Welcome to Indie Author Fringe: Orna Ross and David Penny

Like many writers I have an email newsletter (though unlike many of my more disciplined colleagues I am not fastidious about posting to it regularly). It is not the platform I use, but the highest-profile longform email newsletter platform is Substack. It is also the one that tries hardest to engage with the writing and publishing community in an endeavor to make the case that it is both a valuable tool for engaging with readers and a (financially) valuable medium for writing in and of itself.

On this week's Self-Publishing News podcast, ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway sorts through new Authors Guild clarifications on the Anthropic settlement: payments should still begin trickling through from November, but rights-reversion disputes are clouding who gets paid what, and authors whose rights reverted by August 10, 2022 are advised to claim their full 100 percent share. He also covers Spotify taking its ElevenLabs-powered audiobook creation tool out of beta for all US authors — free for five titles, with no exclusivity — and a new Frankfurter Buchmesse report finding that only 15 percent of audiobooks are made with no AI at all.

Before anything else, a point of clarification after reading Jane Friedman's incredibly in-depth roundup of all things Anthropic. The wrangling over lawyers' fees, she has said, should not delay the onset of payments to rights holders. The first of those payments, in instances where there is clarity over who the rights holders are, should start trickling through in November.