News

Canva Unveils AI Tools

Canva Unveils AI Tools, Including Image Generation; Law Professors Challenge Meta’s Copyright Use: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

This week’s AI news focuses on two issues of great interest to indie authors. I will start with Canva. In part because I haven’t talked about them for a while. And partly because this news picks up from the last time I did talk about them. Which was last year, when they made a lot of people unhappy by increasing the price of its Pro offering from a flat $120 per year for a team license to $10 a month per team member.
Read more
Books Exempt From Latest US Tariffs

Books Exempt from Latest US Tariffs, but Printing Materials May Be Hit: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

You will probably have noticed an absence of reporting on what has been an almost constant in the regular news media: the impact of the various new international trade tariffs. That is because there has been considerable lack of clarity on the impact this would have on the book business and our particular corner of it. This week we learned a lot more. Tl;dr: books are exempt from the latest round of tariffs imposed on trade imports into the US.
Read more
AI Copyright Lawsuits

AI Copyright Lawsuits Consolidated as Authors Protest Meta’s Use of Shadow Library: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

For some time, there have been several AI copyright lawsuits brought by rights holders against tech firms, each focusing on how they trained their generative models and whether they breached copyright in doing so. Now, twelve of those cases have been consolidated, including the highest profile of all—the one brought by (inter alia) Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates—during which Meta’s now-infamous internal comms about LibGen were released.
Read more
Kindle Recaps

AI-Powered Kindle Recaps Launched for Series Readers; TikTok Ban Delayed: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

Users of Amazon’s Kindle (in the US for now, but surely to be widened) now have access to a new “recaps” feature. Kindle Recaps is designed for people who like book series. As the title suggests, it allows readers to refresh their memories about what happened earlier in the series while they are reading the latest installment.
Read more
Alliance Of Independent Authors | Self-Publishing News | April 5, 2025 | With Dan Holloway

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.
Read more
W H Smith

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.
Read more
Authors Call For Compensation

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!).
Read more
Bluesky

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.
Read more
Books On LibGen

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.
Read more
Unbound

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.
Read more
AI Wrote A Story

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.
Read more
← Newer Posts
Older Posts →
Back To Top
×Close search
Search
Loading...