Spotify Launches Mental Health Fiction Award; Meta Halted AI Licensing Talks: Self-Publishing with ALLi Featuring Dan Holloway

On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway explores Spotify’s new $10,000 mental health fiction award, the fallout from the Paris AI Summit, and surprising revelations about Meta’s stalled AI licensing talks with publishers. He also looks at the latest Kindle policy change that limits how readers can back up their e-books, raising concerns about digital ownership.

Note: The story about the change to Kindle's terms and conditions, which Dan mentions at the end, has developed considerably since its passing reference in this podcast. It is now the subject of much discussion among writers and readers alike. ALLi has been in touch with Amazon, and Dan has more information, which will be in tomorrow’s column. To clarify the change: Starting February 26, the ability to download books to a computer and transfer them to a Kindle via USB will be removed. However, you can still read books you previously downloaded, and you can continue transferring books across devices with Kindle reading capability via Wi-Fi.

Listen to the Podcast: Spotify Launches Mental Health Fiction Award

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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 a very busy feeling week in self-publishing news, with all sorts of news about AI, Spotify, Paris, and all kinds of other stuff, Meta, Blue Sky; all kinds of things that I hope Howard is pleased with me for stuffing in for SEO at the start, before I say I am absolutely freezing here in Oxford.

So, it's lovely to feel the warmth of this audience to warm the cockles on a cold, late afternoon in February.

Spotify Launches Mental Health Fiction Prize

I will start with the competition, and that's because it's great to start with some good news. So, Spotify has launched a $10,000 prize for mental health fiction. So, something that's really positive.

Spotify by JD Impact Award, it's called, and it's launched through The Blacklist, which some of you may know as being the place where the best unmade scripts in Hollywood are available for agents and studios to look at. They do all sorts of other things as well with the idea of bringing great, undiscovered works to a discovered audience, so that great things can happen to them.

I first found out about The Blacklist, I have to confess, when I found out that it was where the script of the current Mark Wahlberg shocker, Flight Risk, had been languishing. That's not necessarily a great advert for it, but I am sure that you can do better than Flight Risk.

If you can, and if you write fiction about mental health and the mental health experience, and in their words, normalizing mental health experience, challenging stereotypes, and showcasing help seeking and help giving narratives, then they want to hear from you.

Five manuscripts will each receive a $10,000 grant from the award. So, do check that out.

AI Paris Summit Fails to Address Rights Holders’ Concerns

The biggest story was the Paris AI Summit. Obviously, I spoke a little bit about that last week. It was coming up at that point. Everyone got together for, I think it's the third big, global AI summit.

Publishers had got really uptight beforehand. They had been part of a joint creatives statement calling for all kinds of measures on transparency, on making sure that if AI platforms are going to be trained on the work of creative artists, from whatever strand of the creative arts, that only ever happened through official licensing agreements with authors’ consent. They were also calling for regulation and teeth for those measures, and you will probably have seen in the news that none of those things was in the statement.

Going beyond that, even what was in the statement wasn't actually signed off by the UK and U.S. So, there are lots of signatories. I think there are something like 70 signatories to the statement, but the UK and the U.S. aren't among them. So, that's obviously a big gap.

And the statement's key priorities, that's all it actually outlined, was what the countries involved considered to be the key priorities for AI. So, there are things like AI accessibility, ensuring AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, helping AI innovation in AI thrive, encouraging AI deployment that positively shapes the future of work, making it sustainable for people and the planet, and reinforcing national/international cooperation and governance.

So, there are kind of things there that touch on the arts. In particular, the future of work that kind of touches on what we do ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy, that kind of touches on what we do. But the bit that actually referred to copyright, intellectual property rights, protection of consumers and intellectual property rights is at the end of a very long list of things in the ‘also' section.

That in a way sends all the message that you need. So, that was the big story.

Transcripts Reveal Meta in Talks with Publishers in 2023

Then I actually came across something really interesting on TechCrunch about Meta, and this feels to me like it's a much bigger story, though I haven't really seen it covered in the industry media.

So, I'm not 100 percent sure why that is, but anyway, you're hearing it covered here, and that is that court transcripts from the current case involving Meta show that they stopped speaking to publishers about licensing rights to AI, or rights to train its AI on the work of writers, back in 2023, which is something that's really interesting, because obviously it's really recent, but it was actually quite a long time ago in terms of the history of AI.

So, early April 2023. It was talking to publishers and then it stopped talking to publishers, and the reason it stopped talking to publishers, according to Sy Chowdhury, who is the leader at Meta's AI partnership initiatives, is that publishers, especially fiction publishers, actually turned out not to have the rights that they wanted.

So, they were asking publishers for rights to use the books that those publishers published, and it turned out that publishers didn't have those rights, and that was because publishers hadn't talked to their authors. They thought that it was going to take too long for publishers to get around to talking to their authors, and so they put on pause this program to ask for rights.

Obviously, there's a huge amount to unpack in that.

First, obviously, being indies, we don't have this weird relationship that we've seen authors having with publishers, where we have to negotiate different rights with publishers, and then it's the publishers who negotiate with the AI platforms. So, we do use intermediaries. So, we use platforms like Spotify, like Draft2Digital, Amazon, so on, but we don't have to go through a publisher.

Also, a lot of authors have been not necessarily 100 percent happy with the transparency of publishers around negotiations, and April 2023 feels really early. I wonder how many authors realized their publishers were in these talks with Meta before early April 2023, and what they would have said if they'd found that out, and what they would have said about the fact that they might have missed out on a massive payday. Their books may have been used anyway, because companies may have got fed up with talking to publishers and decided to use the books anyway, so they might have missed out on paydays, and on transparency like that.

It feels like this is a conversation that publishers and authors are probably going to be having quite a lot when authors find this out and wonder, why weren't publishers talking to us about AI rights back in 2022/23.

Really interesting.

Kindle Changes Terms of Service

Finally, a little bit of news to finish with about Kindle, because we've been talking about Kindle a lot recently and I came across this on YouTube. Kindle have changed their terms of service.

It seems this is a small or seemingly small change, but what it means is that readers will no longer be able to back up Kindle books to other devices from the end of this month.

This, as users have been pointing out, makes a big difference to how you can read your Kindle books, to what it means to own a Kindle book or to license a Kindle book, if you can't back it up onto your computer to read offline or on your browser on your computer, but you have to read it through the kindle app on a particular device.

Again, it's less freedom for readers. It feels less like you actually are buying a book and more like you are tying yourself into an ecosystem, and a lot of readers seem to be quite unhappy about that, and I can see where they're coming from.

This is one of the reasons I still buy paper books of the books I really like, because of ownership. Not necessarily because I prefer reading in paper, but because I want to know that if there's a book I love and I want to come back to it, I can pick it up off the shelf any time and read it, because I do read books a lot. If I like them, I read them four, five, six times.

The thought that you might switch on a device one day and it's just gone is not something that fills me with joy, as Marie Kondo would say.

What better place to leave it for the week than ending with some Kondoism. So, I will leave it there. I will enjoy the fact I am now thoroughly warmed up and go back to Oxford, and see you next week for some more self-publishing news, and then I hope to see some of you in London in a couple of weeks’ time. Thank you very much and speak soon.