On this week’s Self-Publishing News podcast, ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway shares what authors asked most at SelfPubCon 2026: newsletters and copyright, including why registering before the new year’s fee rise could save you money. He also covers Audible’s beta feature that lets listeners explore a story and talk to its characters, starting with Dracula. Then he reports that the plaintiffs in an OpenAI copyright case have dropped Tuhin Chakrabarty’s market dilution study, and that Books by People has launched to certify human-written books.
Listen to the Podcast: Audible Lets Listeners Talk to Dracula
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, and welcome to another week of self-publishing news, on the week after the ALLi SelfPubCon 2026, and a big thank you to all of those who attended. It was especially good to answer questions for those of you who were at the Ask the ALLi Team session on the Sunday afternoon. And I thought I just wanted to sort of tease out a couple of the key strands from that session.
SelfPubCon Questions Center on Newsletters and Copyright
So it was very much the case that there were themes to the questions that authors were asking there, and that feels newsworthy in and of itself, because it shows that there are things that are top of people's minds. The first was sort of marketing related, and that was around newsletters. So it is clearly the case that there are lots of people who are interested in how to run a newsletter, how to engage people with their newsletter, how to get people to sign up, and what to do with their newsletter, which is very interesting because it is something that I feel like I report on quite a lot in this column: updates from newsletter platforms, most notably, obviously, platforms like Substack, Patreon, Beehiiv.
There is quite a lot of news around those at the moment because they are trying to vie for the creative market and find ways to get people to sign up for their newsletters and to use their platforms. And so that feels like a nice sort of synchronicity that is emerging. And the other big theme that was around was copyright, and in particular the process around copyright.
So there were some interesting questions about copyright libraries, so libraries of legal deposit, but also around what exactly is the process of ensuring that your work is protected, basically, for future potential lawsuits and class actions in the light of the Anthropic case. So just to clarify on that, from what emerged from questions: first is that in theory your copyright is covered from the moment you create the work, but in practice it is not that simple, and in particular in the US, if you want to be sure, then you will need to register your work with the Copyright Office.
That is the bar that was set in the Anthropic judgment. That judgment doesn't necessarily set a binding precedent, but it is very much not going to be a surprise if future rulings also follow that. And around that question, because obviously, as I've reported here, fees are likely to be going up in the new year.
It is possible to register copyright before your work is published, and if you do that, then you will, over the next month or so, take advantage of fees as they are now rather than fees as they are going to be in the new year. And that is going to be around $20 a title that would save you if you were to register now, as well as obviously the protection that you would be afforded were any cases to be ruled on in the intervening months before you had otherwise registered.
So there we go. Lots of stuff to talk about around copyright and newsletters that seem to be uppermost in people's minds. So I thought I would just round up some of the subjects there.
Audible Lets Listeners Talk to Dracula
And that brings me to this week's news. And first of all, we have news from Audible. So Audible have been in the news quite a lot recently. They seem to be catching up with Spotify and the need to bring out some features, or at least promote the features that they have. And what they are bringing out now is some new features for readers. It is immersiveness, and that is a word that makes me shudder, because it is a word that has been used many times around the reading experience.
Most of those have been consigned, of course, to the history books. The likes of enhanced e-books, for anyone who remembers those. Every time they're launched, we are told the technology is different now. Now it can really make a difference. They are all so far in the history books, but we will see.
It might well be different this time. So Audible's new feature is basically going to do a couple of things. So the first is character guides. It's a visual sort of feature allowing you to explore around the story that you are reading. And it is also going to give you the chance to converse with the characters within the story.
So they're very keen to make the point that this is something that's done in collaboration with the people who actually create the work. So that is a good sign that they are following Spotify's book in making clear and transparent their connection with the people who actually do the creative stuff.
And it is in development. So it's currently being launched in beta in the US and the UK. They are looking for feedback, and they are going to develop and to iterate based on feedback. As I say, it's sort of an interactive thing that enables you to go and see, let's say, the landscape of the book that you are reading and act out stories with the characters.
So say, having conversations with the characters. In particular, this is launching with a very seasonally apt Dracula. So I don't know if you've noticed on YouTube as well, Audible are doing a lot about Dracula at the moment. There is this big superstar cast audiobook of Dracula coming out, and this is clearly in conjunction with that.
They want to make a big bloody splash in conjunction with Halloween. We will see what the reader uptake on this is when it's a story that is less well-loved and well-known than Dracula, but one to watch there from Audible.
Plaintiffs Drop Chakrabarty Study in OpenAI Case
There is a lot of AI news. I will skirt over most of it, but the stuff that is really relevant is the dropping of Tuhin Chakrabarty's paper on market dilution in the latest OpenAI copyright case. So you will remember that OpenAI are being sued by a number of authors. They brought a motion to have Chakrabarty's very viral piece on market dilution and AI-generated content struck off. They claimed that it had been funded by, or in some way connected to, the plaintiffs' legal company in the case, Susman Godfrey.
Chakrabarty has denied this. He has sworn in court that this is not true, that the Susman Godfrey-funded research referred to in his CV is another piece of research. Nonetheless, the plaintiffs in the case have now dropped that article and are not using it. This is particularly important because it is one of the big pieces of academic research that has suggested that there might be a market dilution effect from extra AI-generated titles, because those titles were commercially relevant, I think was the phrase that was used.
That is, readers were prepared to pay for them, and that might well have an effect of overall bringing down the price of e-books and therefore affecting the money that is available to human authors. So it was a really big piece of research that sought to show that, and therefore, if it is not going to be admissible in court, that is a big move in OpenAI's favor, I guess.
So it will still be worth watching. This is a case that is obviously seeking to show that there is a market dilution effect, but it is going to have to rely on other evidence.
Books by People Asks Authors to Prove Their Humanity
So that's one, and on a similar note comes the launch of Books by People. Yes, Books by People is the title of the platform. So this is another human-authored certification site that seeks to provide reassurance to readers that the books that carry a certification have indeed been written by humans. Some of the platforms that seek to do this at the moment rely on sworn affidavits or sworn statements by authors and content creators that they have not used AI.
This seeks to go one further by actively asking for evidence that this has been produced by humans, such as the kind of thing that we saw the Commonwealth Book Prize was looking for a while ago. So evidence of the process of writing, so notes on drafts and the creative process and so on, in an effort to provide greater reassurance to readers, because there clearly is a market still for readers who want to know that they are buying from human authors.
And with that, I will say goodbye to all my human authors out there. Wish you a very happy lead-up to spooky season, the launch of Dracula, and all those good Halloween things, with which I will be speaking to you at the same time next week. Thank you very much as always.
