Craic-er: Who Are You?

Thursday, August 8, 2024

Who Are You?

In Publishing News this week,

Publishing Perspectives reports on the arrest of the International Publishing Association’s Prix Voltaire laureate Sihem Bensedrine. Sihem received the Priz Voltaire for her work on the Tunisian Truth and Dignity commission following Tunisia’s 2010 revolution. Now Tunisia is arresting her for it. Giving a voice to victims’ truth is always going to be unpopular for governments. How they deal with it tells you all you need to know about the people in power.

Last year the use of AI in the publishing community signaled plaintive cries that the sky was falling from publishers, authors and industry commentators.

This year the publishing community is looking to make money off AI in all sorts of forms.

The latest to take up the AI money spinner are the audiobook producers and the academic publishers.

This week Audible announced a beta trial of AI powered search for audiobooks. This follows last weeks announcement from Scribd that they are Beta testing an AI search programme for their subscribers for ebooks and audiobooks.

Mark Williams of The New Publishing Standard looks at how academic publishers are quietly embracing money in return for letting AI companies have access to their books.

But will the money trickle down to the authors?

Various national copyright agencies are wrestling with the AI copyright problem. In the U.S. the copyright office has released the first part of a big report on AI. You may remember the writer’s strike last year which highlighted the dubious nature of AI copyright in producing scripts. The calls to tighten up laws around copyright are getting louder.

Amazon’s KDP are making some big changes. Dan Holloway reports on the rollout of Identity Verification requests for authors and publishers. It’s another way to limit the scammers. (Why did it take this long?)

Gizmodo reports on Colin Kaepernick’s new venture, Lumi. It is raising eyebrows and blood pressure levels in the comic book world.

The Alliance of Independent Authors has just published a comprehensive article on all things AI for authors which I recommend reading to get some more information of what you can and can’t do. It’s here to stay you may as well learn about it.

The beauty of having a physical book is that you own it, you can read it at any time, make notes in it, or get it signed by the author. With digital products you don’t get that physical ownership feeling. Eleven years ago, I covered the launch of Enthrill. Their great idea was eBook cards as a physical product you could buy and gift to someone. Enthrill got bought and sold, swallowed up and disappeared. This week a new company has got the great idea to produce physical audiobook cards which contain a QR code to get your audiobook.

Allison Williams writes on Jane Friedman’s blog about the platform authors need now and it isn’t Social Media. This is an interesting article about showing up and practicing the 3 P’s.

Donald Maass asks a provocative question. Have you ever been reading a novel and asked yourself “Why should I care?” and then realized that you don’t.

He writes about flaws that sometimes elicits this reaction and where writers have made us care and why.

Katie Weiland has another super post on structure. She takes a deep dive into the inciting incident and how it shapes the story.