On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway reports on new insights into what bookstores want from publishers and how indie authors may be better placed to respond quickly to trends. He also examines controversy over Harlequin’s AI-driven micro drama project, where authors say they were not consulted, and looks at wider tensions in the publishing industry as it both adopts and challenges AI in different arenas.
Listen to the Podcast: Bookstores Call for Faster Response; AI Micro Drama Deal Sparks Author Backlash
Show Notes
What Jane Friedman says bookstores want from publishers
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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.
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Read the Transcript
Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to Self-Publishing News. Happy Easter. Happy Passover. Happy spring — or whatever festival you celebrate. It is a glorious sunny day here in the UK, the first we've actually had at this time of year, so I will very shortly be out doing what I love doing on such days: reading in the sunshine.
We ended last week with a fascinating study — thanks to Jane Friedman for surfacing it — from the Book Industry Study Group on the business of bookstores. It was essentially a list of things that bookstores wanted publishers to tell them or help them with. As we are publishers as well as authors, this is really of interest to us. One of the things that came across clearly from this bookseller feedback was that they often found it frustrating that publishers didn't help them as quickly as they would like. So this is an opportunity for us as indie authors to step in and be as responsive as they would like us to be.
Key things they were highlighting included social media trends. As bookstores, the importance of being able to ride a trend is real — if a book goes viral because of someone's TikTok post, they need to be able to stock that book while the virality is still on the rise. Often this is not the case with traditional publishers, who have long lead times and can't necessarily keep up with such trends, especially when it comes to backlist. All of these things rang bells for me as an indie author, because they are all things where we have the flexibility that publishers don't.
It's slightly frustrating, of course, because bookstores aren't necessarily as open to print-on-demand as we would like them to be — for reasons that largely come down to cost, which is understandable. But the fact that we can get things done through print on demand means we are able to meet demand as and when it happens, and we can do small print runs at very short notice.
I'd like to think that this plea from booksellers will be matched by a receptive ear where the titles in question are self-published. BookTok, to take an obvious example, might not distinguish between traditionally published and self-published works. If something goes viral on BookTok, people are going to go into bookstores wanting to purchase it, or go to Bookshop.org wanting to get hold of it through their local indie bookstore. It would be really helpful if we could have those dialogues with bookstores when that happens — say, look, this is happening on social media right now, we can help you make the most of it. An interesting possibility of dialogue opening up.
Harlequin, Dash, and the AI Micro Drama Controversy
The main news this past week has been another drama — I'd say a micro drama, because it is a drama all about the micro drama genre. This is the social media-driven trend for serialized short videos of about a minute that tell stories, in the mold of very short chapters, everything ending on a cliffhanger, with a well-rounded arc within each episode. It is a massive business and a massive driver of how people are getting and wanting to get their stories.
Publishers took note. HarperCollins imprint Harlequin — the famous romance imprint — announced that it was going to be partnering with Dacast, a producer of such videos, to produce a series of animated micro dramas based on 60 of its most famous and successful backlist titles. That sounds encouraging on the surface.
But this caused a big fuss for predictable reasons: the use of AI to help with the animation and to generate the video content. Dacast's CEO put it as openly as this — ‘this is a step towards building global entertainment franchises from existing IP, powered by AI.' What did the authors have to say about this? Well, it seems they didn't necessarily know what was happening. Those who've gone public on social media have said they weren't consulted before their IP was exploited in this way. It seems there will be royalties going towards them, but they weren't consulted in advance — and that is the main cause of the controversy.
We see this so often: people aren't consulted about the use to which their work will be put. You can imagine that there may or may not have been clauses specifically around rights where AI was involved, and whether authors would be consulted — because all of this is so new, and these are largely backlist titles, so it sits in a gray area about what is covered by existing rights in traditional contracts. Authors have said: hang on, we're not quite sure about this. So it hasn't caused great happiness.
The Publishing Industry at War with Itself
This comes at a time when the publishing industry is, on the other hand, getting behind an anti-AI movement. There is another lawsuit — not the famous Anthropic class action, but a separate lawsuit against Anthropic, this time brought by Concord Music. Authors and publishers have together submitted an amicus brief outlining why they think this is an important case and what they consider the pertinent information to be.
Their argument is that using unlicensed copyrighted material to train AI systems that then generate other material isn't fair use — and that it is directly in competition with creative interests. The word ‘competition' is the key point: if you're using AI to generate additional content, that content is going to compete with the original content produced by authors. This is also at the heart of why people got so exercised about the announcement that an extra million largely AI-generated self-published books were published in 2025. This is seen as expanding the pool to such an extent that it is diluting what is available for human authors — in all sorts of shared-pool situations, the most obvious being Kindle Unlimited, but also any market where people are competing for readers.
It's a similar argument to piracy: if people are able to buy things produced by AI, fewer of them are going to buy things written by human authors. So the publishing industry clearly hasn't got its dots joined up, because it seems to be doing things on a very piecemeal rather than a very strategic basis.
In the meanwhile, there are lots of opportunities for us as indies to step in, think through thoroughly what we see our place as in this new landscape, and pursue it without having to worry about what our publishers are doing behind our backs. And with that rather positive note, I'll leave you to enjoy the spring — or indeed the autumn, depending on which hemisphere you're in — and I'll go and have a read in the sun. Looking forward very much to speaking to you again at the same time next week.
