On this week’s Self-Publishing News podcast, ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway warns indie authors about a major PHP vulnerability affecting WordPress.org sites and WooCommerce, and explains what to ask your web host. He then covers three platforms with new money-making options: Spotify’s new Memberships for podcasters, Kindle Unlimited passing $5 billion in author payouts, and YouTube’s plan to launch an audiobook offering in 2027.
Listen to the Podcast: PHP Flaw Threatens WordPress Author Sites
Show Notes
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 as we build up to the spooky season. And happy Halloween to everybody. There has been a lot in the news this week about a lot of our tried and trusted platforms. But if you have been anything like my day job has been, and probably lots of your day jobs and also your indie author life, then you will have spent a lot of the last week or so thinking, acting on, worrying about the PHP vulnerability that was announced back on, I believe, the 21st of October.
PHP Flaw Puts WordPress Author Sites at Risk
So I will say a little bit about it. I will ensure that Howard has a link to the WordPress official security release and patch update on it, because that is what is going to affect people the most. So obviously, I am not a technical expert. I’m not an IT person. But this is major news because it affects apparently 70% of the internet.
So PHP is, as I understand it, a programming language that is used on 70% of the internet. And what has happened is that it seems we have been made aware that a lot of people are aware of a vulnerability within PHP which, if it were exploited, would enable hackers to send requests direct to people’s websites and access the files on those websites, and even possibly on servers, without needing a password, without needing a login.
So this would affect anyone who holds sensitive customer information, anyone who holds that kind of data on their customers, on their readers, and so on. And it is particularly of interest to us as indie authors because one of the major affected sites is WordPress. So in particular, WordPress.org websites and WooCommerce, which is a plugin that a lot of us will use.
So almost straight away, WordPress brought out a patch for this. But for those of you who have WordPress.org websites that are independently hosted, there are things that it is recommended you do to ensure that that patch has been installed and therefore your security is back to where it should be, and your data, and your customer data for those of you who have such, is as secure as it possibly can be.
It is recommended that people contact their web host directly and ask them, in respect of every WordPress site that they have, for confirmation in writing of the version of PHP that they use. And this is because the vulnerability affects prior versions to version 8.2. Versions 8.2 and more recent do not have the vulnerability, I believe.
For those versions, 8.2 and prior, a patch has been issued, and you should get written confirmation that that patch has been made active. So, as I say, that’s my understanding of the position. I will link to the official advice from WordPress for Howard in the show notes.
Spotify Launches Memberships for Podcasters
But on to sort of happier and more usual kinds of news. We have seen in the last week and a bit quite a lot of updates from the platforms that we know and love. So we will start with Spotify and the launch of Spotify Memberships. So Spotify Memberships was launched on October the 20th. And they are part of a suite of tools that Spotify is trying to roll out to creators to help increase the number of ways you can make money through your creation on Spotify.
And it is particularly for podcasts. And it works as you would imagine memberships would work, that listeners can pay for special content, and you can decide what special content you want to offer. So they pay a monthly fee, and creators can offer a range of content types. The Spotify announcement lists these as exclusive audio or video, bonus episodes, fewer ads, early access, access to a show’s archive, or all of the above.
And it feels as though it is open to a wide range of podcasts. So eligibility is for those who have, and again I quote, “Three published episodes, 100 listeners or viewers, and 100 consumption hours on Spotify in the previous 30 days.” So if that applies to your podcast, then you would be eligible to sign up, and Memberships is being rolled out initially across 34 markets.
And those include the UK, US, Canada, and Australia. So very much something to have a look at if you are a podcaster out there.
Kindle Unlimited Passes $5 Billion in Author Payouts
And talking of platforms, Kindle. So Kindle Unlimited — thanks to Mark Williams for pointing this out — Kindle Unlimited in October is going to pass the $5 billion mark in terms of its payout to authors. The October payout alone is going to be around $66 million. And one of the things that I found interesting, going back through the archive, so I found a piece on Amazon celebrating one of the anniversaries. It was celebrating $2.2 billion paid out, and that was written in November 2022.
So at that point, Kindle Unlimited was 11 years old. It came out at the end of 2011. So in those first 11 years, the payouts were $2.2 billion. And it has been $2.8 billion in the fewer than four years since then. So it really is a mark that this is a large amount of money, and it is an amount of money that is still increasing at a rapid rate.
And we see this again and again in writers’ surveys, that however a lot of people make their money, a huge amount of indie authors make a large amount of their income through Kindle Unlimited. So it continues to be something that many, many authors rely on for a large portion of their income. And great to celebrate $5 billion paid out by the end of this month.
YouTube Plans an Audiobook Offering for 2027
So that’s Kindle, that’s Spotify, and we will end with YouTube. So YouTube, in a rather strange announcement, is announcing that it is entering the audiobook fray. And I say it’s a rather strange announcement because there are a lot of audiobooks already on YouTube.
Some of them have been put there directly by authors. Many, many, many of them have not. And a lot of them are, as I put it, in the column of questionable provenance. But they are now making this official, that from 2027 there is going to be an audiobook offering. It is going to be quite possibly part of their premium subscription.
There is very little news on what form it will actually take or how creators will actually get paid for it. But it is nonetheless the case that you might be able to make money from audiobooks on YouTube through some way other than advertising alone, by tapping into subscription money from viewers and listeners direct.
So that’s three platforms with new offerings coming out, all of which could benefit us as authors, to give us something more positive to think about as we wrestle with the remaining fixes to our websites. And with that, I wish you all a very, very happy Halloween. I look forward to seeing you on the other side, well, in the depths of winter or summer, depending on where in the world you are.
Thank you.
