On this episode of Self-Publishing with ALLi, Dan Holloway covers four stories: a new EU tariff that will affect authors shipping books directly to European readers; The Economist's striking data showing book publishing volumes have doubled since ChatGPT launched in 2022; the Commonwealth Short Story Prize awarding its top prize to the very story accused of AI authorship; and the relaunch of Simon and Schuster's Pocket Books imprint, which is specifically targeting successful indie and hybrid authors for a romance-first print list launching in January 2027.
Listen to the Podcast: EU Adds Tariff on Book Imports
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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 and welcome to another week's Self-Publishing News, and it's a very exciting week. Not just because here in Oxford the Bad Girl Books indie bookstore opened — the bookstore dedicated to romantasy books, throwing its arms wide open to indie authors and generally doing all kinds of good things. But also because we have European Union financial matters in the news, and nothing gets me more excited than that. It feels like a throwback to more innocent times before everyone got caught up in AI.
EU Scraps De Minimis Exemption — A €3 Tariff on Small Imports
This will affect anyone selling into the European Union — and that will be a lot of you who ship books direct. Until now there has been an exemption on tariffs for small items worth under €150, under what is called the de minimis principle. De minimis basically means ‘about things too small to bother about,' so nothing under €150 attracted a tariff. That exemption is now being scrapped. From now on, if you want to ship goods into the European Union — books, magazines, any other printed material, or anything else worth under €150 — there will be a €3 tariff to do so.
The main point of removing this exemption was to protect EU businesses from being flooded by giant shipping companies like Temu and Shein, which have been using cheap shipping to undercut local retailers. The European Union is worried about empty high streets and wants to protect local businesses. But publishers and others who ship small items have got caught in the crossfire. Publishing groups have united to call for an exemption for books, journals, magazines, and print media from this tariff, and there is a concerted industry effort to make that case.
This will obviously make it much less appealing for anyone to sell into the EU — following on the heels of VAT MOSS and all the other things that have made it harder to sell across borders. So if you are shipping into the European Union, be aware: it just got more complicated, and there are now more things that make it less attractive for readers there to buy directly from you.
The Economist's AI Publishing Graph — and the Commonwealth Prize Winner
And now — using the economy as a segue — let's get to the big graph from The Economist that has been doing the rounds. This fills in the detail behind the figure we've been hearing about all year: that an extra million books were published in 2025, most of them self-published and most of those AI-generated.
The Economist has produced a series of graphs, one of which shows the correlation between the rising number of books published and the release of ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022. The number of books published per month has essentially doubled — from around 150,000 to around 300,000 — over the three-year period from the end of 2022 to the end of 2025. The Economist believes it can demonstrate this is down to AI-generated content, somewhat ironically by using AI detection tools to show it.
This comes in the same week that the Commonwealth Short Story Prize — which has been mired in controversy for about three weeks now — has finally announced its overall winner: Jamee Nazir, for ‘The Serpent in the Grove.' This is the story that caused all the original controversy, because when it was announced as a regional winner, Pangram — the same AI detection tool The Economist is using — was wielded by armchair detectives across the internet as supposed proof that the story was AI-generated.
That caused much hand-wringing about competition rules. It caused Granta to dissociate itself from publishing deals with independent organizations, wanting editorial control rather than risk being caught up in any AI controversy. The prize organizers, however, contacted all regional winners and went through a rigorous due diligence process — looking at very high-tech things such as drafts and the kind of material writers naturally produce as part of the writing process. They were satisfied that all entrants had written their own stories, and awarded the first prize to the very story that had been accused of being AI-generated. Which is a fairly pointed reminder that claims based on AI detection tools should be taken with a pinch of salt.
The rest of The Economist's graphs are behind their paywall, so that is probably why you haven't seen as much of them. They cover things like lawsuit filings, research papers, and coding. But one graph that should be getting us excited is about the music industry: around 75,000 AI-generated songs are now being uploaded daily to the platform Deezer, up from around 10,000 per day at the start of 2025. Almost an order of magnitude change in one year.
What the research found in relation to that is perhaps the most striking figure: 97 percent of listeners could not discern the AI-generated content. Back when people were claiming AI would never be able to produce what audiences actually wanted to consume, that argument has long since flown. We are now at a point where only 3 percent of people appear to be able to distinguish between AI-generated and human-generated creative content.
Pocket Books Returns — Targeting Successful Indie Authors
We won't leave it there on that rather sobering note. Let's end with the relaunch of Pocket Books, the Simon and Schuster imprint. Pocket Books used to publish mass-market paperbacks — those small books you'd find on newspaper stands everywhere, tucked into jacket pockets. As you'll know from this column, mass-market paperbacks are functionally no longer a thing. You might find the occasional one, but they're not really sold or catered for by shipping companies in the way they once were. Pocket Books went out of business as a mass-market publisher as a result.
Now it is coming back, and with a very specific purpose: signing successful indie authors. Simon and Schuster are targeting two to three titles a month, launching in January 2027. In their own words, they want to engage with what they call ‘forward-thinking writers, including best-selling indie and hybrid authors looking to amplify their reach using our unparalleled strength in marketing, publicity, and print distribution.' It will be a romance-first imprint but open to authors wanting to put their print books through a traditional publisher.
This takes us back more than a decade to when Amanda Hocking and Hugh Howey were breaking the mold — achieving huge success with self-published ebooks, then taking up offers to put their print books through traditional presses to take away some of the paperwork and take advantage of what traditional publishers still do well for print. If you are thinking about becoming a hybrid author, or if you are already a best-selling indie and the idea of having traditional distribution and marketing for your print titles appeals, Pocket Books is worth looking at.
And with that I will leave you, and very much look forward to speaking to you again at the same time next week. Thank you.
