The news starts 2026 as it ended 2025, with Amazon's new Ask This Book feature for Kindle books. When I first reported on this, I had yet to see the response from authors. Thanks to a link in Jane Friedman's newsletter, I have now been able to read and digest a very robust response indeed from the Authors Guild.

My ALLi author guest this episode is Dale Rogers, an indie author, illustrator, and former assistant professor who retired after eighteen years in higher education to focus on his creative work. Based in Nashville, Dale blends poetry, visual storytelling, design, and spirituality in what he calls Poetry Comics, a genre he’s developing as an indie publisher. We talk about his early creative life, his years as an educator, and what it means to start something new later in life.

As I write, it is deep into the “off season” of the literary world, and news outlets in most places are slumbering in a post-Christmas haze. But not me (in part the result of finally recovering from a long bout of flu). Amid the midwinter quiet, I have dug my way to a couple of interesting stories about the shape that social media might take for us in 2026.