On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway reports on the Selfies Awards opening to indie authors worldwide, marking a major shift for one of the most respected indie-only prizes. He also highlights a new Publishing Perspectives survey asking authors, readers, and publishers what they really want from book prizes, looks at Libro.fm’s new annual audiobook subscription model supporting indie bookstores, and notes developments in artist basic income schemes and fresh details emerging from the Anthropic lawsuit.
Listen to the Podcast: Selfies Awards Go Global
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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 Self-Publishing News. And today we are talking mainly about prizes. Everyone loves a prize, especially one that we're able to enter, stand a chance of winning, and that is worth winning.
One of the most celebrated prizes in the indie scene over the past few years has been the Selfies Awards. The Selfies were started about a decade ago — I remember being at the first ceremony at London Book Fair, thrilled that ALLi's very own Jane Davis was the winner there, and I've been reporting on them ever since. They are awards set up specifically for indie authors, celebrating the very best of indie publishing.
One of the interesting things about the Selfies is that they specifically look for quality. They're not voter-based, they're not a popularity contest — they run on the lines of other literary awards and are very much a celebration of the pinnacle of indie achievement.
What's new this year is that they are no longer simply a UK-based award. They are now open globally. Submissions are accepted from all authors internationally who have self-published — that is, who have acted as both author and publisher — in any one of the three current categories: adult fiction, children's books, or memoir. Books need to have been published between January 1st last year and December 31st.
On the timeline: entries are open until March 31st. The shortlist will be announced on May 19th, and the winners will be announced on July 1st. Dates I will have in my diary. I very much look forward to reporting on the winners, wherever in the world they are from. Great news that an award dedicated to indie authors is opening itself up to even more indie authors across the world.
Publishing Perspectives Launches a Survey on Book Prizes
If the Selfies isn't quite for you, or if you have other strong feelings about prizes, that brings me to my second story. Publishing Perspectives has launched a major survey which essentially asks: what do you want from book prizes? This is looking specifically at international prizes — prizes open to people in more than one country.
It's an interestingly constructed survey. Broadly, what they want to know is: what are the high-profile prizes out there doing well? What are they not doing well? If new prizes were created, what would they ideally do that existing prizes don't? And which of the smaller or less recognised prizes actually matter to the people who matter?
Whether you're a reader, a publisher, an author, or all of those things — as most of us are — this survey wants to hear from you. I've been through it. It asks some very interesting questions: it lists many current prizes and asks you to select the ones you've heard of, asks what prizes could do to appeal more to you as an author, how well you feel prizes support you, and invites you to add other prizes that matter to you. The Selfies, for example, is not on the list — so that's something one could helpfully bring to their attention.
Libro.fm Launches an Annual Subscription Plan
Libro.fm — the audiobook subscription service — has now rolled out an annual subscription plan. For those who don't know it, Libro.fm operates on the same model as, and in partnership with, Bookshop.org: you buy an audiobook through them and a slice of the price goes to a local bookstore of your choosing. So it's very much designed to help indie bookstores wherever you are based in the world — exactly the same model as Bookshop.org.
Until now they haven't had an annual subscription plan. Now they have. It costs $149.99 in the US and £94.99 in the UK, and for that you get twelve credits a year. There is a limited-time offer of a thirteenth credit for those who subscribe early. All your credits roll over — you don't get one credit a month that expires; you get twelve credits a year to use as you wish.
Basic Income for Artists: Ireland Succeeds, Scotland Follows
A couple of other things of interest. First, and this is a story that's been covered a lot on the BBC in the UK: the Irish Basic Income for the Arts scheme. It launched in 2022, giving around $1,500 — approximately £1,100 or €1,300 — annually to 2,000 artists. That was a pilot scheme, it's still going, it was deemed a great success, and it is now being rolled out on a permanent basis from this year.
And Scotland is now looking at introducing a similar scheme because they've been so impressed with the Irish results. The scheme was open to artists of all kinds, including writers and, I believe, indie authors. There were 2,000 places and applicants were selected by lottery. I will report on the details of how the full permanent scheme will operate when I have them. But it's an interesting development: this is very much a scheme that has been seen to succeed, and it is not dead in the water.
Anthropic and Book Purchases for AI Training
And finally, on the subject of the Anthropic lawsuit — a very interesting post, and thank you to Jane Friedman for the link. It suggests that Anthropic haven't only been using pirate libraries. We know they have been using pirate libraries — that's what the lawsuit was all about. If you remember, the judge deemed they needed to pay settlements not because they were using copyrighted work per se, but because they had obtained that copyrighted work from pirate libraries.
But it appears they have also been buying books at retail price — and may still be doing so. This is something the judgment didn't stop and didn't deem problematic. It seems they may have purchased as many as a million titles at retail price, used them for training the Claude language model, and then destroyed the physical books. This was considered fair use by the judge in the original case.
What is interesting to me is the rationale they gave: they want not just titles that have been selected by critics as the pinnacle of culture, but all titles, in order to make their language model representative of the full breadth of published work. They did add a caveat, however, saying they were not particularly targeting self-published books. There are so many layers in that story, so many things one could take issue with — and the comment about self-published authors is one where one could take many of those issues. I will simply leave you with that to ponder. There are so many hobby horses I could get onto that I'm not sure which one to choose, so I'll leave it there.
With that, I look forward to speaking to you again at the same time next week. Thank you.
