On this week's Self-Publishing News podcast, ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway rounds up a busy week for indie authors: the rise of “Summerween,” BookTok's new blend of sunny settings and Gothic dread; Kobo's return to big-box retail through Best Buy; and the report that Amazon has been ripping up and shredding books, including rare out-of-print titles, to train its AI. He also digs into KDP trend data showing dystopian fiction bouncing back and self-published titles claiming 38 percent of the US top 100, and closes with Ingram's new Covered platform, which puts digital advance copies in front of 50,000 booksellers and librarians.
Listen to the Podcast: Amazon Rips Up Rare Books to Train AI
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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.
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Read the Transcript
Dan Holloway: Hello, welcome to another week's Self-Publishing News, and with a certain inevitability, the very first time I am actually on leave in the summer, and I have come down with a delightfully rough throat, so apologies for that. It is kind of spooky how that happens, which is a perfect clichéd segue into the first story, which is the emergence of apparently a new subgenre of horror stroke dark academia, I guess you could call it, which is known as Summerween.
Summerween Trends on BookTok
So this apparently is the latest portmanteau, and I'm sure you can guess it's a portmanteau of summer and Halloween, that is trending on BookTok. And it is, from what I can tell … Well, first of all, the name comes from an animated series I will confess I had never heard of called Gravity Falls, which is from the 2010s.
And it is a blend of Gothic and bright light. So it's the kind of thing, sort of warm summer, bright evenings, but you want that sort of feeling of Poe. If you want that around where I live, you simply go outside and get yourself surrounded by suitable numbers of ravens and crows. But you can also do it by reading this kind of fiction, which has this light, summery feel, but also a Gothic, dark feel.
It's the kind of thing that makes me think of one of the films that really, really frightened the bejesus out of me as a child, and that was Picnic at Hanging Rock. I have no idea why, but it was, I think, this combination of bright summer, everything feels great, but actually beneath the surface, there are all these sorts of scary Gothic things going on.
I guess more recently you might think of obviously things like Midsommar and I guess Saltburn, that kind of stuff where everything seems to happen in the daylight, but nonetheless it is kind of spooky. So if you are thinking of writing something quickly to appeal to a seasonal readership, there we go.
Kobo Returns to Big Box Stores
You have your answer, which is Summerween. So where might you sell such books? Well, that brings us to the next piece of news, which is around Kobo and the Kobo eReader. So this has been absent from big box US bookstores since 2024, when a deal to have the eReader stocked in Walmart came to an end.
It has just been announced that Rakuten Kobo will have its Kobo eReaders stocked in Best Buy, and that is already happening, and it is looking to capitalize on the fact that the Kobo eReader is coupled with the Libby app to make it the eReader of choice for digital library readers.
Amazon Rips Up Rare Books to Train AI
So there we go. The Kobo is back in big box shops. So yes, some good news for eReaders from that point of view. And that brings us to Amazon. So Amazon has obviously been — it is the big story that has been in the news, whether you are looking at the book-related news or the non-book-related news.
The thing that everyone seems to be talking about is Amazon ripping books up and using them to train its AI. This comes after a report from 404 Media, which basically put some AirTags in books that it sold and found out that those books ended up in an Amazon facility where they rip books up page by page to scan them, and then they shred the books thereafter.
And it has been sort of mooted — I think it is probably beyond mooted, it has been realized — that some of the books that are ending up being destroyed in this way are actually really hard to find books. They are technically categorized as rare books, so they've been out of print many, many decades.
And obviously the reason that this is happening from the tech company's point of view is that they want their large language models to be based on the best possible material. That means going beyond what's available online, so a lot of these titles obviously aren't available online. They are only available in very hard to find print versions, and so tech companies are going out there finding these hard to get print versions, and then they are basically tearing the books up to scan them into AI, and this has caused the kind of reaction that you would imagine it would cause.
Dystopia Bounces Back on KDP
So that is one of the things Amazon's been doing. Another Amazon-related story, though, and this thanks to Jane Friedman. I'm not going to give too much detail 'cause she goes into a lot of detail in her Bottom Line. It is a paywalled newsletter, so I don't want to take away her material.
And she was talking to the person who runs K-lytics, which is, again, a paywalled set of reports. So if you want to find out the real in-depth, then do go and sign up to K-lytics. But there are some really, really interesting highlights about trends on KDP. And going back to Summerween, one of the trends, and this is something we've seen throughout 2026, is that dystopia is back.
So, darker titles are selling after having really plummeted. No one wanted to know about dystopias. No one wanted to know about really dark stuff as soon as the pandemic hit. But now those titles are bouncing back, and it is very much that sort of the darker end of romantasy, this sort of dystomance, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago. In general, horror titles are the thing that is growing at the moment.
So for those of us who write in that kind of area, it's sort of kind of exciting that not everything is cozy anymore, although cozy and lighter romance is definitely still doing okay. The other thing that was really, really interesting about this is the difference in representation of self-published titles on either side of the Atlantic.
So in the US, in terms of the top 100 titles of the previous year, they found that 38 percent of those are self-published. In the UK, it's just 16 percent. So that is a really, really interesting divide, and there was some speculation as to why that might be. The speculation seemed to be primarily that this is not down to indie authors, but down to what publishers do.
And in the UK, the speculation is that publishers are much better at moving digital titles than they are in the US. I'm not sure that that necessarily feels like something that I would say digital publishers are really great at over here in the UK. Maybe it's just that they're really, really, really less good at it in the US.
And there may be all sorts of reasons for that, but it is interesting that it seems to be that there is much more of an indie dominance in the charts in the US. And that was, as I say, 38 percent self-published titles in the top 100, only 32 percent from Big Five publishers, and the rest sort of from smaller indie publishers.
Ingram Launches Covered for Trade Advance Copies
And doing the maths, that means that of those three groups, self-published authors are the most highly represented. That really does seem positive. So what can you do if you want to increase your coverage in the UK? Well, one of the things that is becoming available is a new platform from Ingram.
This is called Covered. And Covered is … Basically, it's a digital advance copy offering that is solely aimed at industry professionals. So you won't get influencers signing up to get their galleys through it like you can with NetGalley. Ingram has got a network of, it says, 50,000 booksellers and librarians who are going to be able to look at copies of books in advance and order copies in advance.
And yeah, that's quite a large network of people who are just looking to buy and not necessarily to get a freebie. And if you are an IngramSpark author, then you will be able to participate in this. So there will be a portal where IngramSpark customers can set up a direct pay option so that bookstores and libraries can buy direct from authors.
And that will therefore make it available to, as I say, all self-publishing authors who are publishing through IngramSpark. So that is some positive news to finish the week with. I very much look forward to speaking to you again at the same time next week, probably, or hopefully, with a little less of a frog in my throat.
With that, I will get back to some honey and lemon and some Summerween reading, and thank you very much.
