Spotify Launches ElevenLabs-Powered Audiobook Creation Tool

News Summary: Spotify Launches ElevenLabs-Powered Audiobook Creation Tool; Voice Actors Sue AI Companies

Spotify joined up with the AI voice generation platform ElevenLabs last year to allow rights holders who created audiobooks using ElevenLabs to upload those books to Spotify. They have just announced they will be taking this collaboration a step further in a feature that in June will be launched as an invitation-only beta. I'll quote the key sentence from the Investor Day statement on this: "Built directly into Spotify for Authors, and powered by ElevenLabs' digital voice technology, authors can now access seamless audiobook generation and publishing without exclusive contracts."
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Inspirational Indie Author Interview: D. K. Marie

Inspirational Indie Author Interview: D. K. Marie. Romance Author Discusses Hope, Healing, and Building an Indie Career on Her Own Terms

My ALLi author guest this episode is D. K. Marie, a Michigan-based romance author who writes stories about second chances, emotional healing, and hope. She’s moved from traditional publishing into indie publishing and recently won a Wishing Shelf Gold Award. We talk about her journey from reader to writer, the business side of indie publishing, building a loyal readership, and why she believes romance novels can offer comfort during difficult times. 
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Commonwealth Short Story Prize Winner Accused Of Using AI

News Summary: Commonwealth Short Story Prize Winner Accused of Using AI; Judges Face Impossible Dilemma

This week I feel we reached the peak "oh good grief, what now?" moment of the AI scandal hypercycle. And to be honest, I am genuinely not sure whether the whole thing feels more Woodward and Bernstein or Arthur Miller. In short, this week we saw serious shade cast on the Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner Jamir Nazir. Nazir's story, "The Serpent in the Grove," was straightaway called out by several highly qualified people for being AI-generated.
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AI-Powered Scams Target Writers

News Podcast: AI-Powered Scams Target Writers; Audible Opens Pop-Up Bookstore; Anthropic Fairness Hearing Update

On this episode of Self-Publishing with ALLi, Dan Holloway opens with an urgent warning from Writer Beware's Victoria Strauss about two new AI-generated scams targeting authors — one involving fake radio show invitations, one involving fraudulent book fair representation — and explains the telltale signs that give them away. He then reports on Audible's StoryHouse, a pop-up audiobook store in New York's Bowery modeled on a vinyl record shop, and closes with an update on the Anthropic settlement fairness hearing, including concerns about the $3,000 per-title payout and the US copyright registration requirement that overseas authors say is unfair to them.
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Anthropic Settlement Clears Fairness Hearing

News Summary: Anthropic Settlement Clears Fairness Hearing; Payout Expected for 93% of Eligible Titles

The Anthropic settlement has just jumped through one of the final hoops before people can expect the courts to order payment. May 14 saw the so-called "fairness" hearing. Now I will preface this as always by saying I am not an expert in the law, and certainly not US as opposed to UK law. On the other hand I've read a lot of coverage of legal cases over the years of reporting for this column (and even in my spare time).
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Genre Conventions

Audio Interview: What Genre Conventions Teach Authors About Professional Book Cover Design with Howard Lovy and Michele DeFilippo

On the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, host Howard Lovy talks to Michele DeFilippo, founder of 1106 Design, about the role genre conventions play in professional book cover design. Michele explains the visual signals that help readers recognize a book’s category at a glance, from the authority expected in business books to the mood and atmosphere that drive fiction covers. She also discusses the thumbnail test, common amateur mistakes, the danger of cramming too much information onto a cover, and the importance of giving designers enough room to create a cover that serves both the author and the marketplace.
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Bookless Bookstore

News Summary: Audible Opens ‘Bookless Bookstore’ Pop-Up in New York’s Bowery

My literary heart is, and has always been, torn between two worlds. On the one hand is the sensory delight of the dark, dusty library that started with an almost sacred room in my parents' house and has brought me to and kept me in the myriad libraries of Oxford, where I've spent four decades losing myself in physical text. But there is also nothing quite like the electricity of a live show. Which is why I spent more than a decade running spoken word shows, and why anything that brings the book to a live audience will grab my attention.
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Where Friction Hides In Your Author Business

Where Friction Hides in Your Author Business (And When It Might Be Useful), with Orna Ross and Joanna Penn

On this episode of Self-Publishing with ALLi, Orna Ross and Joanna Penn explore the concept of friction in the author business — the stuff that stops readers from buying and stops authors from acting. They examine reader friction including decision fatigue, pricing signals, platform fragmentation, and the challenge of buying direct; author friction including tech overload, identity resistance, and fear of judgment; and the counterintuitive idea that some friction — a signed limited edition, a serialized novel released chapter by chapter, a live human conversation — is actually worth keeping, because it creates connection, commitment, and differentiation in an age of one-click AI convenience.
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AI-Generated Scams

News Summary: New AI-Generated Scams Target Authors with Fake Book Fair and Radio Invitations

Thanks to Nate Hoffelder's morning coffee for the heads-up on a new warning from everyone's favorite scambuster, Victoria Strauss. The subject of her latest exposé is two more entries into the increasingly overstuffed canon of AI-generated scams targeting authors. Both of these follow the same trajectory. They begin with a very eloquently composed (or, at least, composed without the scam signs we've been told to look out for over decades) email request. And end, of course, with a special deal and some bonus extras, all for a reasonable (!) fee.
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BookTok Bestseller List Launches

News Podcast: BookTok Bestseller List Launches in the UK; Subscription Boxes Drive Charts; Have Special Editions Peaked?

On this episode of Self-Publishing with ALLi, Dan Holloway examines three interconnected stories about how books get discovered and sold. He reports on the launch of the UK's first BookTok bestseller list, powered by Nielsen BookScan, and what its romance- and romantasy-heavy lineup reveals about how viral book conversations actually work. He also looks at two striking examples of subscription boxes driving books to the top of the charts — including Goldsboro Books' GSFF box and the fantasy service Fairyloot — and closes with the question of whether the special edition and deluxe edition market may have reached its peak, drawing a sharp parallel with the vinyl singles collecting craze of the 1980s.
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