this estate and it’s not one of the high-profile ones. Our author was a successful midlist author, often invited to contribute to anthologies and textbooks on writing. When they stopped publishing, they didn’t have an agent. It is down to their family to manage the reprints, the new publications, the requests for quotes or poems. If an agent was still involved, things might be very different. In agent contracts there is sometimes a clause granting management of author estates to the agent. The agents have a stake in the literary estate because they get paid a percentage for every contract they negotiate for the life of copyright. For some, managing an estate for the heirs is their sole job. Literary agencies are often bought and sold based on the Intellectual Property they manage. Based on some of the contracts I have read, a slice of royalties can still be going to a long swallowed up agency for years. The Authors Guild supported Harper Lee over just this problem.

Heirs don’t necessarily mean family members. Beatrix Potter’s literary estate went to Frederick Warne, her publisher. They stopped publishing other authors and concentrated on Beatrix. That is the sole reason they are still in business, just to manage the Beatrix Potter literary estate.

In some wills the literary estate can be settled on trusted friends, an institution, a charity or to a trust to benefit a particular cause. In the UK the author of Peter Pan, James Matthew Barrie signed over all proceeds from Peter Pan to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. When the end of J M Barrie’s copyright drew near, the trustees of the hospital petitioned the UK parliament to allow them to keep the rights. (It helped that the Prime Minister’s wife was a hospital trustee.) A special law called The Peter Pan law was passed granting the hospital all rights in perpetuity.

Sometimes literary estate heirs can generate a lot of controversy as in the case of Harper Lee. Many called into question the actions of a lawyer who said they were the sole beneficiary of the Lee estate. It was noted that Lee was medically incapacitated and somehow granted permission for a hidden manuscript to be published sixty years after her only book To Kill A Mockingbird was published. Of course, the sales were excellent for the publisher.

Our experience shows the need for writers to be thinking about the work that they are leaving behind. We are lucky that the contracts were filed in folders and boxes and clearly labelled as contracts. We are also lucky that there are family members who have some knowledge of publishing and what these contracts represent. The family member in charge of finances looked quite sick when I had to explain that accounts needed to be kept open and why. Everybody now understands the amount of work involved.

We had already started getting the estate in order when the Anthropic AI case came along. The literary estate has to file claims for all the books that were scraped illegally. Only a fraction of these books were registered with the US copyright office. The amount of money that could have been claimed if the publishers had registered all the books just from the literary estate we are dealing with, is an eye watering sum. There will be author estates whose heirs have no idea that they are eligible for compensation. Publishers may be dealing with compensation claims and have no way of finding beneficiaries. And this is only the first of the AI scraping of copyrighted works to be settled. There are more coming.

If you want to find out more about what you need to do to prepare your literary estate- Check out the two excellent books by Michael Le Ronn, who is an advisor to The Alliance of Independent Authors. The Author Heir Handbook and The Author Estate Handbook by M L Ronn. They are excellent guidebooks in thinking about the future of your literary estate and preparing for the future.

Your heirs will thank you.

@craicer

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Understanding Copyright.

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 05:50:00 +0000

It is Summer down under and while my writing brain takes a break from the current Work In Progress (WIP from the Fiction Overseer-er) I picked up a book on the history of copyright. I then proceeded to bore the family with what I thought were fascinating facts about the evolution of copyright.

For example, when the printing press was in its infancy, the printers wanted to make use of the technology, i.e. earn some money, so they printed pamphlets from anyone who wanted to get their ideas out to the people. They bought the right to copy the idea in printed form. This brought the printers into conflict with the authorities. They didn’t want just anybody being able to print information to the public. The public might get the wrong ideas. Printers were told they had to print the names of these idea rabble rousers so the authorities knew who to go after, otherwise they would be prosecuted. As this meant execution or hefty fines the printers quickly complied. From this practice of naming the author, the printer was absolved and notoriety was bestowed. Fame and fortune usually followed, sometimes just ahead of the police. Thomas Paine made a quick buck in three countries printing his revolutionary ideas before skipping town ahead of the executioner. (See Thomas Paine’s life for all the details.)

What does the term copyright mean for us now?

In its most basic form copyright is an intellectual property law that grants creators exclusive rights to their original works once they are recorded in a fixed form. The important parts of the previous sentence are original creator, exclusive right, once they are recorded and fixed form.

Fixed Form

Ownership of an ideas starts from the time it is written down. Print is usually the first fixed form. (If you want to be extra careful about when you created a character or novel idea, date your drafts.) Translations then opened up a pandoras box of problems as historically translators asserted copyright over the translated work. They sold the work as for their own profit cutting out the original creator. Eventually this was resolved by assigning only the copyright of the translation to the translator, and a license fee to translate was negotiated to benefit the original creator.

In the twentieth century along came the invention of audio and visual media. With the invention of mass media entertainment companies needed Intellectual Property. Contracts with the original creators began to get complicated. A contract written on a napkin after a boozy lunch wasn’t going to be sufficient anymore. In the twenty-first century computer code arrived and was considered as equal to books, art, and music. The code behind the software of the screen you are reading this on is copyrighted. As technology advances copyright laws get tested. It is a very complex collection of rights and laws.

Right now countries are grappling with works that are produced with Artificial Intelligence (or really complex computer code.) What laws should be in place to protect the creator of the code? In some early test cases the legal opinion is whoever generated the prompt to the AI is the copyright owner of what it produces. Artificial Intelligence is just a tool of production, similar to a pen. However, every country is approaching AI copyright works differently and what might be fine in your country won’t be somewhere else.

Exclusive Rights

As printers evolved into publishers and new ways of sharing the information became profitable, contracts assigning exclusive rights became more important.

Could the creator be tempted to assign exclusive rights to a printer publisher? What can the publisher expect to make from the exclusive right to the creator’s work. A good Return On Investment is at least 25% annually. The publishing model is a risky business. To make a profit a publisher needs a good performing piece of Intellectual Property.

Choosing a profitable work is difficult. Which work will generate profit? Nobody knows, for the public taste is fickle. For every ten works a publisher might acquire only one may take off and earn lots of money. And you don’t know which one of the ten it will be. If you have a hit, you need as many exclusive rights as possible to get as much money from the work as possible. Contracts between publisher and author hinge on how many exclusive rights the publisher can acquire from the author just in case this work is the one work that will generate a profit or be the next Harry Potter franchise. (Bloomsbury was looking pretty shaky when they acquired Harry Potter. They didn’t know until the third book sold out how big the phenomenon was likely to be and it saved their publishing company.)

The best description I have ever found on what exclusive rights are is Dean Wesley Smith’s book on copyright, The Magic Bakery. Here he breaks down Intellectual Property and copyright as slices of the one pie that is the exclusive work of the author creator in its first fixed form. Dean’s book is well worth reading and will grow your mind and give you a much better understanding of what the author creator actually owns and why Intellectual Property is so valuable that corporations spend billions of dollars just to get access to Intellectual Property assets.

To show you the potential value of Intellectual Property let’s look at just one right, the exclusive right to the audio production of a work, (a novel pie.) This can be sliced into narrator only, translation narrator only, multi voice narration, translated multi voice narration, audio drama, translation audio drama, soundtracks, abridged audio production, audio serialisation, and on into radio broadcast rights which opens up another big pie of rights to slice. And this is just for the first time these rights will be used. If the book has an updated second edition, it starts all over again.

Once upon a time

The words, ‘once it is recorded’, don’t look like they are important, but they are. From the time of creation, and then publication, copyright resides with the creator. Every country has a law that determines the length of time a copyright is valid. For us here in New Zealand our government says fifty years after the creator’s death. In the United States it is seventy years after the creator’s death. This means that creators need their heirs to know what they are doing with Intellectual Property. Your literary estate lives on after your death. However, there is a much more immediate clause in your contract about time, and that is the length of time the creator assigns an exclusive right.

Many author creators are so happy that a publisher wants to take their book that they quickly sign a contract and send it back without realising some of the implications and rights they have signed away. The words ‘in perpetuity’ mean forever. The phrase ‘for the entire life of the copyright,’ means, if the publisher is in the United States, seventy years after your death. The words world wide or universal rights means in any other language than the original language and the term universal rights covers any potential publication on another planet. You might think it’s funny but lawyers who write contracts have thought of it. Project out seventy years from when you turn one hundred and think about space exploration for a moment.

Time can be a good negotiating tool. For example, you can offer a publisher exclusive rights for a set period of time and then the rights revert back to you. Amazon has exclusive rights for seven years to your audio book if you publish through their audio book platform. If your book is going to be the next big franchise hit, and that increasingly depends on the marketing budget to get the word out, five to ten years is a good rule of thumb and one that agents are now writing into contracts. Reversion of rights is important and putting a time limit on exclusive rights gives the publisher a reasonable time frame to exploit the rights they have to the fullest. They may choose not to do anything or to let some rights slide as not important to be bothered with. Brandon Sanderson’s publisher let Brandon keep the rights to special editions on his first book. He was an unknown writer. Fantasy wasn’t that big of a deal. The tenth anniversary of the first books publication came around, and Brandon decided to have a kick starter campaign for a special edition. He wasn’t expecting forty million dollars to be pledged by the end of the campaign, and neither was his publisher who didn’t get a cent. You can just imagine how carefully Brandon’s publisher’s lawyers are going over the contracts to see what else they can make money on.

On January 1^st every year a list is published of works that have come out of copyright. This can be a potential bonanza for publishers who can publish editions of famous books and not have to give literary estates anything. The character Miss Marple came out of copyright this year. Hopefully she won’t star in a slasher movie like Winnie the Pooh did the year following his copyright expiry date.

Copyright going forward.

The recent class action against Anthropic hinged on whether Anthropic paid for the books used to train their Claude Artificial Intelligence. If they had bought a copy of the book then, the judge said, it would be fair use to teach AI from it. After all students read and learn from textbooks. However, Anthropic programmers used a pirate site to get the books. Because they were using stolen property they needed to pay compensation to the copyright holders. With over 400,000 works identified as being copied, Anthropic settled out of court for one billion dollars, and the copyright holders are now working through their claim forms. The copyright holders of translated works will have to bring separate claims against Anthropic. The lawyers dealing with the claim are only dealing with works published in the United States and registered with the United States copyright authority for the purposes of legal protection. Unfortunately, a lot of authors found out their publisher had not registered their copyright claim (you can register anytime up to five years from first publication if you want to take legal action in the USA) and so they and their publisher are missing out on the settlement compensation.

There are more class actions going through the courts against other AI companies. Some AI companies have decided it is better to pay for a license to use a publisher’s backlist, trusting that the publisher will pass on compensation to copyright holders. Contract lawyers might have got there first though with the phrase ‘and other means of publication yet to be invented,’ a nice catch all phrase that has been a feature of publisher’s contracts for decades.

Copyright is an important subject that gets glossed over. If corporations can spend millions acquiring the rights to music, or film, or games, or characters, or any sort of Intellectual Property then the original creator needs to understand the value of their work and protect it. You might wake up tomorrow to discover that your work is a runaway success, and you aren’t entitled to a cent.

Your copyright is an asset judged by the courts. It is property and worth something. It can be used in a divorce settlement or a bankruptcy. If you understand the value of it first, you may save yourself an expensive mistake.

Hopefully, I have helped you understand a little more about the subject. I am always asking my young friends who want to be lawyers if they have thought about going into intellectual property law. It is the key to most entertainment law and where else can you get your name into the credits of movies, games, and acknowledgements.

If you are interested in further reading on the subject, check out Dean Wesley Smith’s book. The Magic Bakery

Who Owns This Sentence by Alexandre Montagu and David Bellos - print copies at your local bookshop or on Amazon

@craicer

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Time For A Change?

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 05:49:00 +0000

In Publishing News this week,

I always tell writers that if they want to know what’s coming check out what the romance industry is doing. They are always ahead of the curve. So I was surprised when I read that Harlequin are discontinuing historical romances after forty years. Publishers Weekly looks into the reasons why. Have eBooks replaced mass market paperbacks?

Publishing Perspectives reports on research findings in Italy that suggest that piracy accounts for one third of the book publishing market. This is a shocking statistic, and the publishers have gone in depth to find out where and how it is happening that they have lost so many sales.

If it’s happening in Italy, a sophisticated publishing market, what is happening elsewhere?

Recently the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators held their winter conference in New York. There was an interesting panel discussion from Editors and Agents talking trends in children’s books. Humour is on the wish list.

Writing Australia has some money to play with and they want to invite small Australian publishers to spend it. Be still my heart. If only we had such nice things here. There is a dedicated travel fund to get to the bookfairs and other goodies.

Eleven Labs audiobook company recently held their summit in London at the same time as the Independent Publishers Guild. Publishing Perspectives reports that both conferences talked about AI voices. Eleven Labs is moving beyond just audio books and into voice anywhere.

Publishers Weekly reports that the Minnesota Booksellers are not being nice to the ICE agents in their city. They are actively running campaigns to support the victims and harass the agents. It’s all part of the community service.

Mark Williams has a deep dive article into the merging of audiobook and eBook and how disruptive this technology is. Amazon has just launched their Immersion Reading feature. We are seeing the merging of book formats. Mark examines the rise of audio for populations that are illiterate. He knows first hand the struggles of access to literacy. He teaches in an isolated school in the poorest country in Africa.

Sara Hildreth has been looking at her reading strategy. In the midst of change she has found herself reading differently. She offers four shifts in focus that are helping her enjoy her reading more while navigating through family chaos.

Rachel Thompson has an interesting article on why We Can’t focus Anymore. The Hidden Cost of our Attention Economy. She offers a few strategies to cope. First, just breathe.

Gabriela Pereira has an article on time management. It’s not about time it’s about priorities and setting goals. This is something that I have been trying to do in my own life lately.

Dave King writes about the perfect novel. In his opinion it is Pride and Prejudice. He writes that in his forty years as an editor he finds it hard to read for pleasure, but he was recently reading P&P out loud and thought- this is the perfect novel. He looks at the way Jane Austen got it right.

In The Craft Section,

Are you making these four mistakes?- Anne R Allen- Bookmark

How not to write your novel- James Scott Bell- Bookmark

Which point of view should you use- Gabriela Pereira- Bookmark

Let’s be clear- Grammar fix its.- Jim Dempsey- Bookmark

Four act structure- K M Weiland-Comprehensive- Bookmark!

In the Marketing Section,

A 5 star email experience- Ines Johnsen- Bookmark

28 whimsical holidays for March- Sandra Beckwith- Bookmark

Voice options for do it yourself audio books- Indie Author Mag- Bookmark

Why writers need multiple practical marketing strategies- Rachel Thompson- Bookmark

The submission package - Michelle Barker- Bookmark

To Finish

I have been busy writing long nonfiction articles. They are going to be appearing here over the next three weeks while I am traveling. I will try to pop in and check comments.

I hope you will find the articles useful. I started this blog to educate myself in publishing and along the way it has taken on the structure you know and (hopefully) love. I don’t write deep dive articles often, so if you like my wild viewpoints let me know and I might consider doing it more often for you.

Ciao

Maureen

@craicer

Do you want the best of my bookmarked links in a handy monthly newsletter? You can subscribe here to join our happy band.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the free Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate the virtual coffee love. Thanks.

Pic Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

AI – Publishing Friend or Foe

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 08:57:00 +0000

In Publishing News this week,

Last week the big news was Bookshop.org partnering with Draft2Digital. This week it’s Bookshop.org partnering with Spotify. You can buy the audio books you are listening to and Spotify also has a nifty new feature which could be a real game changer in inter device use. With all these deals Bookshop.org is becoming a global player. Hopefully they will see the rest of the world exists soon.

In other global player publishing news, Microsoft has just launched a platform marketplace to facilitate the buying of licenses to train AI’s. They are looking at fast churn news stories to get up to the minute information but there may be scope for publishers to market their IP. After all the Anthropic judge did say that it was fair use to buy a copy of a book to train an AI. HarperCollins leapt in quickly to license their back list. Mark Williams takes a deep dive into the pro’s and con’s of this announcement and what it means for fiction publishers. While Microsoft has already made the marketplace Amazon is shouting that they are making one too. It’s nearly here. Soon.

The next AI training court case is nearly upon us. Google is in the hot seat trying to defend themselves against a class action. Two publishers have recently joined the class action and Google is shouting not fair. Publishing Perspectives has an article on why the publishers were so late to the party.

Forbes has an article on why Publishers are employing AI engineers. This has been quietly happening for about a year now. Publishers using AI’s in the business and demanding no AI use in making the books. Why has it become a news issue now, sadly because the entry level jobs in publishing are being done by AI. I have a recent publishing graduate in the house looking for their first job and it’s tough out there.

I have been writing some non -fiction articles recently and while my brain was wandering into this head space, I read this article in Publishers Weekly on the top best sellers for 2025 in children’s books. They have divided the list into front and backlist. One of the things that caught my eye was the amount of back listed titles sold in huge numbers that were first published sixty years ago or more. The perennial value of this Intellectual Product couldn’t have been foreseen when they were first published. It makes you think about your own backlist and how every title, no matter when it was published, can be new to a reader.

Who has the biggest Book Fair in the world? If you said Frankfurt, you would be wrong, India is second biggest. But for sheer size check out Egypt. The New Publishing Standard has a run down on all the numbers and why publishers should be seriously looking to have a presence there.

Last year I linked to articles about Ireland’s Universal Basic Income scheme pilot for artists and writers. It was such a success that they are rolling out for real. Scotland has taken a look at Ireland’s model and are considering doing the same. It could be a movement…

Do you remember joking about wanting robots to do the boring work and let you be free to do the fun stuff? I had the feeling we were getting close to that with Chelle Honnikers article on code last week and then she followed it up with Agentic AI, which is where AI is going this year. Your own personal AI agent worker. Chelle is an expert in author business automations and the programmer for the Author Nation conference. It is worth while reading the articles for a look at the future.

Russel Nohelty writes excellent articles on author mindset and business. This week he has a great article on how authors need to treat their business like a startup. There are some key road map signs to look for in being successful.

If you are looking for some quick author upskilling, The Get Published summit is on soon. There are great speakers, many of whom have featured in this blog so go on over to the website and grab your free ticket.

Katie Weiland has a fantastic article from James Scott Bell about the mirror moment in fiction. I had one of those AHA moments when I read James’ book on the topic. The article is excellent and I highly recommend the book too.

In The Craft Section,

The scene between the beats- Ines Johnson- Bookmark

The beginning page- Kathleen McCleary- Bookmark

Single or multiple viewpoints- Becca Puglisi-Bookmark

Get paid as a writer Suzy Vadori- Bookmark

What does your character fear – September Fawkes

In The Marketing Section,

How one author got ripped off- Sandra Beckwith

25 things I wish every writer knew- Dan Blank- Bookmark

Explaining KDP expanded distribution- Memoir Mentors

Reader magnets- Ines Johnson- Bookmark

Book Marketing metrics that matter- Penny Sansevieri- Bookmark

To Finish

If you have been in the traditional author space or reporting on it for a few decades you would have noticed the gradual decline in publishers taking an interest in their authors. A few decades ago a publisher or an editor would nurture a writer and spend time polishing the manuscript or giving them opportunities to grow their career.

Ah the good old days.

Richard Charkin comments on the power shift in publishing that has happened almost without publishers realizing it. And they only have themselves to blame. Aligned with this thinking ,Agent Richard Curtis talks about the importance of negotiating rights in your contract. Who is looking after your best interests? It should be you!

Maureen

@craicer

Do you want the best of my bookmarked links in a handy monthly newsletter? You can subscribe here to join our happy band.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the free Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate the virtual coffee love. Thanks.

Picture- The great Tom Gauld nailing it again.

What the New Year Brings

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 22:12:00 +0000

In Publishing News this week

As I write this the news is filtering out of the layoffs at The Washington Post. Hundreds of journalists have lost their jobs, among them the editor of the Book Review page. Book reviews are hard to come by at the best of times. Lit Hub examines the astounding impact of the Washington Post Books Page. Bezos started Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore. Shake your head and weep.

In happier news, Bookshop.org and Draft2Digital have inked a partnership deal. This opens up the Independent Bookshop supporting marketplace to the one of the biggest Independent print on demand publishers. That’s worth celebrating.

Publishing Perspectives reports on an advanced seminar for Booksellers in Italy and the key points to come out of it for publishers and booksellers looking at the international market. Know your customer and provide a high level service. Make your bookshop a destination, the article suggests. As I was reading the article I was thinking of the new romance bookshop in Auckland, Enamoured Books. They are off to a fantastic start!

The hot new craze is microdrama. I was contacted by a publicist for Reelshort to talk about what they were doing. I was interested in the concept as a writer. Short cliff hanger serial story episodes that commuters read on their phones. It was a big thing in Asia a few years ago. If they need writers that would be an interesting gig. Now TikTok has launched a new microdrama serial app and is set to cash in on the commuter trip.

Mark Williams has commentary on the UK government’s new partnership with AI and how the UK publisher’s association has been left out in the cold. He is pro AI from the point of view of its here deal with it camp. Meanwhile, San Diego Comic Con and the science fiction writing community are tightening the rules around using AI in award criteria.

The Book Industry Study Group recently hosted an event on rights selling; If You Don’t Know The Value of Your IP You Don’t know The Value of Your Company. One of their keynote speakers, Thad McIlroy talked about licensing for AI. This could be a limited lifeline for publishers depending on the judgements in current court cases against AI companies this year. The American Copyright Alliance had a quick rundown of how many court cases against AI companies will be heard in 2026. It is not a small number and makes interesting reading as companies scramble to settle out of court.

Alicia McCalla has an interesting viewpoint on AI, What actually scares me about AI.

She talks about AI hallucinating the books she has written. Just before Christmas we had that happen in New Zealand where children’s book authors were credited in a newspaper article with books they had not written. There is a solution, says Alicia, be proactive for AI to find your work.

As we roll onward into another year of writing, it’s a good time to revisit the scammers who want to shatter your dreams. Anne R Allen has a recap post on the sharks out there. Victoria Strauss has a warning post on a new scam using agent identity theft as the twist. Don’t forget to point out these scams to new authors out there.

The Dream Team, Angela and Becca have a new thesaurus coming in April. When I met Angela last year, she told me that many psychologists are using these books to help them in their practice. A whole new world out there for a writing thesaurus book. If you haven’t checked out these award winning books, you are missing out!

If you are after great books check out Dean Wesley Smith's new Kickstarter. He has four updated books on publishing and writing, The Essential Indie Collection. I’ve got the originals of these books, they are amazing resources on mindset and author business.

Joanna Penn recently interviewed Melissa Addey on researching like an academic and then using this to spark your creative writing. I love researching but knowing when to stop and write the story is the tricky part. Melissa has some great advice here. As an academic she has an interesting view on researching for her novels and the horrors of academic publishing.

In The Craft Section,

Reading with purpose- Gabriela Pereira- Bookmark

Meet the villain- Gwen Hernandez- bookmark

Becoming your character- Boo Walker

Coping mechanisms Thesaurus- Becca Puglisi

What makes a good ending- Janice Hardy- Bookmark

In The Marketing Section

Author press kit blunders- Sandra Beckwith-Bookmark

The hidden cost of spam- Lisa Norman

Publishing secrets every new author needs to know- Rachel Thompson- Bookmark

The 2026 reader survey results- Written Word Media- Bookmark

The ultimate guide to crafting a book pitch- Penny Sansevieri

To Finish,

As we head into February and your writing goals are sorted it’s time to look at your author business. Here is where Becca Syme comes in. Becca is one of the most respected author mindset coaches out there. She often guests on the big writing podcasts. She recently made available her keynote talk from a recent conference on the phases of an author business. Clear and practical advice. A must watch.

Maureen

@Craicer

It’s nearly time for my first newsletter of the year. If you want the best of my bookmarked links plus other interesting tidbits, you can subscribe here to join our happy band.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the free Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, Thank you very much. I appreciate any virtual coffee love.

Pic Photo by Iuliia Pilipeichenko on Unsplash

Finding Our Way

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 08:24:00 +0000

In Publishing News this week,

Publishers Weekly has an interesting article on Booksellers in Minneapolis and how their visibility in the recent protests have affected their sales. The picture of a 70 year old bookseller standing in clouds of teargas went viral. For my American readers – the world is watching and appalled on your behalf at what is happening in your cities by your own government.

In happier news, The Babysitters Club is 40 years old and Scholastic are celebrating with new projects. It is amazing how this series kept going, girls, and clubs a winning combination. Meanwhilie, the American Library Association celebrated their Carnegie and Newbury medal winners today.

Bologna Children’s Book Fair has a sizable exhibition section devoted to the illustrators and every year they host a competition of submitted work from illustrators. Thousands enter but only 75 get honoured at the children’s book fair. Looking down the list- only one from the Southern hemisphere and one each from USA and UK.

Mark Williams reports on Amazon coding changes that were rolled out slowly in 2025. A10 is now fully implemented across the ecosystem and Mark explains how this has changed the way books are ranked and hopefully cut off the AI book surge.

Dale Evans reports that Ingram Spark is dropping the Update fee from February 1^st. When Ingram first started Print on Demand publishing it used to cost to upload a title and then a further cost to update it. With all the Print on Demand competition they dropped the upload fee a few years ago and now the update fee is no more. Expect a wait as thousands of authors take the opportunity to refresh their books in the first half of this year.

Selling Direct was the catch phrase in 2025 and everybody seemed to be experimenting with different online shops. Just coming to the party are publishers who have caught on to the benefits of knowing who might be buying their books. The Independent Publishers Group has partnered with Norwegian Beat Technology to offer sales platforms to their members.

Joanna Penn recently interviewed Adam Beswick on his selling direct adventures with live streaming on TikTok. As I read through the transcript I was constantly marveling at how bookselling is changing. If you want a glimpse of the future check out what Adam is doing. Mind blowing stuff for 2026.

Written Word Media have a comprehensive article on author trends for 2026. They start off with the statement Trust is the new currency. This is one of those articles that you need to read without distractions. There is a lot to think about.

Jenny Hansen has an interesting article on Writers In The Storm on writing goals and how they suffer in January. You start the year with great intentions then flail around after a few weeks doubting yourself. Writing Goals: Going From Aargh to Aha!

Kristin Hacken South writes on Writer Unboxed about the dilemma of the writer. Who Are You? This is not a navel gazing exercise in what type of writer you are, it is a look at the profound understanding of choosing the identity of writer.

In The Craft Section,

How to craft accurate fight scenes- Dr Alex Jemetta

Writing without trying to manage the reader- Excellent essay -Harper Ross

Character Journey as Structure- Lisa Poisso- Bookmark

5 ways to hide your villain- Jill Boehme- Bookmark

Writing for change- Nina Amir- Excellent

In the Marketing Section,

The author formula workbook- Book Review- Sandra Beckwith

2 great posts from Penny Sansevieri-9 Proven strategies for Amazon sales and

What drives success- Bookmark

Substack made simple- Rachel Thompson

Planning a branding focus- Ines Johnson- Bookmark

To Finish

Katie Weiland is not afraid to go deep into the writer’s psyche and study how we think and express ourselves. As we start a new year there are challenges in the world that have us feeling unsure and unsettled about our place as writers and how our work is influenced by the events around us. Her essay on Why Writers Need A Sense of Wonder in Fiction More Than Ever speaks to the unease many of us are feeling. Our own lives can be seen in the context of stories. It is a great essay, and I hope you will read it.

Maureen

@craicer

Do you want the best of my bookmarked links in a handy monthly newsletter? You can subscribe here to join our happy band.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the free Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate the virtual coffee love. Thanks.

pic Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

Trying To Stay Sane for 2026

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 08:12:00 +0000

And we are back for another year of looking at news, trends, and tips on navigating the publishing world.

Because I live in the Southern Hemisphere, we also have Summer, schools out, and Christmas and New Year all squashed together in one month of eating, celebrating, and broken new year’s resolutions. But the publishing world continues without noticing we are gone, so the first blogs in January are What Did We Miss.

Publishers Weekly reported that publishers are getting together to join a class action against Google. Yes, they too copied the Anthropic playbook and now a court case is looming on the horizon.

Spotify having made a substantial inroad into Audibles market share on audio books is looking to expand into video and to sweeten the pot it is going to be super easy to get eyeballs and ears on audio books. Meanwhile, Audible is doing the same according to Publishing Perspectives. The video wars on audio books are about to start.

If you are using YouTube for audio books you might like to check out the new trend on BookTok, ambient video for your books. You could upload a video of a cozy fire in a library as the visuals for your audio book experience. This could help with lots of sales if you upload the video to Spotify and Audible.

In AI news – HarperCollins France has decided to embrace AI translation much to the annoyance of translators. Publishing Perspectives reports on The Future of Translation: AI and The Greater Good.

Dave Malone has an interesting post on what labeling could look like as a way to distinguish works with AI use in it. He has some clear examples of types of labels which could be used on creative work. (It looks a little like a nutrition label, but the concept is worthy.)

Steph Pajonas has an interesting post on AI resistance being a problem for your ego. Are you letting your ego get in the way of using this tool?

Mark Williams keeps his eye on the publishing in the rest of the world, and he has some interesting things to report on the new darling of the Frankfurt Book Fair- India.

With their Gen Z numbers bigger than the population of the United States this is a potential publishing market that has been ignored for too long. The New Delhi Book fair is aiming for over 2 million visitors. If your country has just signed a free trade deal (NZ) this could be a great opportunity for publishing expansion.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has seen the future in kids literature and it is Manga. They have embraced the Manga storytelling style and are teaching their kids to create this using their own stories.

Big Bad Wolf is back in Indonesia. BBW takes English language books that would be pulped otherwise and sells it in huge sales that last a week and are round the clock. Children’s books are in high demand. The numbers are astonishing. (A nice little earner for the publishers who write off their books, officially.)

Every January, the list of books, songs and films coming into the public domain gets attention. This is for specific books or characters. So thriller authors if you want to do your own versions of The Saint or Miss Marple or the Maltese Falcon you are in luck. Check out the list. There might be a pot of author gold waiting for you.

If you are thinking about the coming year and what might be the dominant themes check out Joanna Penn’s predictions for publishing in 2026. She is a publishing futurist and is often ahead of the trends.

Meanwhile, Erin Niumata has an interesting post on selecting a word of the year as your guiding star for decisions in your author life.

In the Craft Section,

How to use character tropes without the cliches- Angela Ackerman- Bookmark

3 Unforgettable Scenes- James Scott Bell

Summing up your story in 2 sentences- P J Parrish- Bookmark

The sentence and the story; a fable- Donald Maass

When to reveal story stakes- K M Weiland- Bookmark

In the Marketing Section,

Tips to overcome video shyness- Amy Rogers Nazarov- Bookmark

2026- the year to stop being invisible- Jaime Buckley

The pitch- a writing selling point- Ellen Buikema- Bookmark

Facebook ads for authors – video teaching by David Gaughran- Bookmark

5 social media metrics that matter- Rachel Thompson- Bookmark

To Finish,

As we look to start another calendar year of writing and publishing organizing ourselves into productive habits become the most pressing things to conquer in January. In the Southern Hemisphere it is right up there with getting the kids back to school after the so called Summer holiday. (It’s torrential rain here- Climate Change is biting.) If the thought of planning a year full of writing activities daunts you, check out this excellent post from Alexa Bigwharfe on a way to plan your writing goals and keep you moderately sane for 2026.

Maureen

@craicer

Do you want the best of my bookmarked links in a handy monthly newsletter? You can subscribe here to join our happy band.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the free Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate the virtual coffee love. Thanks.

Pic Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash

The Writers Gift

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 06:02:00 +0000

In Publishing News this week,

If you have books on the Amazon store you may have received a message about an important change coming in January. Amazon will allow book downloads of ePubs and PDF’s. This is a potential hazard as one author put it. What’s to stop someone taking that PDF uploading it with another name and selling it… or using it to train an AI? Will the T’s and C’s change allowing Amazon to train Ai’s because you didn’t put a DRM on the book? A nice conundrum present for Christmas.

Writer Beware also flags a problematic Amazon gift. The one that introduces a chat bot into your book to help you find where you got up to in the story. This could be a breach of copyright. Publishers are reaching for contracts and lawyers. Amazon’s gifts are double edged and always in favour of the gift giver.

If you are an author in France, you will be celebrating as the French Publishers Association have negotiated a way to compensate authors for used book sales. Money for writers, what a present.

Also in the money for writer’s present mode, a new literary prize for Deaf and Disabled Writers. This is welcome news and a nice boost of sharing the love to emerging writers. Publishing Perspectives talks to the first recipient.

Hachette is funding a Raising Readers campaign to encourage reading by funding class libraries and other great things to reach the younger readers. After all if we don’t encourage reading early, we won’t have adult readers. It would be nice if other publishers joined in this gift giving.

The American Book Fair died a lingering death over a few years ago and pretty much disappeared but now something new is coming. BookCon 2026 which has sold out already, according to Publishers Weekly. A potential gift to the publishing industry in America- their very own Bookfair.

The Diamond Comics fallout, or the gift that keeps on giving. It was the first news story of the year and now it’s in my last roundup for 2025. After all the court cases, the shady deals, the legal wrangling, finally they are moving to liquidate stock. Probably, says Publishers Weekly.

PEN America has the list of most banned books for 2025. Sigh. Not the gift you were looking for, John Green and Jodi Picoult. On the other hand, having a banned book might result in lots of sales as a backlash.

Hoopla library app has been tracking the 2025 most borrowed trends. Audiobooks are up nearly 20 percent with Thrillers and Romantasy the top audio borrows. Banned books were also amongst the top borrowed books. With physical libraries suffering under book bans- there is still a way to read that ‘controversial’ book.

Richard Curtis has part 2 of his article on collaborations. This is where the copyright and back detail gets a close look. If you are thinking about collaborations with other authors next year – check out these articles.

Mark Leslie Lefebvre has an entertaining article on the author photo. I didn’t realise the lengths he would go to get the right author photo. Hilarious. A completely different way to look at author branding.

Sarah Brinley has an interesting article on the stress response and how you can use the Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn responses to strengthen your scenes.

In The Craft Section,

What to write next- Julie Glover- Bookmark

Tech tips for organizing your novel- Kris Maze- Bookmark

Allow your characters a moment of happiness- Lesley Krueger-

Bookmark

Using character themes to fix a scene- September Fawkes- Bookmark

Why character motivation matters- Lucy V Hay- Bookmark

In The Marketing Section.

The art of the ask- Rachel Thompson- Bookmark

How authors can elevate their brand- Kimberley Grabas-

Bookmark

The years best book marketing articles – Sandra Beckwith- Bookmark

The complete guide to Amazon optimization- Penny Sansevieri- Bookmark

To Finish,

This is the last roundup for the year. I feel a bit battered by the years events. Jane Friedman has written a comprehensive review article on the standout moments. You may be reaching for the eggnog after reading it.

Gift giving for writers always generates lists of journals and pens etc. The best gift you can give a writer is a review or a library request. Go out and talk about your favourite writers. Share the love. (My book Star Light is free in an epic mid-grade book giveaway.)

I will be back halfway through January 2026. I’m off to finish the bumper newsletter and find some sunscreen because its Summer down under.

Have a fantastic festive season.

Maureen

@craicer

If you have enjoyed my weekly blog this year and want to buy me a coffee or an eggnog, you will have my grateful thanks.

Newsletter subscribers will be getting the bumper Christmas edition. You can subscribe here to join our happy band.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox, subscribe to the free Substack version.

Thanks.

Book Bans – The Non Gift for Writers

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 05:25:00 +0000

In Publishing News this week

In another blow for libraries in the United States, the supreme court has denied an appeal to re consider a book banning case in Texas. The decision affects three states and affects the freedom to access information. Publisher’s Weekly reports on the impacts that are likely to freedom of speech.

The judgments being handed down on the United States courts have a bearing on publishing worldwide according to a symposium on Future Proofing Equality in Children’s Publishing held recently in the United Kingdom. Most of these book banning judgements center around children’s books. With diversity, equity, and inclusion hot topics in children’s publishing, the flow on effects from the US are impacting children’s books worldwide. Publishing Perspectives report on the symposium highlighted the increase in books being dropped before publication just in case they might violate some US ban.

The School Library Journal published an open letter from the owner of Lee And Low Publishing about the danger of soft censorship. Jason Low exhorts publishers to keep publishing inclusive titles. Soft censorship is a slippery slope to restriction of information. Everybody needs to get behind challenges to book banning including publishers.

PEN International is an organization supported by author groups worldwide to shine a light on writers who have been imprisoned for speaking truth to power. They are fund raising for various legal campaigns for imprisoned writers. Many well known authors have supported by donating amazing collectables to the literary auction.

New Zealand is one of the few countries to have a Public Lending Right. This means that writers are compensated for having books in public libraries. Recently all the PLR countries got together to have an international body reports Publishing Perspectives. They are looking to exchange ideas and international cooperation.

Lit Hub is reporting on the possible Netflix Warner Brothers merger and why author societies are up in arms about it. Can you see any danger in a large corporation controlling all the entertainment media? Yes, Publishing books is in entertainment media.

Dan Holloway reports the European Union has not exempted books from the deforestation regulations. This is going to impact publishing supply chains as paper is crucial in publishing books. James Daunt, CEO of the largest book chains in the world told the BBC that he would sell AI produced books if someone wanted to buy them. Watch for new dartboard pictures in publishing offices.

Mark Leslie Lefavbre is a well respected commentator on publishing. He has done pretty much every job in it. He has an essay on how the traditional slush pile has moved out of the publishing in-box and into the digital publishing sphere. He makes some great points and is a must read.

Agent Richard Curtis looks at collaborations and how they can be richly rewarding or a nightmare of unrealistic expectations. He talks about the best projects that lend themselves to collaborations.

Rachel Thompon has an outstanding post on relationship based book marketing. This is the post you need when you are figuring out how to show that you are not an AI. She offers lots of tips, and reasons to stop saying buy my book everywhere.

Jane Friedman has been highlighting memoir this week. She has two guest posts on the process of writing memoir. It’s Not About You. Your Memoir is Someone Elses Story by Allison Williams and Why Your Memoir Feel Like its Rambling and How To Fix It by Wendy Dale.

In the Craft Section

2 excellent posts from Janice Hardy- Freshen up tired tropes and How to edit without feeling overwhelmed- Bookmark

4 ways to protect yourself when writing trauma- Rachel Warmath- Bookmark

Anticipation – writing thesaurus- Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi

Trying out dictation- Gabriele Pereira

In the Marketing Section

2026 literary calendar- Sandra Beckwith- Bookmark!

Running successful events- Jillian Forsberg- Bookmark

12 proven book marketing campaigns- Penny Sansevieri- Bookmark

2 different approaches to direct selling- Sacha Black and Joanna Penn (podcast)

How does a good book get discovered – Brian Feinblum

To Finish

It’s December which means… Lists of gifts for writers. Lit Hub has 50 interesting gifts for writers If you are looking for a really good resource, The Dream Team of Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi have a Buy One Get One Free Thesaurus sale. If you haven’t checked out these amazing books… run to their store.

If you have any mid grade Sci Fi and Fantasy fans, there is a book giveaway happening over December. You can even get my book Star Light for free.

Maureen

@craicer

My last post for the year is next week, and Newsletter subscribers will be getting the bumper Christmas edition. You can subscribe here to join our happy band.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the free Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate the virtual coffee love. Thanks.

Photo by Ionela Mat on Unsplash

Counting The Cost

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 07:10:00 +0000

In Publishing News This Week,

The publishing world was rocked by the death of Porter Anderson. Porter was a long time commentator and publishing news journalist. I shared many of his articles on the blog over the last decade. He was a kind and generous man who will be missed. I still grin when I see the words The Industry. Porter coined this tongue in cheek phrase, “the industry, the industry,” when reporting on the impact of another merger of publishers or publishing shaking event. RIP Porter.

Publishers Weekly reports the deep dissatisfaction with the new owners of Edelweiss, the ARC copy review site and sales database. Prices have gone up sharply. Being in this catalogue was essential for small publishers but now they are being priced out.

Metadata. It’s important. And many people in publishing do not understand it. It is the difference between finding your book in an online catalogue where it is supposed to be or the book disappearing completely. Darcy Pattison has an informative post on metadata.

Bloomsbury has partnered with AI reports Publishers Weekly. If you sucked in your breath at that headline, you are not alone. However, they are using AI technology for discovery and engagement. Not for writing. Only for learning outcomes in their academic division. Really.

Anne Trubek has an interesting article on Will AI Written Books Destroy Publishing. She lays out where AI and the publishing contract language of indemnity diverge. This is a soothing post for most writers worried that AI written books will replace them.

Mark Williams has an interesting post on the music industry and how the music publishers are using leverage with the AI companies to get favourable terms. This is something that the publishing companies are trying to do. With the recent court case judgement of training AI’s coming under fair use if you buy a copy, publishers might have missed a trick with licensing.

Written Word Media have published the results of their annual survey of writers. One of the interesting ways they present this data it what each finding means for the author reading the survey.

Richard Charkin has an interesting column on the measurement trap and how what you measure in publishing gets in the way of why you are measuring. Is the industry failing to understand the basics of good publishing judgement?

Agent Richard Curtis has a guest post on Jane Friedman’s blog about the Importance of Print and why it never died. Print might still be alive but some formats of it are shrinking fast.

Jenn Windrow has an excellent post on making your writing sparkle. She see’s developmental editing like a Christmas Tree. Has it got a good structure? What about the sparkle?

In The Craft Section,

The case for shrinking your novel- Amy Bernstein- Bookmark

Keeping score- Donald Maass- Bookmark

Four moments you should hold the conflict- Becca Puglisi

The most powerful writing tip- Sue Coletta- Bookmark

Naming your book- Penny Sansevieri

In The Marketing Section

Can Facebook ads sell books- Randi Minetor- Bookmark

Understanding IngramSparks title processing

Amazon royalties explained- Dale Roberts - Bookmark

Long term author career- Podcast with Joanna Penn and Jennifer Probst – Interesting

The Taylor Swift Newsletter strategy- Katrina God- Bookmark

To Finish,

The last month of the calendar year and everyone is thinking I haven’t met my goals.

If that is you, cut yourself some slack. Are you further ahead on your writing journey than the start of the year? If you need some concrete help in goal setting check out this article from the SPA Girls. They are fantastic and one of my go to podcasts.

As it’s December, there will be lists of writer gifts out there. Katie Weiland has 12 days of writing gifts to get for yourself or a friend. Treat Yourself.

Maureen

@craicer

Do you want the best of my bookmarked links in a handy monthly newsletter? You can subscribe here to join our happy band.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the free Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate the virtual coffee love. Thanks.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Understanding The Rules

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 08:14:00 +0000

In Publishing News this week

In the continuing saga of Baker and Taylor distributors, the physical warehouse and staff have found a buyer. Riding to the rescue is Lakeside Book Company who have snapped up their warehouse, employees, and print on demand service.

Publishing Perspectives highlights the news that Tennessee is demanding libraries comply with a directive on age appropriate books- or gender politics by another name. This has widespread condemnation with PEN America among many organisations crying political interference in library management and reading.

The suspension of books with AI covers from New Zealand’s prestigious national book awards was reported around the world. The online discussions ranged from it shouldn’t be about the cover to we must draw a line in the sand, and this will strengthen the argument for other book awards. One of the issues raised was the time a book is in production. If you change the rules unexpectedly instead of gradually everyone has time to prepare.

This morning the Book Awards Trust released the new rules for the New Zealand Children and Young Adults Book Awards. There is a clear clause on AI.

“ 11. Works containing AI-authored text, in part or in whole, are not eligible for entry in any category of the awards. Use of AI for research and minor editorial or formatting support is permitted. Submitters should clarify any queries they have with the awards administrator before entering. If, after submission, a work is found to include ineligible AI-generated text, it will be disallowed. Entry fees will not be refunded and submitted materials will not be returned.

Note: Ahead of the 2027 awards, the awards organisers are consulting with the children’s book sector, including with illustrators and designers, to provide clarity around the use of AI for illustrations. Potential submitters who are currently working on books that will publish during the eligibility period for the 2027 awards (1 April 2026 to 31 March 2027) should bear in mind the potential for restrictions on its use for illustrations.”

Their gradual introduction of rules for illustration and AI use gives everyone who already have books in production a grace period.

The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators recently held a webinar on the state of the industry. Gone are the months where children’s books propped up publishers. In this brave new world SCBWI believe it’s time to make everything fresh again.

Tanzania has a publishing problem, reports Mark Williams of The New Publishing Standard. With all the English language books flooding into the country, reading in their native language is on the decline. What to do?

Elle Magazine has an interesting article on the celebrity culture of using ghost writers. The quality of your ghost writer collaborator is now the hot thing. Can you get a Pulitzer Prize writer to ghost write your book?

Written Word Media has a comprehensive article on the latest AI scams for writers. Sigh.

Meanwhile, in another twist Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware reports that scammers are impersonating famous writers, calling you up to sell the dream.

Let’s be careful out there. Please pass this knowledge on to newbies. It doesn’t hurt to ring the company and ask if their email is genuine but do your own google search and website contact. I know of one local writer who did this and exposed a whole scam operation from a hacked financial account.

Chelle Honiker of Author Automations has an interesting article on using AI to streamline all her office jobs.

Jenny Hansen also shows how you can use AI in 8 cool non writing ways to protect your work- which means not sharing it in the first place. (Yes you can turn off sharing in AI.)

AI is a tool, you can use it as such for proofreading but the accepted practice is don’t use it for creativity. AI does not have the human experience or voice.

Rachel Thompson has a brilliant post on repurposing content. Have you got an article or notes filed away that you can repurpose for social media, website articles or into different bite size notes? Rachel shows you how to do more with your work.

Kobo Writing Life has an interesting article on the three technical skills writers need to develop. This is a good advice. Are you learning your craft? Do you keep learning? Do you reread your writing craft books? This is also the last week for the Storybundle of writing craft books. Don’t miss out.

In The Craft Section,

Creating subtext in deep POV- Lisa Hall-Wilson- Bookmark

Edit your book as if it’s a screenplay- Lesley Krueger

Memoir examples- Reedsy

Ethical and moral dilemmas in crime fiction- Chris Berg and Paul James Smith- Bookmark

Is your character the true antagonist- September Fawkes- Bookmark

In The Marketing Section,

The importance of your author website- Kobo-Bookmark

The power of the free prequel- Harshini Fernando- Bookmark

Amazon Metadata mistakes- Bookbaby

The 100 rejections challenge-Libby James-Bookmark

Ebook Distribution Deep Dive – Reedsy - Interesting

To Finish

As we move into the last month of the year it's gift giving season with Black Friday deals, Cyber Monday deals and then Christmas. Sandra Beckwith is first off the rank with a collection of writer gifts that you might like people to buy for you. The best gift to give a writer is reviews, book sales, a coffee, and then maybe trawl the list for something they really need.

Maureen

@craicer

Do you want the best of my bookmarked links in a handy monthly newsletter? You can subscribe here to join our happy band.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the free Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate the virtual coffee love. Thanks.

Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

The Spirit of The Gift

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 09:14:00 +0000

In Publishing News this week

The closure of Baker and Taylor book distributors has ongoing ripple effects throughout the book publishing industry. As the biggest book distributor to libraries, publishers are scrambling to put together dedicated sites. Small publishers are left hanging and now the implications are being felt with other book distributors. Publishers Weekly reports on Lectorum Publishing’s closure. Lectorum, the largest independent distributor of Spanish language books explains that the hits kept coming and they couldn’t overcome them.

Spotify is expanding its reach again. This time into the Nordic countries home of Storytel. Storytel have just posted a third quarter profit. Europe and the American continent have been the preferred audiences to chase. I wonder which one will get to Asia or Africa first. Spotify reports that more than half of its listeners are under 35. With the younger demographic of Africa’s population, the struggle for the worlds ears between these two companies is just getting started.

November had three big conferences for the publishing community, Sharjah, Shanghai, and Author Nation and all of them addressed the AI conundrum. Do we? Don’t we? and How much is too much?

One of the keynotes of Sharjah was an address by Keith Riegert about AI tools. Publishers Weekly reports on this with the title When It Comes To AI, Adapt or Die. This is stark look at the AI tech disruption in publishing. Keith Riegert says we should treat AI as “a very intelligent but inexperienced assistant.”

Adding his ten cents into the mix is Mark Williams explaining that book sellers did embrace AI tools back in 2023 then walked back from it.

So where does that leave us at the end of 2025. Publishing Perspectives has an article on using AI for marketing, including the recording of a panel discussion at Frankfurt. Not using it is not an option, according to the panel discussion.

In my opinion, if you pass lots of junior publishing jobs to AI, how will the juniors know when AI gets it wrong or how to do the job without AI? We could lose a lot of knowledge if we let a computer do the thinking. In the publishing office it should be what is the best use of my assistant’s time? Do they understand enough about my business to use AI to my best advantage? The value of AI is speed in marketing, analysis, and productivity tools. But it is a very poor replacement for creativity. It’s the doubling down on being human that distinguishes us from a machine.

Publishers Weekly has an article on what’s happening in children’s publishing in China.

They are not having a fantastic year. The stats are reflected throughout the world as everybody is struggling to find children’s audiences. Where are they all and who is the competition? When I was talking to children at a recent market, they all said they read graphic novels. Producing a graphic novel is time consuming and expensive. A conundrum for the children’s publishers.

Joanna Penn is back from Author Nation the world’s biggest indie author conference. They had over 80 presentations and every major vendor was in attendance. Joanna gives a run down on the big topics of conversation.

Richard Curtis has an excellent post on the profit and loss statement. For many in the publishing world this is the most important piece of paper in the office. And one that is not talked about. Understanding this document is key to every publishing decision.

Rachel Thompson has an excellent article on subscribers and their importance in marketing. I was recently talking to a publisher about owning your audience and Rachel’s article explains how your free newsletter subscribers are just as valuable as your paid ones.

Michelle Barker (writing on the dream teams blog) has an excellent article on the qualities of a successful writer. It is not about sales.

Dave King has an interesting article on Writer Unboxed about Redshirts. This is shorthand in the writing community for the character that is only there to die. If you are thinking about killing off a character, are you using their death wisely?

In the Craft Section,

Microtension- a must in fiction- C S Lakin- Bookmark

Character layer by layer reveals-Patricia CrisaFulli- Bookmark

Crafting memorable sidekicks- Elizabeth Spann Craig

Is your protagonist the main character- September Fawkes- Bookmark

3 things silent movies can teach you- Janice Hardy

In the Marketing Section

Bookmarketing requires patience- Sandra Beckwith

Free Bookfunnel marketing guides- Bookfunnel- Bookmark

22 ways to grow your email list- Bookbub- Bookmark!

Strategies to get into libraries- IngramSpark

Author branding – Kindlepreneur- Bookmark

To Finish,

It’s that time of year where everywhere you look there are Black Friday deals along with Cyber Monday deals. It’s a sign of cultural capitalistic dominance when a holiday only relevant in America spreads around the world as an exhortation to spend money as a way of celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday. Why not flip this on its head and show your thanks to your fellow authors by reviewing their books or subscribing to their patreon or buying them a coffee. If you are hanging out for Black Friday deals for writers then the dream team Angela and Becca have great website discounts. Katie Weiland has a discount on all her courses and books. Women in publishing has collected a long list of other writerly Black Friday discounts.

Go Forth and Give Thanks.

Maureen

@craicer

Do you want the best of my bookmarked links in a handy monthly newsletter? You can subscribe here to join our happy band.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the free Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate the virtual coffee love. Thanks.

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Creator Imposter Syndrome

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 08:29:00 +0000

In Publishing News this week

As you read this the Shanghai Bologna Children’s Book fair gets underway in Shanghai. It is billed as the largest Asia Pacific region book fair dedicated to children’s books. Looking at the geographic representation… there are a lot of Asian countries quite a spread of European countries but none from the lower Pacific Rim. Is it geopolitical politics that is keeping them away?

African publishing is having a geopolitical publishing problem, reports Publishers Weekly. The problem is Wakanda. This mythical nation is being seen as the default African experience by international publishers There are 53 nations in Africa, apparently they all sound like Wakanda, and look like Wakanda. African publishers are trying to separate themselves and be true to their own voices.

Scotland libraries have highlighted a real crisis happening at home and across the world, the closure of libraries. They are calling for more financial and contextual support for libraries. What happened to the billionaires who funded libraries? Where are they now?

Mark Williams reports on Audible’s huge investment in Harry Potter, specifically a full dramatized audiobook production. A cast of hundreds, a fan base of millions, a match made in heaven or at least the accounting ledger. He sounds a warning to others who might think this is a good idea.

Publishing’s survival depends on data, says the Elsevier chairman Y S Chi. He was speaking at Sharjah Publishers Conference and knows what he is talking about. This is a fascinating article from Publishers Weekly. He gives publishing five years before it is irrelevant if they don’t take action now with their proprietary data. I wonder how many publishers still have their head in the sand on this. Data and what you can learn from it is one of the big discussions in the independent publishing community.

Amazon has a news release that they have Kindle Translate in Beta. They are just looking at Spanish and German translations at the moment. I wonder if they picked those two because of the huge book selling markets they have.

There are still 200,000 books unclaimed in the Anthropic settlement. Writer Beware is warning of scam law firms who want to help you get your payout. This is really annoying the actual lawyers who are overseeing this case and the payout. Not every law firm is your friend especially if you might be coming into money.

The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad imposter syndrome crisis writes Rachel Toalson for Writer Unboxed. (I don’t know a single good writer who doesn’t suffer from this.) Why is this such a problem in the writer community? Rachel suggests we get out of our own head.

Anthologies. It’s lovely to be asked to contribute to these. But there are some pitfalls out there for the unwary author. Matty Dalrymple and Mark Leslie Lefavbre have a chapter from their excellent short story writing craft book on Jane Friedman’s blog. Before you say yes to the anthology.

Joanna Penn recently had a great interview with Wendy Dale on Memoir and why structure matters more than you think. For anyone writing or editing a memoir, this is a must read.

In The Craft Section,

The art of intimacy in writing- Sarah Hamer- Bookmark

How to mine early memories for children’s stories- Marilyn June Janson

Secondary characters should have motivation- Anne R Allen- Bookmark

Stop labeling the process and trust the story- Yasmin Angoe

Is your writing good enough- Suzy Vadori- Bookmark

In The Marketing Section

How I use Bookbub ads to market full price books- Mathew Holmes -Bookmark

The Instagram Glow Up – Sandra Beckwith

The power of the prequel- Written Word Media- Bookmark

Book Promo ideas- Penny Sansevieri- Bookmark

Wither Social Media -James Scott Bell- Interesting

To Finish

Rachel Thompson’s posts on book marketing are always must reads for me. Her latest post Why Creators Fear Bad Reviews and How That Fear Makes Us Better is one of her stand out articles that all writers should read. She explores the psychology behind creator fear and how we can harness it to turn it into creative fuel.

Creative fuel comes from many sources. The Storybundle collection of writing craft books is only available for another three weeks so go check it out. You will kick yourself if you miss out.

Maureen

@craicer

Do you want the best of my bookmarked links in a handy monthly newsletter? You can subscribe here to join our happy band.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the free Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate the virtual coffee love. Thanks.

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Standing Out

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In Publishing News this week,

The Sharjah Bookfair is on. As Publishers Weekly explains it centers on the Global South, Africa, Asia, India, and the Middle East. That’s a fair chunk of the world catering to a young demographic. Over 118 countries and over 2,300 publishers represented. It’s a networking extravaganza.

In an interesting side event at Sharjah the PublishHer- Women In Publishing, networking event was held over three days. Publishing Perspectives reports that the mood was upbeat. ‘What a time it is to be a publisher,’ said Gvantsa Jobava, president of the International Publishers Association.

Dan Holloway reports on the European and International Booksellers Federation’s new AI charter. They have a list of 11 points that they want to make clear to the technological industries. Dan makes a good point about the confusion between assistive AI and generative AI. The 11 points are easy to understand and a good guideline for the publishing industry.

Everybody seems to be launching a website company for authors. Publishers Weekly reports that Tertulia book discovery platform is launching a website building platform for authors that will instantly populate their books and sell them using Ingram for shipping. It’s in Beta at the moment, but with the current move to direct selling it looks like a good solution to an author problem.

A while ago (Before Covid) I delivered a big speech on the future of publishing where I talked about the potential of blockchain technology. At the time many people shook their heads and muttered that it was all too much for them to understand. It was interesting to come across this company who want to take the concept of books on the blockchain and run with it. Publishing Perspectives writes about the Written site. It’s a pity that their website is so horrible though.

Writer Beware has the best guide to the Anthropic AI case. This is a what you need to know, all the links you need to claim compensation, timeframes etc. If you still are wondering how to claim your $3000 from the settlement this is required reading.

Kevin Kelly, of 1000 true fans fame, has an interesting take on AI. Paying AI’s to read my books. This is a completely opposite idea to the prevailing concerns in the publishing industry. If AI is going to be the search engine for everything don’t you want your books and ideas inside the box being discovered? A fascinating point of view here.

Gabriele Pereira has a great article on DIYMFA- Two Things AI Can’t Take Away From You. This is a good reminder that the importance of your voice and how you write is what distinguishes you from every other writer out there.

Agent Richard Curtis has an interesting article on the Droit Moral clause and what happens when you waive it in a contract. This is eye opening. This is a clause that is in contracts for film rights. If you waive the clause – the film can do anything they like to the story.

Rachel Thompson has a great post on writers block. If you are settling in for Novel November this is the last thing you need. Rachel writes that it’s not your muse that has gone missing but something else in your life.

Ellen Buikema continues this theme with a look at writer self doubt. She has some great tips to get over your fear of not being good enough.

Chelle Honniker of Indie Author magazine has a sideline in devising author automations. She is an expert at streamlining author business with innovative uses of software. I was intrigued with her post on branding. She dives into things I never thought of before on author branding.

Cathy Yardly writes on The Art of Propulsive Fiction for Writer Unboxed this week. This is the fiction that sits between pure commercial and literary. Is it plot driven or character driven? Cathy writes that this is the wrong focus. It’s about the goal of the main character. Sometimes that gets lost in the story.

In The Craft Section,

Five commandments of Storytelling- StoryGrid- Bookmark!

Connecting points keep the story moving- K M Weiland- Bookmark

6 tips for creating great character chemistry- Becca Puglisi- Bookmark

Crafting real relationships between characters- C S Lakin

The fastest way to make a character sympathetic- September Fawkes

In the Marketing Section,

3 common book marketing tactics that are useless- Sandra Beckwith

Book marketing Blueprint- John Kremer- Interesting

Author event ideas that sell books- Penny Sansevieri- Bookmark

Adventures at book signings- Terry Odell- Bookmark

To Finish,

Elizabeth Spann Craig has been writing great articles for years on her author blog. It’s a great blend of her cozy mystery books and her articles for writers. Recently she had an interesting article on the importance of author promo instead of book promo. She writes “Readers remember the author who taught them something or made them laugh, not the author who just posted cover reveals.” This is a great mantra to remember as we head into the Christmas selling season.

Maureen

@craicer

It's nearly time for my monthly newsletter? You can subscribe here to join our happy band and get the best of my bookmarked links.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the free Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate the virtual coffee love. Thanks.

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Finishing To Start Again

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 05:07:00 +0000

In Publishing News this week,

The most fantastic news hit the worldwide children’s publishing community. The Booker prize for children’s books was announced. Yes, we have made it! A huge prize of our own and it is of equal value to the other Booker prize. That is such an endorsement of the importance of children’s books. (After all if they don’t learn to love reading, they won’t be reading all those other Booker prize books.)

Meanwhile, over the pond the American Publishers association was lamenting the latest sales figures for summer. Every format was taking a hit according to Publishers Weekly.

However, in Europe the biggest selling format was comic books. They were up nearly 10 % in sales. Why? Publishing Perspectives looks at this quiet superhero publishing industry saviour.

In AI court news a judge has ruled that there is a case to answer with Chat GPT’s book summaries that violate copyright laws. These court cases will lay the basis of how AI will operate in the future. More judgements might be going authors way in the next round of the AI legal cases.

While eyes are on AI court cases, the CEO of Bloomsbury was making waves by saying that AI can help with writers block and other creative things. This has surprised many people in the book industry who see AI and creativity in a different light.

The Independent Book Publishers Association has a comprehensive article on the pros and cons of direct sales from websites. Direct Sales has been the one of the major topics of interest in the Indie publishing community for its ability to bypass the Amazon algorithm. What happens in the Indie world will gradually trickle up to the traditional publishing world.

Kathleen Schmidt writes this week about the rise of lavish book publishing parties. She details parties that were spectacular blowouts as a way of marketing. But did they work? Meanwhile, there is a rise in the sort of book party that benefits a charitable cause. I’m going to a book launch next week of a poetry book on food and everyone is asked to bring items for the local foodbank. The last event this small press ran filled a car with food for the foodbank.

Kindlepreneur has added a new video to their useful YouTube series- How to format in Word. This is actually a great primer on the basics of interior page design.

Anne R Allen has an excellent post on writing rules. They are only guidelines. This is important to know. The rules should be in service to the story not the other way around.

Good luck to all those people tackling Novel November. Don’t forget to sign up and access those freebies. Also if you want some craft books to help you on the journey check out Storybundle.

When do you need a prologue? Many writers say never but there is a place for them according to Maryka Biaggio on Jane Friedmans blog. She explores why some prologues work.

Over on Writer Unboxed, Barbara O’Neal writes about The Art of Endings. Do you stop and reflect on the energy of finishing a project? Does the end set the scene for the next project?

In the Craft Section,

Waiting for inspiration to strike- Ellen Buikema

9 ways to energise your plot- Ruth Harris

The stubborn elephant- Sue Coletta- Bookmark

The real purpose of the second act- K M Weiland- Bookmark

The art of crafting relationships - C S Lakin- Bookmark

In The Marketing Section,

What’s Interesting – Dissecting Marketing Copy-Cassie Murray- Bookmark

Simple steps to success- Rachel Thompson

Leverage someone elses network- Sandra Beckwith- Bookmark

The week following a promo- WrittenWord Media- Bookmark

Eleven Labs review- Reedsy

To Finish

The blog is late by a day because last night I attended the Whitireia Publishing Course graduation. This course is the only one of its kind in the Southern hemisphere. It has been running for over 30 years. The graduates have a 75% chance of getting a job in publishing within six months which is an enviable position to have as a training course.

So why am I talking about this?

In the constant restructuring of our education system across all age levels, this post graduate course held on in the face of funding cuts and restructuring until this year. The axe fell and 2025 was to be the last year. The shortsightedness of axing a course that was profitable with a great international reputation stunned the New Zealand publishing industry. This course is hands on, working on real projects, and acts as an apprenticeship scheme for publishers. A Whitireia Publishing grad can walk in and do the job on day one is the unofficial motto.

The Publishers Association of New Zealand put their heads together and worked up a model that will save the course, partnering with Whitireia polytechnic to keep the course going. They need a venue, but they are taking enrolments for next year. If you know of anyone who wants to spend an intense year learning all things publishing in a post graduate course with a high success rate, fantastic tutors, internships, publishing projects, speakers, and total book love send them here.

In uncertain times, books are a comfort and an inspiration. It is nice to know that publishers can come together to protect their industry newbies in the face of their own challenges. In the end, the books will be the winners!

Maureen

@craicer

If you have a job for a recent publishing course graduate – drop me a note.

It’s nearly time for my monthly newsletter. If you want the best of my bookmarked links you can subscribe here to join our happy band.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the free Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate all virtual coffee love. Thanks.

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Caution: Look Carefully At The Message.

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 08:06:00 +0000

In Publishing News this week,

Frankfurt Bookfair wrapped up and everyone is slowly trickling back to their offices in publishing land. Publishers Weekly has a rundown of the gossip, the political brickbats, the changes coming to the fair to make it more public facing, much to some publishers’ dismay. I think there will be a lot of water cooler conversations about the fair, especially the stats of more than 50% of European readers not reading more than one book a year, and the American ambassador feeling attacked because the German minister said AI was digital colonization.

While AI might have been the subject of fiery speeches at Frankfurt there was a survey done that asked how many publishers were using AI. Some were but many aren’t for various reasons, reports Publishing Perspectives. It sounds like many publishers are dipping the tip of their little toe in the water, seeing which way the rest of the publishing world is going, and still making up their mind.

Nielsen released a report at Frankfurt showing which territories were having a growth moment. More than half but some were going backward rather than staying the same. Nielsen reported than NZ was locked in price discounting which stifled growth. (I wonder where those cheap books are?)

Publishers Weekly reported who the top trade publishers are in 2025. Thompson Reuters took over pole position. It is interesting how Amazon, possibly the worlds biggest bookstore, isn’t on the list.

Barnes and Noble have got a new library distribution eco system sorted out. This is to try to fill the gap left by the collapse of Barker and Taylor. They are the latest in a stream of book distributors and publishers hoping to help libraries part with their meager funding.

Meanwhile, in a glimpse into the future, Thomas Umsteddt reports that Walmart are making buy links directly into Chat GPT. Watch for this to be quickly adopted by Amazon. Thomas also talks about the changes to the Amazon algorithm now rewarding readers from outside the ecosystem coming to buy your books. Amazon ads are slowing down.

Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware has a post on the Army of Bots taking over the publishing scams. She has examples and screenshots of what to look for. As ever, if you see a newbie talking about the great offer they got – gently point out that publishers don’t randomly email you out of the blue to offer publishing contracts.

Chad Allen writes on Jane Friedman’s blog about Why Your Book Isn’t Enough and Why that’s Good News. This is an interesting article on platform. Could you engage more with your audience?

Insecure Writer Support Group have an interesting post on Fair Use. What is it and when can you use it? This is a good reminder that lawsuits follow when you take someone’s work without getting permission.

The Creative Law Centre has a good post on Author Estate planning. Protecting Your Legacy Beyond The Page.

Hank Quense has an interesting post of Elizabeth Spann Craig’s blog warning beginning writers not to use AI. This is sound advice. How can you know if AI is writing anything good? How will you learn to tell the difference? September Fawkes is also cautioning writers about over reliance on Beat Sheets. Yes they teach structure but sometimes they get in the way of the story. This is an excellent article from a great writing teacher.

James Scott Bell is starting a new project and he looks at the process of getting ready and when the big grind points will hit. If you are thinking about having a go at Novel November (NovNov) this is a good primer.

Katie Weiland has an excellent article on the midpoint which had me thinking about my own characters and where their mirror moment is. A good excuse to dive back in and see if I have really nailed that essential bit of the story down.

In The Craft Section,

Strengthening your prose through direct language- Elizabeth Spann Craig

Working with relationship driven scenes- September Fawkes- Bookmark

Clean 1 draft fiction Dean Wesley Smith- Bookmark

Coach your characters- Jackie Alcalde Marr- Bookmark

You keep using that word- On profanity- Tiffany Yates Martin

In The Marketing Section,

On Amazon verified reviews- Sandra Beckwith

Branding by standing out- Podcast with Joanna Penn and Steve Brock- Bookmark

Free reads- new service from Bookbub

Creative book launches- Bookbub – Bookmark

How Netgalley makes your book stand out- Rachel Thompson- Bookmark

To Finish,

This week I dropped into the Alliance of Independent Authors free conference on New Trends in publishing. These mini online conferences are excellent. My hand cramped writing notes. It is so good for those of us in opposite time zones to be able to access replays. Sadly, the two day grace period to watch the replays disappeared very fast. If you are hunting down information online about writing conferences check out YouTube. The 20books to 50k conference sessions are still up. Author Nation who have taken over the big 20 books conferences have a video podcast now. Draft2 Digital has an excellent series on Print or you can go down the Brandon Sanderson’s Writing University rabbit hole.

If you want to grab writing craft books don’t forget to check out Storybundle’s collection, a win win win for the book authors, writers, and a charity. All this is great prep for Novel November (NovNov) coming soon.

Maureen

@craicer

Do you want the best of my bookmarked links in a handy monthly newsletter? You can subscribe here to join our happy band.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the free Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate the virtual coffee love.

Thanks.

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Hunting Down Information

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 09:01:00 +0000

In Publishing News this week,

Frankfurt Bookfair is on. This Bookfair, the largest in the western hemisphere, dominates the publishing calendar. Publishing Perspectives has a run down on the issues talked about on day one of the fair.

Publishers Weekly reports that libraries are hunting for partners to fill the distribution gap left by the collapse of Baker and Taylor. Ingram Content group are ramping up to offer services, but Amazon is ahead of them having quietly designed an eco system just for libraries. The library dollar is still relevant and with limited funds libraries are going to be looking for as many extras as they can get.

Dan Holloway of the Alliance of Independent Authors has a post on the Spotify and Chat GPT integration and the how this might play out for authors. He also explores the dangers of the new AI video app, Sora which is threatening the content creators on YouTube.

Dan Blank uses the Sora controversy to wonder if we should all ditch social media. He explains that social media is only worth it if you are intentional with its use. How are you showing your human side?

Publishers Weekly has an up beat post on comic books. They are having a moment, where new readers are discovering them and sales are going up. I wonder if this is a follow on from all those graphic novels that were being launched at young readers in the last decade.

The Guardian reports on a new venture – a certified organic and AI free stamp for literature, to help readers identify books created by real authors. The team behind this has plans to expand beyond the UK. They have a following amongst independent publishers.

Sandra Beckwith has an interview with Tal Kilim, who has launched Booksnout an innovative approach to storytelling using crowd sourcing. Does this approach sound familiar? Hopefully they have learned from the Unbound debacle earlier in the year.

Manda Comisari writes on Jane Friedman’s blog about the divide between art and business. Good Intentions Aren’t Enough in Publishing Deals: How Creators Can Protect Themselves.

James Scott Bell always writes an entertaining article on the writing business. This week he looks at advice he would give if you are hunting a traditional publishing deal. He references Nathan Bransford’s publishing submission bill of rights, one clause is the timely response to submissions. Many writers are left in limbo over never hearing about a submission. It leaves a sour and discouraging taste about the industry.

Kathleen Schmidt is wondering where the big fall book is? Twice a year- Northern hemisphere Spring and Autumn, the publishing industry releases their big books. These are the ones with the marketing dollars behind them. This year the Fall books are very quiet. Why?

Penny Sansevieri reports that some authors are getting locked out of their Amazon Central pages. She has some tips to help you get back in and why you should be using these pages in your marketing.

Katie Weiland has a collection of great writing craft books. She has been updating them this year and has now updated her popular workbook on Structuring Your Novel. She is launching her second edition with a nifty giveaway.

In The Craft Section,

How to edit someone’s work- Sarah Hamer- Bookmark

Morning pages- tips- Gabriela Pereira

Writing using good speech guidelines-Barbara Probst- Bookmark

Creativity in Brevity- Jim Dempsey- Bookmark

The secret weapon behind character arcs- Janice Hardy- Bookmark

In The Marketing Section,

Selling books direct- Kindlepreneur

Standing out in a crowded market – Podcast with Joanna Penn and Steve Brock

Pinterest for authors- Bookbub- Bookmark

The best social media channels for different types of books – Rachel Thompson- Bookmark

How to build an email list before the book launch- Thomas Umstaddt- Bookmark

To Finish

Recently, I had a phone conversation with a family member and we started talking about dicey parts of the world and what was happening. Then I thought about what if our phone conversation was being monitored so I stopped and addressed whoever might be listening that this was an innocent phone call. Sue Coletta this week addressed the same problem that thriller writers have. Do FBI profilers mistake writers for serial killers.

It can be tricky out there in writer search history land. I’m glad I write children’s science fiction.

Maureen

@craicer

Do you want the best of my bookmarked links in a handy monthly newsletter? You can subscribe here to join our happy band.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the free Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate the virtual coffee love. Thanks.

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Shopping for Knowledge

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 07:54:00 +0000

In Publishing News this week.

In a surprise move, as everyone thought the Baker and Taylor Distributors had a buyer, B and T shut the door and fired everyone. Publishers Weekly reports that this leaves B and T workers, small publishers and libraries completely in the cold with no sign of redress.

Fox Entertainment and HarperCollins have decided to work together. They have signed a first look deal. Fox gets to develop Avon romances and HarperCollins gets to write books on Fox studio properties. If you can’t beat Netflix – Do what Netflix does… all the way to the bank.

If you are a subscriber to the Substack version of the blog you will have already seen the breaking news about the new searchable database for the Anthropic settlement last week. Darcy Pattison has a great article on what all the important dates around filing for the $3000 per book payout means. This is a must read. You can be sure that the other AI companies are looking at this judgement and will be taking notes. Anthropic saved themselves a $75 Billion fine by settling out of court and if you look at the numbers they come out of it pretty well. The kick in the teeth for some writers is discovering their publishers in America didn’t file a copyright claim within 5 years of publication which leaves them out in the cold.

On Writer Beware Victoria Strauss writes about the return of the Nigerian Prince scam and includes the new book club feature scam. With AI doing all the research work the email scams can be pretty convincing.

Penguin Random House has sent its banned books wagon to Washington DC for Banned Books Week. Insert your own pithy comment on the juxtaposition of these two entities meeting in the seat of American government. The banned books on this year’s list, that they are handing out, will make you weep.

Last week I mentioned an article - Publishing has a Gambling Problem and the responses from many people in publishing to its truths.

This week to add to the discourse, Karen Gillespie writes about The Case of the Disappearing Author and Why You Don’t Want a 6 or 7 Figure Deal.

Agent Richard Curtis turns the spotlight onto Moral Clauses this week. He argues that the moral clause is immoral. Publishers are seeing the moral clause as a potential weapon to disassociate themselves from a high risk client. High risk? That could be a writer who disagrees with the latest edict from a political leader. Have you read your contracts morals clause?

Next month you can join Novel November. This is the replacement for NaNoWriMo. The list of sponsors for this free event is gathering momentum. If you want to test yourself and write a novel in November check out the site and sign up for free. There are lots of goodies on offer, including a charity donation from Pro Writing aid for every writer who succeeds in writing 50,000 words in November. This could be the month to try dictation and smash those words out.

Dan Blank has an interesting article on cycles of learning. What stops you from doing or learning about book marketing and connecting with readers. It can be as easy as committing to a short daily challenge.

Susan Watts has one of those articles that you file away and think I must do that. It’s all about body position and health. If you have felt the strain of sitting at your keyboard Susan has some ideas for you to fix your workspace. (Stretch your body now!)

The Dream Team of Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi are celebrating 10 years of their website One Stop for Authors. This is their comprehensive website with articles and planners and all good things. They have some great deals to say thank you.

The Art Of Keeping Your Readers Hooked is what every writer wants. Elizabeth Craig has boiled it down to five important things to nail to keep your readers nailed to the page.

In The Craft Section,

Writer Igniter Story prompts- DIYMFA- Bookmark

How long should a series go- James Scott Bell

First draft words of wisdom- Dale Ivan Smith-Bookmark

10 dialogue tips – C S Lakin- Bookmark

What is a compelling voice-Tiffany Yates Martin

In The Marketing Section,

Booktok for Book Marketing- Sandra Beckwith - Bookmark

Social media strategies for authors- Rachel Thompson- Bookmark

Creating Buzz- Terry Odell- Bookmark

When your imaginary world becomes real- R J Redden

10 proven strategies to own the Amazon Algorithm- Penny Sansevieri- Bookmark

To Finish,

October was usually called NaNoWriMo prep month. Now with Novel November prep month continues, with lots of resources around for writers to access. Kevin Anderson has put together a collection of writing craft eBooks for Storybundle with great bonus books if you buy the whole set. It’s a win win win, writers get money, you get great books for not much, and a charity gets a dollop of cash.

To make the most of writing resources you should read Gabriela Pereira’s article on Double Take learning. It is especially interesting if you are thinking about stretching yourself into new writing directions in November.

Don’t forget to sign up for The Alliance of Independent Authors free online 24 hour conference. This year’s theme is New Trends and the agenda is up.

Go out there and soak up the knowledge.

Maureen

@craicer

It’s nearly time for my monthly newsletter of the best of my bookmarked links.

You can subscribe here to join our happy band.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the free Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate the virtual coffee love. Thanks.

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How To Find A New Book

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 07:52:00 +0000

In Publishing News this week

Publishers Weekly had a story about Bookshop.org beginning to sell eBooks in the UK. If you haven’t heard of Bookshop.org they are an independent online book seller that sells into the US and UK. They donate their profits to your local independent bookseller. Their catalogue is from Ingram. With eBooks being added to the stores that’s another win for independent booksellers. In NZ we have BookHub, an online book site linking to independent booksellers throughout the country. It’s a great tool to quickly research and buy books from your local bookseller.

Porter Anderson reports that the judge has approved the settlement of the Anthropic case but as anyone in publishing knows what about the fact that AI companies all scraped their information from pirate book sites. Porter talks to some of the plaintiffs about that big problem that wasn’t addressed in the settlement.

PEN America reports on the latest round of book censorship taking place across the US.

Banned Books week is next week and sadly there is an increase in book censorship in American schools. It’s got to the point where they are just reporting on new books that are being banned, not all books that have come under censorship.

With a child studying the publishing industry here in NZ, I am interested in what publishing courses around the world are teaching. Publishing Perspectives has a run down on what New Yorks Advanced Publishing Institutes week long conference will be covering. Their hot topics are very familiar to anyone in the indie publishing world. Newsletters, YouTube, AI, Audio, and Direct Selling.

There has been a lot of comments in Social Media about an article published by The Walrus – Publishing has a Gambling Problem. Some commenters agree that the system could be broken, others defend it. At issue is how publishers’ actions can screw up a writers career. Nowadays the success of their first book dictates whether they have a career at all. Kathleen Schmidt has an interesting take on this from the publicist’s point of view. And riffing on a theme, An independent bookshop book buyer also weighed in how difficult it was from the bookshop side to even choose books from a catalogue. Suffice to say that if you see a book being featured in a window it has already gone through many battles to get there.

In a potential new book alert- The Dream Team of Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi have a new thesaurus in the works – The Coping Mechanism Thesaurus. They like to test out ideas with writers so have a great article on what coping mechanisms are and how you can use them in your character development.

It is nearly time for the Frankfurt book fair and happening at the same time is The Alliance of Independent Authors 24 hour online conference. The conference is free and available for everyone. This year’s theme is New Trends. They have their usual fantastic lineup of speakers. Sign up and get all the talks for two days before they go behind a paywall.

Dave Chesson has pulled together a list of the best book marketing books in his opinion. Rachel Thompson has a great article on 5 Misconceptions Writers Have About Book Marketing and Sales.

Liz Michalski has an interesting article on Writer Unboxed – How First Drafts Are Like Cauliflower. She has a list of hints that can make the process of revision so much better.

I’m currently working through one of her hints in my own work. It’s tough but it is worthwhile.

Katie Weiland has a quick post on single vs multiple narrators in your novel. What are the pros and cons of each style of writing? I’m wrestling with a multiple POV book, and it is tricky. Huge learning but hard work.

In The Craft Section,

How to find your characters voice- Becca Puglisi- Bookmark

Craft a Raptor Hero-Sue Coletta- Bookmark

Picturing your characters- James Scott Bell

Can setup and backstory work in chapter one- Donald Maass- Bookmark

Writing friends becoming co-authors- Julie Glover

In The Marketing Section

How to get reader reviews- Sandra Beckwith

5 mistakes authors make running eBook promos-Written Word Media- Bookmark

How authors can ask smarter questions- Brian Jud- Bookmark

Global Translation tips- Kelly McDaniel

15 rules for advertising books- David Gaughran- Bookmark

To Finish,

It’s the last quarter of the year and that’s a panic time for authors. The Christmas book sales rush – will my book sell? The end of year, I still haven’t finished my manuscript, worry. Advertising budgets go up. Aaargh Money! Not Enough Time -Aaargh! That treadmill of productivity starts to run faster.

How do we counter this?

Meet someone to talk about books.

Electric Lit has an article on what they think is the next big past time, Book Readings. Have a session at a bar and read each other’s books… or just your favourite book. Hang out at a bookstore event- or start a weekly reading drop in. Book readings where you can ‘meet cute’ or just meet someone new and buy a book as well. It might be just what you need.

Maureen

@craicer

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noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Crisp) — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 09:36:00 +0000

In Publishing News this week

And back to court we go in the Anthropic AI court case. Publishers Weekly writes that the attorneys for the authors had to satisfy the judge that the right people would get compensation. Publishers Weekly have laid out what different sectors of the industry should expect in renumeration. The judge will decide if it's fair.

In New York, women in publishing got together for a Publish-Her session. Porter Anderson talks about the keynotes and the new collaborations amongst women in publishing. This international movement is gaining momentum. Bologna will have a dedicated PublishHer session.

Publishers Weekly turns a spotlight on Indie children’s publishing to share the secrets of their success. Amongst their advantages are how they are using their smarts and size to take advantage of opportunities quickly. They also have more editorial control over their books so they can publish the unusual or potential problem book.

Publishers are waiting to see what the terms of the deal are over the Baker and Taylor sale. The new owners, Readerlink are only buying the assets of Baker and Taylor library distribution company. Who will pay the bills owed? According to one source -it will be a wild ride for publishers.

In academic publishing news, Cambridge University and the Max Planck society are collaborating to provide open access publishing of evidence based research. The academic publishing model is one of pay through the nose to publish and pay through the nose to read it. Open access publishing shares the work among researchers, so everyone benefits. Given the nature of wild claims coming from some politicians free access to medical evidence based research should help everyone to figure out what is pure bunkum snake oil.

Amazon are partnering with the International Congress of Arabic and Creative Industries to create a comprehensive digital Arabic collection. Amazon will bring their AI translation and Audible publishing company to the party. Publishing Perspectives reports on how it will change the Middle Eastern publishing industry.

If you have been wondering about what to do in November now that NaNoWriMo is no more- Fear Not, the annual push to write a novel in 30 days is still on. ProWriting Aid has taken over the reins and has a whole lot of free support for you if you want to have a go, including a big list of mentors and coaches.

The Tax arm of our government occasionally puts out some good short videos to help small business figure out what to do at tax time. This morning I watched a little video on business expenses. Yes, writers can claim business expenses. If you aren’t sure what to claim the video is very educational. Of course this is New Zealand- your country might have different expense claims. You might have to do some digging on your own government website.

Chelle Honniker from The Indie Author magazine has been beavering away on a new author automation hub. If you have been wondering about streamlining your author business go and have a look. She is doing a coming out of Beta special.

Rachel Thompson breaks down the numbers around marketing for traditional publishing. This is a good overview of what you can expect from your marketing budget – and what you have to do for yourself. She has some great reference articles to help you manage your marketing.

Stephanie Cowell has an interesting article on Writer Unboxed about Daring to Share Your Work. It never gets easier even the great Madeleine L’Engle said this. She shares some helpful ideas to make the process easier on the writer.

Kaitie Weiland has an excellent article on Big vs Small character arcs. Some characters have a quieter life in your story but they still have an arc. How do you make the most of those small moments?

In the Craft Section

How to write twists and turns- KWL team-Bookmark

A writing compass- Sally Hamer- Bookmark

Trouble is your business- James Scott Bell

Use weather to create mood- Angela Ackerman

5 strategies for pacing dialogue- C S Lakin- Bookmark

In The Marketing Section

Why most writers hate marketing-Rachel Thompson – Bookmark!

What to do when ads stop working- Mathew Holmes- Bookmark

Pen to camera – YouTube a platform authors can’t ignore- Dale Roberts

3 powerful things to find your ideal reader - Sandra Beckwith

Newsletter magic without math- Lisa Norman-Bookmark

To Finish,

Jane Friedman has excerpted a chapter from Nadim Sadek's book How Creativity Survives in an AI Monoculture. This is an excellent reminder of what AI can do and can NOT do. Now more than ever is the moment where we must remember it is our relationships, our voice, our vision that makes us different. Handing creativity to a machine that can only regurgitate the next most likely words in the sentence is not a replacement for human experience.

Sharing our creativity with others adds to the global human story.

Maureen

@craicer

It’s nearly time for my monthly a handy monthly newsletter? you can subscribe here to join our happy band.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox, subscribe to the Free Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate the virtual coffee love. Thanks.

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