Seasons Greetings from the Alliance of Independent Authors

On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway looks at a new study of American media habits that reveals strong daily audiobook listening—despite slowing growth driven by low uptake among readers over fifty. He also reports on OverDrive’s trademark lawsuit against OpenAI over the name Sora, and shares findings from a research paper showing that poetic prompts can bypass AI guardrails far more effectively than standard requests.

Authoritarian governments—and commentators on Lord Byron alike—have long suspected poets might be the most dangerous people in society. Indeed, one of my favorite novels, Bolaño’s doorstop The Savage Detectives, has this fear at its heart. A new study has discovered there might be something in that after all. The paper, catchily titled “Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak in Large Language Models (LLMs),” can essentially be summed up by saying, “AI will teach you how to do naughty things if you ask it in poetry.”

In this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Matty Dalrymple talks with author and ghostwriter Jon McGoran about the craft and business of ghostwriting fiction. They discuss how Jon got started through an agency, the difference between fiction and nonfiction ghostwriting, the challenges of working in someone else’s creative world, and how clear contracts and good collaboration can make ghostwriting a steady income stream for authors.