Top Indie Author Advice Panel: JOANNA PENN, RACHEL ABBOTT, MARK DAWSON, STEENA HOLMES, CJ LYONS, MARK MCGUINESS, NICK STEPHENSON

It's a tale as old as, well, the early days of Kindle if not "time." For some indie authors it's a dream come true. For some, it's a patronizing/cynical gesture. For yet others, it's an invaluable extra string to a business bow that they can flex perfectly autonomously. And for publishers, it's a cash cow, on paper (pun intended) at least.

My ALLi author guest this episode is Diane Hatz. Diane spent years in the music industry, working at major and indie record companies, managing a band, and co-founding a fanzine on The Who that ended up in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Years later, she drew on those surreal experiences and turned them into fiction. After decades of putting off her dream of being an author, she published a four-book series in five years. 

On this episode of Self-Publishing with ALLi, Dan Holloway reports on a revealing piece by Rakuten Kobo CEO Michael Tamblyn, who explains why Kobo rejected 45 percent of self-published submissions in 2025 — most of them suspected AI-generated — and frames the decision as a "book community first" choice over a "readers first" approach. Dan also returns to the Commonwealth Short Story Prize controversy, where organizers have taken a strikingly different and very human approach to AI detection: gathering notes, drafts, and timestamped evidence from authors rather than relying on AI detection tools. He closes with news of a BISG and BookNet Canada survey on AI in publishing that indie authors in the US and Canada are encouraged to take part in.