Surviving Indie Publishing with Susan Kaye Quinn (IndieRecon Facebook Page Chat)

I love new prizes, especially reporting on new prizes that are open to indie authors. And this week sees a prize that both is open to indies and carries a large prize. The Libraro Prize carries a winning package of £30,000 with a £20,000 marketing budget thrown in for the winning book, which will be self-published by Hachette.

On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway opens with news that early bird tickets are now available for the Indie Author Lab, taking place alongside London Book Fair in March. He then looks at TikTok’s launch of short-form serial video drama as a new outlet for episodic storytelling, before turning to fresh legal developments as major publishers move to intervene in the ongoing lawsuit against Google’s Gemini AI, signaling a push toward collective licensing talks.

AI lawsuits are in the news again. And it's not Anthropic this week, but the large ongoing lawsuit against Google's Gemini. It takes the form of a motion to intervene, as I believe it's called (you can read the motion in question here to fill yourselves in). The motion is brought by two major publishing groups, Cengage and Hachette. It requests, as I understand it, that the two publishing groups join the case brought by writers and illustrators in 2023 and currently before the Northern California judiciary, intervening as class representatives.