On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway covers strong UK audio growth, with audiobook downloads up 31 percent in 2024, and rising fiction sales led by romance. He previews a major London conference on copyright, AI, and shadow libraries, and reports that Mastodon has joined other platforms in adopting anti-scraping clauses. Finally, he looks at the apparent collapse of TikTok’s publishing venture, 8th Note Press, leaving some authors without sales or rights to their work.
Listen to the Podcast: Audiobook Downloads Surge
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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 from a hot and sticky Oxford at the end of a heat wave.
We have all kinds of things for you this week from a fascinating looking conference in London to interesting or possibly disappointing news about TikTok, and lots more encouraging news about audiobooks.
Upcoming Conference on Publishing Rights Taking Place in London
Dan Holloway: Let's start with, on the 3rd of July, the Publisher's Licensing Services in the UK is going to be holding a day long conference in London. It's free to attend.
I am expecting to be there, and we'll report on what's going on, but I very much hope to see some of you there. If you do see me there, then come and say hello and who knows, maybe I'll try and bring some way of recording little snippets that we can include in that week's podcast.
The subject of the conference is, as you would expect from a group called Publishers Licensing Services, it's all about rights and rights holders. So, they're going to be talking all things, copyright and licensing, and in particular, copyright and AI.
There is a series of interesting speakers who are leading figures in the field. There are all sorts of very interesting looking panels. The one that really caught my eye is one that's on shadow libraries. Shadow libraries, of course you will remember, were in the news very prominently just a few weeks ago when it was revealed in the AI lawsuit against Meta that Meta had been using one of the most infamous shadow libraries, Library Genesis or LibGen, to train its AI allegedly on the contents of that shadow library, which it may are made up of works, not all of which have been included with the owner's consent. In fact, a large number of which are basically links to pirated copies.
A lot of us discovered that our works actually were contained in these shadow libraries, and therefore they may well have been used to train AI.
So anyway, an interesting session is going to be looking at what role shadow libraries play in the ongoing landscape around rights and AI.
Social Media Platforms Tell AI to Stop Scraping Content
Dan Holloway: I think the only other thing news wise that we had on AI was a growth in the number of social media platforms that are including ‘do not scrape clauses' in their terms and conditions. Mastodon is the latest to do this. So, on their Mastodon.social server, obviously it's a decentralized network, so not all instances of Mastodon are on the Mastodon.social server. I think I've got that technically right. But the ones that are, it is in their terms and conditions, basically telling bots not to scrape. So, what you post on there will not find its way into AI training.
That's the AI news from this week.
Audiobook Market Continues to Grow
Dan Holloway: Moving on to audiobooks. We've seen a lot of interesting figures on audiobook growth recently from the US and from Spotify.
The latest set of figures for the boom in 2024 comes from the UK Publishers Association, and it has found that audio downloads in 2024 were up 31% over 2023. So, that's obviously massive growth. That's not just double-digit growth; that's big double-digit growth.
Interestingly, audiobooks made up almost half of the digital market, and I've done some math around the fact that audio downloads up 31%, the digital market is up 17%, eBooks still make up more than half of that market.
So actually, eBooks have been growing at a pretty good rate too. I make that somewhere in the medium single figures of growth, which for a market as established as eBooks is not bad at all.
Overall, the biggest growth has come from fiction, and this is over digital and print. So, fiction sales are up 18% and for the first time have topped the $1 billion or £1 billion figure for the UK market.
That obviously is huge, and one of the big sectors that's driving that it will come as no surprise is romance in all its forms.
To celebrate romance in all its forms, I found a really interesting story this week on London's first ever romance-only bookstore called, rather delightfully, Saucy Books, and it has something called a Smut Hut, which is exactly what you would imagine; it's a room reminiscent of some of those shops that many of us may remember from our youth where there was a section at the back that was just for grownups.
So yeah, all is going well in the world of romance, so that is very good news for those of you who write such things.
TikTok's Publishing Woes
Dan Holloway: Things are not going so well, however, whatever genre you write, if you decided to put your eggs in one of the TikTok baskets.
TikTok obviously is a massive driving factor in the sale of books. BookTok is cited again and again by booksellers and publishers as fuelling growth, and TikTok itself works closely with influencers, enabling influencers to work with brands of their choice; it does so through the likes of the TikTok shop.
Last year, at the end of last year, TikTok's owner ByteDance announced that it was going to be capitalizing on the success of the BookTok phenomenon by launching its very own press. It was going to be called Eighth Note Press, and it would basically use all the data that TikTok have got about what kind of things sell to their readers.
So, you would have a win for TikTok because it's pre-sifted through its own algorithm, so it knows what books are going to do well, and you would have a win for writers because they would be exposed to an even larger chunk of a huge and avidly hungry reading market in TikTok.
It seemed great, but things have not been going so well.
Jane Friedman has done some great reporting on this and has found that actually authors are unhappy. One of the particular examples she gives is of an author whose publication date was repeatedly pushed back. The author in question had removed their books from Kindle Unlimited, thinking that they were going to have a shiny deal with Eighth Note Press that was going to get them in front of all kinds of avid readers on TikTok.
The publishing publication date basically didn't happen when it should have done. I think I understand that it still hasn't happened, and as a result, the author in question has no sales from TikTok and no income from Kindle Unlimited. So, the sales tap and income tap was turned off altogether, and it sucks. So, this is not a necessarily a great way to treat authors.
In this case, the author found that by the time they got their book back on Kindle Unlimited, the wave of popularity for the genre they were writing in had been ridden and their sales struggled to reach the levels they had been at.
So, this is obviously a big problem, and it seems now, The Bookseller are seeming to say that Eighth Note is indeed just shutting down. I think that's basically six months after it started, it is now shuttering. It has not confirmed this, nor has Byte Dance, but it seems that authors have heard and are in negotiations to get the rights back to their works.
So, that's not good news to finish with. It goes to show that some things aren't necessarily the win-win they seem to be, and that in some cases authors might do better to stick entirely with the indie option.
With that, I will leave you and go and try and cool myself down. I look forward to speaking to you again this time next week. Thank you.
