On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway reports that the Oscars will allow AI-assisted films starting next year. He also discusses new surveys showing that reading habits remain stable despite headlines, and highlights Linktree’s new feature allowing authors to sell eBooks directly from their bio pages.
Listen to the Podcast: Oscars Open to AI-Assisted Films
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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.
Read the Transcripts
Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to another Self-Publishing News podcast.
We have everything this week from AI at the Oscars to eBooks in your bio, and a couple of other things besides.
You will recall that recently the Grammys became the latest organization to say that they would accept entries as eligible for awards that had a significant contribution made by generative-AI, and this week we have learned that the Oscars have followed suit.
This is an interesting development in the general AI world because, of course, the role of AI in film, in writing film, and in the appearance of actors in film, was right at the heart of the actors and writers strike, which I think was about a year ago now that it took place, and eventually got resolved with major studios making agreements as to the importance of human creativity, the way that AI would and wouldn't be used in regard to actors, and crucially for us, the role of human writers in writing rooms.
So, there were regulations put in about, for example, the number of writers who had to be involved in writing rooms on shows.
So, this is a debate that the industry has been having for quite some time. It hasn't been a very comfortable debate over the years, but there was a sort of, tentative truce reached.
But the Oscars has now decided that it can't hold the tide anymore, I guess is what it's thinking, and that trying to distinguish between films which do and films which don't use AI, and the ways in which they use them might be too much.
So, they are going to be accepting AI-assisted films for the Oscars from next year. So, that will be an interesting one to follow, to report on how and what actually happens in terms of the actual films that are put forward for the major awards.
The Rise and Rise of the Literary Gig
It comes interestingly at a time when I was also reading an article about the rise and rise of the literary salon and literary gig, which is obviously something that is very close to my heart. As someone who has spent more than a decade putting on literary gigs, I very much feel as though most of the books I sell are to live audiences who have come to hear me, to watch me perform, and then pick up a book on the way out.
It's very interesting that we seem to be going through a time when things are splintering off in both directions, so hyper tech on one hand and the very artisanal on the other.
Anyone who's a fan of Derrida, that's ridiculously deep for a self-publishing news podcast, but if you are a fan of Derrida or have just been following the news for many years, you will probably realize that these things go together. When you get one polar, you tend to get the other polar extreme going along with it, and I've been saying for quite a long time that we are entering a world where the artisanal is definitely being valued by customers, by readers, by fans of all things literary.
Reading is Not in Crisis
That is a nice segue into what feels like a perennial story, which is that apparently reading is in crisis. So, as I was just saying, we are at a time where we think that there is a healthy resurgence in the popularity of physical books, especially amongst young readers, but the latest survey in the UK suggests that people are reading less.
So again, if you've been around the block as many times as I have, you will know that this is one of those perpetual things. It's like the death of the novel, that every few years we get people saying, oh no reading is in crisis, people don't read anymore.
Then we discover a little bit later on that people are actually reading as much as they ever were, that usually what's happening is A: things are cyclical and B: what we think of as reading is changing, often it then changes back again.
So, the latest study has found that the number of adults who say they read for pleasure in the UK has dropped from 58% to 53% over the past 10 years, and the number of people who have actually read a book in the last year has fallen.
The real thing that the survey seems to be talking about is the reason why people are not reading. I had expected to see this talking about attention spans. So, we're used to people saying, oh, no one's got an attention span for reading anymore, that's why they don't read books. TikTok's killing reading, just like millennials were killing reading a few years ago, if you remember.
But no, that's nowhere near the top reason that people are giving, the main reason that people gave for struggling to read is that they struggled to find the free time. They also refer to the challenge of mental and physical health and of major life events.
So, all of those come above a distraction from your doom scrolling or whatever else it is you do online, or anything to do with screen time. There seem to be bigger sort of world or life concerns that are stopping people reading.
Though very interestingly, something that caught the headlines a lot less was another survey, this one in New Zealand, that actually showed that people were reading slightly more than last year. So, the number of people who read a book in the previous year has risen slightly, and it's risen slightly to 87%.
That, unlike the drop in figures in the UK over a 10-year period for a similar period in New Zealand, this figure has remained fairly stable.
So, make of that what you will. The main thing I make of it is that people love to write headlines of doom and gloom about how no one does this anymore and no one does that anymore. Or millennials or TikTok have killed this, that and the other.
Reading is not in crisis. There we go. There's the headline.
We'll see if Howard puts that as the main headline of this podcast. Self-Publishing News: Reading is Not in Crisis. There we go.
Linktree Enables Direct Digital Product Sales
Finally, news from Linktree. So, Linktree, as you will probably know because most of you will use Linktree or something similar, started life as a very simple thing, which is a sort of one-stop shop link in bio.
So, for people who have digital presences all over the place, it became very convenient to have one place where you could send people to all of those spaces. So, if you want to go to my website, go here. If you want to go to my Instagram, go there. If you want to go to my Facebook, go there. My Patreon, go to some other place.
All of those places, you can link to from Linktree, so it becomes like the one stop, not so much a landing page as a take-off page for sending people to, if they're interested in finding out more about you and going to places to, we hope, buy your books.
So, for a little while it's been possible to buy books through Linktree indirectly, they've been partnering with a third-party platform to enable that to happen, but now they have announced that they're going to enable people to sell digital products such as eBooks, direct from or within the ecosystem of Linktree itself.
So, it is going to be much easier for you if you are sending people from wherever they find you to go off and find you somewhere else, including to buy the books.
It's going to be much easier to sell to them before they click away and forget what they were doing or get distracted, or whatever it is that might stop them buying a book. It's a friction reducer for selling eBooks that feels like a very valuable addition to the overall package of options available to us, and that feels actually like quite a positive note to end on.
I hope you have a very enjoyable early spring or early autumn, depending on which part of the world you are in. I will bring you more news at this time next week when I'll be buoyed up by having taken part in this year's Bannister Miles, which I'm sure I told you about last year, which is a celebration of the anniversary of the four-minute mile first being broken here in Oxford. What is now, I believe, 71 years ago, 71 years ago this week.
Without further ado, thank you very much and I look forward to speaking to you all again soon.
