self-publishing news

Canva Unveils AI Tools

Canva Unveils AI Tools, Including Image Generation; Law Professors Challenge Meta’s Copyright Use: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

This week’s AI news focuses on two issues of great interest to indie authors. I will start with Canva. In part because I haven’t talked about them for a while. And partly because this news picks up from the last time I did talk about them. Which was last year, when they made a lot of people unhappy by increasing the price of its Pro offering from a flat $120 per year for a team license to $10 a month per team member.
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Authors Call For Compensation

Authors Call for Compensation as Meta Faces Backlash Over AI Training with Pirated Books: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

The “Meta used pirated copies of my books to train its AI” scandal is most definitely not going away. A recap for anyone who hasn’t been on the internet since last Thursday: The Atlantic published a search facility for the aggregated piracy site LibGen. Writers have been using it and finding out that their titles are on the list (including two of mine). Meta gave the go-ahead from the highest level to use LibGen to train its LLaMA AI. Allegedly, that highest level knew it was a piracy site. Now, those writers call for compensation (inter alia!).
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Bluesky

Bluesky Makes Tracking Traffic Easier; Digital Publishing Award Goes Global: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

This week’s round-up of smaller-scale stories begins with some news from the popular X alternative Bluesky. The platform is making it easier to track incoming links from its feed with its go.bsky.app. What this means is that if you want to run analytics to find out where visitors to your articles, stories, or pages are coming from, you can easily track anything that comes from Bluesky.
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Books On LibGen

Authors Discover Their Books on LibGen, Raise Alarm Over AI Training: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

You’ve probably seen it all over your social media feed this week: light blue rectangular backgrounds with lists of books. Most of these posts feature the writers’ own titles, accompanied by commentary that often hits harder than anything in the books themselves. These are lists of books on LibGen, a piracy-linked site that’s back in the spotlight after a recent article provided a searchable database—allowing authors to see exactly which of their works are available there.
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Unbound

Unbound Goes into Administration, Leaving Writers Wondering About Payments: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

This is a sad column to write. But perhaps not an unexpected one, given how little the company in question has featured in these articles in the past few years. A decade ago, when Unbound was still a relatively new venture, I was very excited to see one of its titles, Richard Kingsnorth’s The Wake, on the Booker Prize longlist and Goldsmiths Prize shortlist. Sadly, that was to be a high-water mark for the venture, which went into administration last week.
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AI Wrote A Story

AI Wrote a Story; People Had Feelings! Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

AI has been writing things for a long time now. Whatever that means. For several years, large numbers of online articles have been produced by machines. And dabblings in poetry and fictional prose are hardly unheard of. But this week, OpenAI’s Sam Altman released something written by what he describes as “a new model that is good at creative writing.” He also stated he didn’t yet know how or where the model would be released, but of course, writers have had thoughts and feelings aplenty.
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Spotify For Authors

Spotify for Authors Expands with New Short Audiobook Program: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

Spotify has launched a new program aimed directly at indie authors. For a few months, I’ve been reporting on Spotify’s increasing appetite for courting indie authors. The Spotify for Authors platform has been adding tools. And recently, the streaming giant announced a deal with ElevenLabs to allow the firm’s AI-generated narration to be used for audiobooks, which indie authors could then upload through Spotify for Authors.
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Libro.fm

Libro.fm Sees Rapid Boom as Indie Bookstores Grow in Confidence: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

The article in Publishers Weekly, where I first came across this story, says that Libro.fm has a similar style to Bookshop.org (before I get too sanctimonious, I might add that a search reveals I said the same thing in an article in 2023). In actual fact, of course, Libro.fm has considerably more history than Bookshop.org. It’s also not “similar.” It’s actually Bookshop.org’s audiobook partner, enabling listeners to buy audiobooks from independent retailers.
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Spotify Focuses On Audiobooks

Spotify Focuses on Audiobooks, Kindle Sales Surge: Self-Publishing with ALLi Featuring Dan Holloway

On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway discusses how Spotify focuses on audiobooks with new tools for authors and its first full year of profitability. Kindle device sales hit their highest levels in over a decade, suggesting a shift in e-book reading habits. Plus, London Book Fair is just a month away, with key sessions on accessibility, sustainability, and attracting new readers.
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