News Archives

NaNoWriMo Is Closing Down After Two Decades: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

“So long and thanks for all the fish” is one of the most famous quotations from my childhood. It is, of course, the title of the fourth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series—and the last line spoken by the dolphins as they exit Earth before its destruction. Whatever Adams’s intention, it is a phrase I have always associated with wistful goodbyes.

W H Smith Sale Signals Shift in Book Retailing: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

Occasionally, I come across a story that may have limited reach but strikes a very personal chord. I hope that, like the best chefs, if I season my reporting sparingly enough with them, I get to indulge without too much offense. This is one of those stories. One of the UK’s most famous and longstanding retailers, W H Smith, has been sold. The simple blue-and-white signs bearing its name will no longer frequent the high street.

AI Translation Sparks Backlash from Translators and Authors: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

Another week, more AI angst. While the Meta AI scandal is not going away any time soon, this week it is AI translation that’s causing the issues—specifically, academic publishing giant Taylor & Francis’s decision to use AI translation to bring research to an English-language audience.

Authors Call for Compensation as Meta Faces Backlash Over AI Training with Pirated Books: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

The “Meta used pirated copies of my books to train its AI” scandal is most definitely not going away. A recap for anyone who hasn’t been on the internet since last Thursday: The Atlantic published a search facility for the aggregated piracy site LibGen. Writers have been using it and finding out that their titles are on the list (including two of mine). Meta gave the go-ahead from the highest level to use LibGen to train its LLaMA AI. Allegedly, that highest level knew it was a piracy site. Now, those writers call for compensation (inter alia!).

Bluesky Makes Tracking Traffic Easier; Digital Publishing Award Goes Global: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

This week’s round-up of smaller-scale stories begins with some news from the popular X alternative Bluesky. The platform is making it easier to track incoming links from its feed with its go.bsky.app. What this means is that if you want to run analytics to find out where visitors to your articles, stories, or pages are coming from, you can easily track anything that comes from Bluesky.

Authors Discover Their Books on LibGen, Raise Alarm Over AI Training: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

You’ve probably seen it all over your social media feed this week: light blue rectangular backgrounds with lists of books. Most of these posts feature the writers’ own titles, accompanied by commentary that often hits harder than anything in the books themselves. These are lists of books on LibGen, a piracy-linked site that’s back in the spotlight after a recent article provided a searchable database—allowing authors to see exactly which of their works are available there.

Unbound Goes into Administration, Leaving Writers Wondering About Payments: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

This is a sad column to write. But perhaps not an unexpected one, given how little the company in question has featured in these articles in the past few years. A decade ago, when Unbound was still a relatively new venture, I was very excited to see one of its titles, Richard Kingsnorth’s The Wake, on the Booker Prize longlist and Goldsmiths Prize shortlist. Sadly, that was to be a high-water mark for the venture, which went into administration last week.

AI Wrote a Story; People Had Feelings! Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

AI has been writing things for a long time now. Whatever that means. For several years, large numbers of online articles have been produced by machines. And dabblings in poetry and fictional prose are hardly unheard of. But this week, OpenAI’s Sam Altman released something written by what he describes as “a new model that is good at creative writing.” He also stated he didn’t yet know how or where the model would be released, but of course, writers have had thoughts and feelings aplenty.

Spotify for Authors Expands with New Short Audiobook Program: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

Spotify has launched a new program aimed directly at indie authors. For a few months, I’ve been reporting on Spotify’s increasing appetite for courting indie authors. The Spotify for Authors platform has been adding tools. And recently, the streaming giant announced a deal with ElevenLabs to allow the firm’s AI-generated narration to be used for audiobooks, which indie authors could then upload through Spotify for Authors.

Christie’s AI Art Auction and Mistral’s OCR Tool Spark Debate: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

When the least teeth-on-edge AI story of the week is a sale at the world’s leading auction house, Christie’s, that consists solely of AI art, you know you might want to go and run your nails down a blackboard for some light relief (and who knows, you could sell it as performance art).

ALLi Authors Win Big at the Selfies Awards 2025: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

It feels like just yesterday that I reported on the very first Selfies Awards, won by Jane Davis’s Smash All the Windows. It turns out it was more than half a decade ago, during which time the award dedicated to finding the very best books by indie authors has expanded into three categories: fiction, children’s fiction, and general nonfiction.

Libro.fm Sees Rapid Boom as Indie Bookstores Grow in Confidence: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

The article in Publishers Weekly, where I first came across this story, says that Libro.fm has a similar style to Bookshop.org (before I get too sanctimonious, I might add that a search reveals I said the same thing in an article in 2023). In actual fact, of course, Libro.fm has considerably more history than Bookshop.org. It’s also not “similar.” It’s actually Bookshop.org’s audiobook partner, enabling listeners to buy audiobooks from independent retailers.

March 11, 2025
Dan Holloway
News
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