On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway explores Oxford’s Word of the Year shortlist, highlighting trends like “romantasy” and “lore,” which reflect shifting reader and writer habits. He also covers Tumblr’s new community feature for creators, TikTok’s legal battle over its U.S. ban, and Harvard’s AI training dataset project, which raises questions about Google Books’ involvement and public domain use.
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Listen to Self-Publishing News: How Romantasy Is Shaping Reader Trends
On the Self-Publishing News Podcast, @agnieszkasshoes explores how romantasy is shaping reader trends and why Google’s AI dataset raises questions about public domain use. Share on XDon't Miss an #AskALLi Broadcast
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
Read the Transcripts
Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to the book cover penultimate Self-Publishing News podcast of 2024, which means next week I will inevitably be doing my Janus thing, looking back and looking forward. This week, I will round up slightly more stories than normal, probably covering them in slightly less depth than normal, but nonetheless to give you a flavour.
Oxford Dictionary Announces Their Word of the Year
I will start in festive end of year mode, because here in Oxford we are home of the Oxford English Dictionary, published by Oxford University Press, and it, as many dictionaries do, has been looking back over the year and has just announced its Word of the Year, and you will know that I love reporting on Words of the Year, because they tell us so much about what's been happening, what the trends are, what's on the public's mind, and it is a particularly interesting word of the year list.
They actually published a short list, which is great, not all do, because several entries are actually relevant to us as writers. So, we have one on there, lore, apparently, is one of the words of the year.
Why is it on our shortlist? It says in recent years, people have been using lore in different ways in a new context. For example, they might now talk about the lore surrounding a particular celebrity or a character in a book or a film, and my guess is that this probably has something to do with Disney Plus and the number of Marvel and Star Wars spinoffs there are, and these, of course, all provoke controversy as to lore and canon. And, of course, Rings of Power, the Game of Thrones spin off, House of the Dragon, and all kinds of things are adding to our increased use of the word lore.
The winner though, something you will never find on this podcast or indeed in the self-publishing world as a whole, is Brain Rot, which as so often for a word of the year is actually two words.
It is a supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of over consumption of material, now particularly online content considered to be trivial.
I am never knowingly trivial or unchallenging, and I apologize if I am such.
Why is it on our short list? They say, it's not a new or recent concept. Indeed, as anyone who studied Aristophanes and Aeschylus and Euripides, in particular thinking of Aristophanes', The Frogs, and the way he skewers Euripides and Aeschylus, as they will know, it is not indeed an old concept, but has been widely used on social media this year, particularly on TikTok.
So, there we go, and that brings me to my favourite of the entries, and one that I have done my bit to contribute to being on the list, I am sure, because it will show up in all the algorithms, and that is romantasy, a word that none of us will have avoided this year.
A genre of fiction, as they put it, combining elements of romantic fiction and fantasy, typically featuring themes of magic, the supernatural, or adventure alongside a central romantic storyline. Indeed, they note, the romantasy genre is very popular in spaces on TikTok where people discuss and recommend books – a community known as BookTok which may have contributed to wider awareness and use of the word. Meanwhile, the popularity of the romantasy genre itself could perhaps be linked to an increased appetite for escapism to counteract widespread political and economic gloom.
I couldn't have put it better myself, so I didn't. There we go. Romantasy, one of the words of the year for OUP, and as we have seen from survey after survey, one of the words of the year when it comes to readers and writers.
Changes to Tumblr and TikTok
Moving on, what else have we seen? This last week there have been some interesting developments on social media platforms. So, Tumblr, who knew that was still a thing, has been making changes. They are launching what they call Tumblr Communities. So, this will be a way of connecting people who are all interested in the same thing. No doubt, that is people who are interested in romantasy will be able to get together on a Tumblr community and discuss lore.
So, there we go. This feels like a natural development in the true fans type of model that we are increasingly seeing a return to as we progress through the cycle of the development of the internet back to the roots where it was seen that you as a creator connected directly with your fans and people who wanted to talk about what you did, rather than just using the internet as a marketing tool.
So, I'm sure it will find many uses in the writing world. More up to date, of course, is TikTok. TikTok has been appealing against the ban which will come into force in the US if it is not divested by its owners ByteDance to a non-Chinese owner by January the 19th, but the Department of Justice has intervened and has asked the court to turn down all requests for a stay on that decision or on that ban.
Though as TechCrunch and others have pointed out, there is an incoming administration before that date, so that may all prove academic. If it doesn't, of course, then there will be massive changes ahead.
Google Books Contributes to New AI Data Set
Talking of massive changes ahead, Google Books has been contributing to a huge 1 million volume training data set, it turns out. This is the new data set that has been announced by Harvard. It is by their Institutional Data Initiative, which is a database calling itself the IDI for short, and this aims to make books that are in the public domain available to those who want to train AI without having to have wildly expensive purchases of copyrighted material.
So, very much something that is on all of our radars. It has been funded by OpenAI and Microsoft, which is very interesting because they are both paying for copyrighted material. They are both saying that you can't train a really good AI without copyrighted material, and yet now they are contributing to something that seeks to provide democratization or equality on the AI training front by providing what they say is going to be an amazing quality dataset made up entirely of public domain works.
I'm not quite sure how that's circle gets squared or whatever the phrase is, but what is interesting, as I said at the start, is the fact that Google Books have proudly announced that they are contributing to this. That matters to us as writers, of course, because Google Books has not been a stranger to controversy.
This was the project that Google had to make every book searchable, and in order to make every book searchable, they basically got a lot of books and scanned them and turned them into PDFs. They originally were making all of these available online, then they were going to make them fully searchable and then they limited how much you could search and what you could do with it, because, funnily enough, copyright owners got upset.
They don't necessarily have the greatest history on this, and quite what their contribution is, and whether it veers outside of the world of public domain, who knows? But the project Harvard says will only contain public domain books, and it will make them really easy to use as a data set to train AI.
It's not available yet, so we don't know whether they are going to stick to their word. As I say, the involvement of Google Books will raise lots of eyebrows, it indeed raised mine, but I will put off judgment until I see the data set as a whole, and when I do, I will, of course, report what I find to you.
With that, I will leave you for another week. When I come back, it will have been Christmas, it will be about to be New Year, and we will look back on 2024 in the self-publishing world and look ahead with what feels like it has to be these days a very opaque crystal ball, to make some fumbling prognostications for the coming year.
With that, I bid you good day and have a very lovely festive season. Thank you.
