Tag Archives: publishing

A simple way to refute any allegation of AI use? Paper trail, baby

Not so long ago, as publishing companies were feeding manuscripts into AI programs to determine if AI was used to write the manuscripts – not surprisingly, in some cases, the AI came up with a “positive for AI” diagnosis, strangely enough often in the case of first-time POC authors – the discourse among writers was how to prepare to defend yourself in case of AI allegations.

“Save your drafts,” the simple response came. Each of the four or five or 10 times you wrote a new draft, each one was proof that it was your hand that crafted the writing.

But what if you don’t draft?

Maybe it’s because of my “this must be written now” practice of writing for newspapers, I don’t draft, at least in the sense of rewriting a stem to stern version of a work several times.

NOTE ADDED AFTER POSTING: I do go over and over everything I write, usually by rereading what I’ve written previously to put myself in the frame of mind to write anew. Does this count as drafting? Dunno.

I do have my outline for my first (and most recently published) novel SEVEN ANGELS, as seen above, dated from June 2019, saved in the SEVEN ANGELS folder on my MacBook Pro.

But is there a more certain, beyond subterfuge, way of proving that a book was written in increments, day by day, for months?

I didn’t realize at the time that I was building proof that I’d written SEVEN ANGELS – really, all my books and even many short stories and nonfiction articles – as I wrote it.

It’s long been my practice to email to myself the latest version of any book as I write another chapter or, on a less productive day, another set of paragraphs. Hell, even new sentences.

In my email, I’ve got the latest version of whatever I’m writing, every day, as I’ve written it.

There’s some added assuredness that could provide a time frame for my writing: social media.

Again, coming from the newspaper business, I’ve always been pretty transparent with my writing. So on Twitter, going as far back as 2009, and more recently Bluesky, I’ll often note on social media what I’ve working on. It’s an incremental timeline, not quite as explicit as the daily email to myself, but pretty close.

Not to mention notes to myself in physical notebooks, which I’ve been using since even before I began writing novels in 2019.

So if the thought of creating a “paper trail” of drafts is intimidating to any writer, I’d suggest emailing yourself your latest version. It’s a good indication that you’ve been working on a project.

It has the added bonus of backing up your work in case your computer decides to jump off a cliff.

You’ve somehow stumbled upon the latest of more than 1,100 posts on keithroysdon dot com, stretching back to the early 2010s. Books, writing, movies, TV, obscure pop culture, Halloween, snark and more snark. I’m the author of crime novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, co-author of four true crime books including the award-winning THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS and hundreds of short stories, news articles and pop culture pieces in spots like CrimeReads, Daily Yonder and elsewhere. You can contact me by leaving a message anywhere on this site or by hollering at me on one of my too many social media outposts.

It’s a Friday free-for-all i.e. emptying out my inbox

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It’s Friday – it is Friday, right? – and let’s escape the ugly realities of the real world by sharing some quick-hit news reports about books and publishing, shall we?

As Carl Kolchak would say …

Item: To paraphrase the old joke, I don’t get Kindle Unlimited here. I see it, but I don’t get it. (Sad trombone sound.) Writer friends are on it and another writer friend explained to me that it works by offering some small amount of renumeration for each page of a book read. So in the oddest move since the then-executives of HBO renamed the streaming arm of HBO as Max before changing it back to HBO Max, Amazon in its very puzzling and unlikely decision has renamed Kindle Unlimited as KindlePlus, or Kindle+. No we don’t know why.

Item: Everybody is naming their best books of the year. Even though it’s still October. And yes, I know that all the major releases between now and December 31 are already in the hands of said tastemakers and arbiters of the best of the year. One reason might be that they want to get people prepared to buy books for the holiday season. Maybe the idea is to find ten books that have as much heat about them as Marlon James’ THE DISAPPEARERS.

Item: Eddie Muller, knowledge-laden host of the indispensable Noir Alley on the indispensable TCM, has scored a three-book deal, Publisher’s Marketplace reports. Muller, who has previously authored books, has a contract with Running Press (working with Turner Classic Movies) to publish three crime novels, THE DISTANCE, SHADOW BOXER and BIG LEFT HOOK. I have no qualms with Muller getting this contract, but it emphasizes that celebrity and a national platform are not drawbacks to getting books published.

Item: Here’s a link to an exhaustive survey about the business of indie writing and publishing by William Duryea and his site Beyond Heat Death. It’s long and I haven’t read it yet but I’ve already bookmarked it and I’m ready for some insights.

Item: Here’s another link, this one to a piece on literary scams and why writers are perfect targets. You might remember that I wrote recently about how I – like most writers online – was targeted by a scammer. Mine was pretending to be author Freida McFadden.

Item: Romantasy. Some writers and readers love it. Others loathe it. Here’s a Goodreads wrapup of the genre right now.

Finally, here’s a new little note that I’m going to include with each of these posts, noting who the hell I am. I’m including it because readership on this page is steadily increasing and I figure it doesn’t hurt to explain who you’re reading.

Too many books published? Maybe, but there’s disagreement on the numbers

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Are too many books published every year? Those of us who love books might be tempted to say no. Those of us who write books might be tempted to say yes, if only because it means more competition for every reader.

And there’s disagreement on how many books are actually being published.

In his always-readable newsletter “Dear Head of Mine,” publishing industry figure Sean Delone asks, “Are too many books published?” and cites some numbers that, while large, take the wind out of much, much higher numbers cited by some sources.

Before I give you Delone’s numbers, consider these from Berrett-Koehler Publishers, which produces professional development books. In a post from April, Steven Piersanti, senior editor of Berrett-Koehler, throws out some alarming numbers in the post “Ten Awful Truths About Book Publishing”:

The number of books being published every year has exploded. According to the latest Bowker data (Publishers Weekly, March 23, 2026), 4.2 million books were published in 2025 in the United States. This is the number of titles that received an ISBN number from Bowker. And here is the truly shocking figure: the number of new titles published each year is 15 times greater than it was 20 years ago. According to Bowker, just 282,500 new titles were published in the U.S. in 2005 (Bowker Report, April 14, 2010). The number of traditionally published titles has more than doubled from 2005 to 2025, to 642,242. But the great growth has been in self-published titles, which account for 3.5 million of the 4.2 million titles published in 2025.

(I should note that I obtained 10 ISBNs from Bowker a couple of years ago and haven’t yet published 10 books, but that’s the benchmark cited as significant by Publishers Weekly.)

Piersanti goes on to note some fascinating figures but I won’t simply regurgitate them all now. I’ll post the link to his piece at the end of those post.

Delone cites significantly lower numbers. (Again, his newsletter is very worthwhile reading and you should subscribe.)

There’s an oft quoted statistic in the book world that millions of new books are published each year (the link says 4.2 million in 2025). Conservative estimates put the number of new books published in the US in the healthy 10,000s, that’s even if you just count the five major publishers. This, we know from the inside of the industry, is a nonsense number. A number that gets people to shout, “There are too many books!”. The truth is that a book editor, reviewer, or avid consumer intuitively knows the actual number of published books that matter, that are competing for their attention, is much smaller.

This is not to denigrate books whose sales are in the double or triple digits. In the year 2026, it should be obvious that financial success does not equal quality, nor intelligence, nor competency. Nor is money what we should rely upon as a scorekeeper for “success.” Book sales are, similarly, not a scoreboard that tells you which books are good and which are bad. Still, we must be reasonable and place the cut off for what books matter to the majority of readers. Let’s not get bogged down in methodology here, but the real number of books— if you cut off all the ones that have very small, specialized audiences—is about 3,000-6,000 new books a year across adult fiction and nonfiction. That’s still a lot of books! Yet, it is a number that your arms fit around, that’s a bit more fathomable than 1,000,000 or 50,000.

Even with 3,000-6,000 new books, discovery is exceedingly difficult. A lot of focus goes to the big bestsellers and then this creates a self-perpetuating gravity of reader recommendations that’s hard to pierce through, a feast or famine dynamic we’ve talked about before at Dear Head of Mine. We are entering the season when this becomes even more pronounced. Book publishing follows the standard retail seasonality of western civilization, so as we approach the fall season—known by retailers simply as the Christmas season—we expect the new releases, reviews, and shelf space to be focused primarily on big known-quantity bestsellers.

Delone goes on to talk about the publishing industry “midlist,” the neither-bestsellers and neither-ignored books, the latter well above the trees that fall in the forest with no one around.

Both sets of numbers spring from that same Publishers Weekly number, although the two different writers arrive at different “net” numbers.

So who to believe? Which set of numbers are accurate, 4 million-plus or 6,000?

It doesn’t really matter. As Delone notes, 6,000 is still a lot of books. For readers, it can make it difficult to cut through the clutter and find your next favorite read. For writers, that clutter is still there and you’re competing with it for readers, attention, sales and space on shelves.

I’m not going to propose a solution here. Ultimately, I do think publicity helps. My novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS wouldn’t have sold even the modest numbers they have without my efforts to publicize them and the tremendous help of booksellers, libraries, friends, family and fellow authors who help get the the very existence of the books out there. As much or little difference as social media makes, for example, I think word of mouth helps more.

If you’re a reader, the numbers can look daunting or delightful. I know for sure that even if I never buy another book, I’ll never run out of things to read. If you’re a writer, the thought of competing with every other book is intimidating or even disheartening.

For writers, in the midst of all that uncertainty, I can say only this: keep writing. You never know if the story or book you’re writing will connect with a reader, who will find momentary amusement, solid entertainment or even enlightenment from your work. Even if the reader has to find it from among more than four million other books or “only” 6,000.

(Photo at the top of this post from the Librarianologist Facebook page.)

Here’s a link to the “10 Awful Truths About Book Publishing” post:

https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publishing?shem=aimgspe,

Which book genre is stuggling now? Nonfiction books.

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Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman probably wishes he’d monetized his famous phrase, “Nobody knows anything,” because while Goldman (“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “All the President’s Men,” “The Princess Bride”) painted a wide swath with that statement, he’s surely as correct as correct can be. If we’ve learned nothing from watching movies, books, politics and, well, every damn thing, in the past decade, it’s that uncertainty is the norm.

I’m enjoying paying more attention to the publishing industry lately as I’m doing some editing for Constellate Publishing and working on three – count ’em – three novels. I get a lot of insights from the several-times-daily email from Publishers Marketplace and I’m enjoying learning which books and genres are going to be populating bookstore shelves in a year’s time.

But the more information I have, the more I need. I’ve got a William Goldman-level lack of knowing anything about the book industry and I’m trying to remedy it.

So today I was fascinated with a new piece by editor Sean Delone – link at the end of this post – in which he looks at some trends in publishing, specifically about non-fiction book publishing.

Before I get into details, here’s a picture I just took of one of my several shelves of non-fiction books, very specifically in this case books about movies, TV and entertainment, but we’ve accumulated hundreds of non-fiction books in the past few decades. Pictured above, my copy of Denis Gifford’s “A Pictorial History of Horror Movies” was published in the early 1970s. My copy was published around 1974 and it’s not even the oldest non-fiction book in the house.

It’s accurate to say that I love non-fiction books, history or news or photography or films or Saturday morning cartoons or whatever, and while I don’t buy as many as I used to – I think my latest might be “TCM Underground,” the cult films book released right before TCM canceled the Saturday night/Sunday morning program – but while dozens of boxes of fiction going back to the 1960s are still stored in boxes here, our non-fiction books are mostly but not entirely displayed. Yeah, I love ’em.

And there’s no doubt that online sites have decimated the need for nonfiction magazines and books. Why buy an authoritative book when you can look something up on some possibly totally erroneous online site?

Anyway, Delone’s article, “The Nonfiction Book Market is Collapsing,” carried disheartening news.

The gist of it:

First, the entire industry boomed in Covid—writing is a hobby and reading for pleasure is, too—and has trudged along as it usually does, staying flat, growing a little over the years since 2020. But for the past decade the market for nonfiction has slowly collapsed. What has happened in the last ten years1 is that the overall industry has grown modestly, but fiction and nonfiction have basically flipped positions. In 2015, 6 of the top 25 bestselling hardcover books—this is a not-perfect but useful proxy for new books published—were fiction. In 2025, 18 of the top 25 hardcover books were fiction, meaning only 7 were nonfiction, almost an exact inversion of ten years ago.

Delone emphasizes he’s not writing an Atlantic-style “end of reading, end of books” essay. If you remember, that one alarmed at lot of writers, editors, publishers and readers a while back.

Delone notes that media – which used to be a few big newspaper book review sections and late-night talk shows, where even a Midwestern rube like me could see important authors interviewed by Johnny Carson – is much more decentralized than it used to be and there’s some emphasis placed on book influencers and book accounts on social media. (I follow a bunch of them, for enjoyment more than education, but information nonetheless.)

But he also notes a colossal fall-off in demand for the kind of information we formerly turned to non-fiction books for:

No amount of platform is going to change that interest across the board in nonfiction from celebrities down to science has been slowly disappearing. Even if nonfiction is stable and more predictable than fiction in the abstract, it’s by far worth taking the risk on an unknown novelist if the return is potentially 4x as much. Let’s bring the nonfiction collapse into current day context. Two weeks ago, the entire hardcover nonfiction bestseller list sold 42,000 copies, whereas just the top two bestselling fiction hardcovers the same week—The Calamity Club in its 15th week on-sale and Yesteryear in its 19th week on-sale—sold 52,000 copies. It’s not inconceivable that on the right week, one fiction hardcover with first week sales could outsell the entirety of the hardcover nonfiction bestseller list.

Welp, as the young people used to say.

Want another gulp moment?

The tide going out on nonfiction sales and reading is entirely reshaping the power balance in the industry. Not overnight, but slowly, the money is flowing to fiction and away from nonfiction. It is causing quite a scramble. Fiction is unpredictable, it requires taste, it does not favor the solid metrics or predictability which, if you are running a publishing company, are much more preferable (businesses tend to prefer predictable growth and low volatility or at least high growth alongside high volatility). Fiction is also an easier category for the big publishers to capture and corner the market on. For instance, a handful of talent agencies represent nearly all A-list actors, and therefore a significant supply of big nonfiction bestsellers. The capture in supply carries over to publishers—when is the last time a big celebrity has published a huge bestseller with an indie press?

Delone has a lot of interesting thoughts on the industry. You can find some very thought-provoking posts here:

https://dearheadofmine.substack.com/p/the-nonfiction-book-market-is-collapsing?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Academic publishers have set some guidelines about AI use and, well, it’s a start

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I like writing about the scourge of generative AI in the arts – obviously – and it seems like there’s new news almost every day.

I’ll make this quick:

In the new Publishers Lunch is a report on how some publishers have developed guidelines and methods of screening papers and books for AI use. (You’ll recall that the suspicion of AI has roiled the mainstream publishing industry lately, causing book deals to be canceled and, possibly, author careers to be stymied.)

Academic publishers cited in today’s Publishers Lunch have tried to come up with a constructive method of screening works submitted to them for use of AI. That’s because like a lot of publishing, academic publishers are being swamped with submissions of AI or AI-assisted slop.

The guidelines, which build on the use of AI-detection tools, set thresholds for when AI use is detected.

Some of the publishers have established four guidelines:

Assisted – AI helped you brainstorm or research but the writing is yours. Meaning, if you asked AI to find the relevant information for you and then you read those source materials and wrote from them, that’s a mechanical assist. It’s just AI working as a search engine.
Collaborated – AI drafted parts while you rewrote, verified, and made it your own. Meaning, if the facts, ideas, etc. came out of the AI model itself (e.g. you asked it explain something to you) and wrote from its answer instead of the source materials, that is AI collaboration and should be disclosed.
Generated & reviewed – AI produced the artifact, but you read every line, checked the facts, and stand behind it. To be clear, you hold responsibility for its integrity and accuracy.
Generated & unreviewed – AI made it and you didn’t really check. This is not acceptable AI use for PUP staff ever: internal, external or under any circumstance.

Publishers Lunch says that for at least one publisher, if a submitted work meets the last two guidelines, it’s rejected. That’s because that particular publisher correctly argues that the use of that much AI couldn’t be copyright-able because, of course, AI is based on the work of others.

I’m skeptical, but at least somebody is setting some guidelines somewhere.

(Image at the top of this post is from the wonderful, funny AppleTV Plus series MURDERBOT, based on the series of novels by THE MURDERBOT DIARIES by Martha Wells.)

Trend chasing? So many hockey romance novels … most of them straight, though. How long will this trend continue?

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Sooo many horny hockey players. And fans.

Barely a day goes by that I don’t open Publishers Lunch and see yet another book deal for a hockey romance.

This is, of course, in the wake of the success of “Heated Rivalry,” the Canadian sports romance series about two hockey players who have an ongoing romantic and sexual relationship while playing on opposing teams. The series got a ton of views and a ton of publicity when it aired on streaming a few months ago.

It’s been interesting to see the book industry’s response to the popularity of the series, which is itself based on one book in a series called GAME CHANGERS written by Rachel Reid.

Oddly – or probably not oddly – of the half-a-dozen hockey romance books I’ve seen announced in the two or three months I’ve been subscribing to Publishers Lunch and Publishers Marketplace, most of the new novels are straight romance as opposed to gay romance like the popular streaming series.

The latest book to win a contract, the one I saw today, is, as Publishers Lunch reported:

Sunday Times-bestselling author Freya Marske’s THE OFFSEASON, the author’s first contemporary queer sports romance, pitched as for fans of HEATED RIVALRY and YURI ON ICE, in which a former figure skater who walked away from the sport returns home, where reconnecting with his infuriatingly gorgeous childhood rival, now the current national champion, reignites his passion for the ice—and more, to Ruoxi Chen at Putnam, in a two-book deal, for publication in summer 2027.

For all I know, each of the novels I’ve seen announced were in the works for years and are getting publishing contracts only now, after HEATED RIVALRY has made the subject popular for mass audiences.

It’s like another genre of books that I’m seeing announced regularly, the Western.

Who’ll get published first? Who will best meet the demands of readers? Will a half-dozen hockey romance books all be successful or will some corner the market? Or will each one inspire readers to seek out more?

After all, romantasy books – the trend, that is, not just the genre – kicked off somewhere and they’re still going strong.

Report: Amazon is buying old books to scan for AI and destroy. Yes, this surprises no one.

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I had intended to follow-up my weekend post about getting my books in a local bookstore by suggesting what authors might do to achieve the same thing, but I’ve delayed that for the moment. First things first, and just like a house on fire, the dual plagues of AI and Amazon get our attention at the moment.

For a few weeks now, book lovers and people who hate AI have been despairing at reports about how companies that steal, buy or pirate books to train generative AI – thus putting creative people at risk of losing their livelihoods – have been buying and scanning books. The revelation comes out of the landmark class action lawsuit Andrea Bartz and other writers filed against Anthropic. Bartz and company won a $1.5 billion settlement on behalf of many, many writers whose work was stolen by the AI company.

Details of Anthropic’s practices came out in the discovery process, and they’re horrifying: The company was buying hundreds of thousands of copies of books, some of them older and out of print, and they’re cutting off the spines and feeding the pages into AI-making programs. The books are utterly destroyed. The judge in the Bartz case ruled that this practice was legal because the company had bought copies of the books, not stolen them. (They’re using older books to ensure no AI writing gets fed into the AI consumption process, of course.) Videos of this process – chopping spines off books and the ultimate shredding of the pages – are disgusting and disheartening.

And of course Anthropic isn’t the only AI company doing this.

Today, thanks to an ingenious investigation by 404 Media, we also know that Amazon is doing it. Maybe not a surprise – Amazon and its owner are widely regarded as awful; most of us who do business through them do so only reluctantly, or at least that’s how I feel – but the confirmation from 404 Media, which was also shared by Publishers Lunch this morning, is damning,

This is the lead of the 404 Media story published today:

Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.

(I’ll link to the 404 Media story at the end of this piece.)

404 Media cleverly hid an AirTag-type tracker in an old book that was to be sold to Amazon’s book-buying operation. 404 was able to track the book as it and many others were shipped around the country and ended up in Las Vegas, where it went to an Amazon warehouse used by an operation called VGT3. That’s the operation’s logo above. Charming, huh?

Amazon didn’t really address the process or its value to anyone but Amazon in its response to 404.

(404 had, in July, reported on an increase in sales of old books and speculated that the increase in sales was due to AI-generating companies buying books it could scan and destroy. And again, I’ll note that the books being chopped and scanned and shredded were published before 2022 or so to AVOID THE WRITING BEING TAINTED BY AI.

As 404 reported: These booksellers suspected AI companies were behind these large bulk purchases because of the high number of books they were buying, the seemingly random choice of books, and the fact that these buyers, unlike libraries and universities, did not seem price sensitive at all. But booksellers couldn’t say for certain who was behind the large purchases because the marketplaces where they sell their books keep the buyers anonymous. When an order comes in, a bookseller ships the sold books to a warehouse operated by the marketplaces, where books are sorted and then sent to the buyer.

In July, one bookseller told me they received a very large order of around 1,000 books on Biblio, one of these marketplaces. The seller agreed to put an Apple AirTag provided by 404 Media in one of the books included in this order so we could see where the book was going. And by extension, which company, AI or otherwise, was behind this massive order.

404 Media granted the bookseller anonymity because they worried sharing this information would harm their business.

404 found online comments from Amazon employees about the VGT3 facility that virtually all they do there is scan books.

Many thousands of books are being bought, scanned and destroyed by Amazon at that facility and probably others. And that doesn’t even account for other companies that are doing the same.

And as 404 reported:

That employees are scanning the barcodes or ISBNs on books — a unique serial number given to every published book — before scanning their content gives further credence to another theory put forth by booksellers: AI companies are trying to methodically scan every printed book in the world by working through the list of ISBNs. One bookseller told me they suspected this was the case because the very large orders they were getting never included very rare books that do not have ISBNs.

I already didn’t feel good about Amazon, where a large amount of my work can be purchased. Their practices toward employees and authors and the sheer mass accumulation of wealth by its owner were long-known and queasy-making.

Here’s another reason, thanks to the reporting by 404 Media and dissemination to the publishing industry by Publishers Lunch, to dislike Amazon.

Here’s the 404 Media story:

https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility

Celebration: Local bookstore carries my books – and what that means for other indie authors

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I had the coolest experience I’ve had in a long time on Saturday: I signed copies of my novels SEVEN ANGELS and THAT OCTOBER for a bookstore. And not just any bookstore, but my local indie bookstore The Hive, which opened this spring.

(Link to the Hive site at the end.)

I’ve had books in local bookstores for 10 years now, since 2016, when the first of my co-written true crime books, WICKED MUNCIE, was published. Each of the three true crime books that followed were also placed in Muncie bookstores (and in displays at Walgreen’s and other stores) by the History Press. Whatever else you might say about History Press, but they have the juice to get books in stores in and around the area that’s depicted in the book.

Since publishing my first novel, THAT OCTOBER, in June 2025, I’ve tried to get it in stores here in Knoxville, where I’ve lived for not quite four years. The long-established indie bookstore here turned up its nose at my request they carry that first novel. And by turn up its nose, I mean that I brought the book to that store and went through their formal online process for requesting that the store carry a book. I heard crickets back. They just never responded, and it’s been 16 months.

And yes, I know all about how much of a premium shelf space in bookstores is. Spare me that factoid, please. Because even though Barnes & Noble replied to my request that they carry the book locally with a refusal to do so, at least THEY REPLIED. (They carry my books online, as does virtually every other bookseller, so I appreciate that.)

So I didn’t have high hopes for the Hive, even though pretty early on it was obvious how they liked to focus locally, with space on shelves and book clubs and talks and signings. I asked.

So when the Hive responded a few weeks ago with a “we’d be happy to carry your novels” and this past week said, “Your books have arrived, would you like to come in and sign copies?” I was just incredibly, pleasantly surprised.

(When I vague-posted on social media about this, some people thought I had interest in my books from TV or movies and, yeah, I have gotten a nibble in that regard but I’ve yet to see follow-through and yet to ensure it’s legit. So we’ll see.)

I’ve been lucky since THAT OCTOBER came out that not only libraries back in Indiana but two of my hometown bookstores, Ink Drinkers Anonymous and Aw Yeah Comics, have been happy to carry my novels. And it was a hell of an experience in 2025 when THAT OCTOBER was carried in the bookstore at Bouchercon in New Orleans.

So the Hive carrying my novels and asking me to sign them and even marking them with a “local author” tag was the best thing yet.

In this “all about me” celebration and back-patting here, I’ll note that there’s a slightly larger issue here. I self-published, through the good work of my friend Jill Blocker, THAT OCTOBER and Jill and I published SEVEN ANGELS through Constellate Publishing, the indie publishing imprint and spinoff of Jill’s company, Constellate Creatives.

So three things can be inferred from my personal victory of The Hive carrying my books: Indie bookstores are the best. Decisions about what books to stock are best made locally.

And indie authors and small imprints should be heartened by the fact that small potatoes book publishing can get your book into bookstores.

Here’s the link for the Hive on bookshop dot org

https://bookshop.org/shop/hivebookshop

Book sales are up to $32.5 billion, but books are dead, right?

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Books are dead! Long live books!

A while back I wrote a piece for CrimeReads – link at the end of this mini-rant – about how those of us at Constellate Publishing were getting into the book publishing business even though it appeared to be an uncertain time for the industry: Some small publishers had gone out of business and some book distributors were shutting their doors, and yet such notable independent booksellers as Barnes & Noble – sarcasm there – were opening new stores all over.

So which is it? Are writers and designers and publishers doomed or are we seeing a boom time?

Today, Publisher’s Weekly reported:

The Association of American Publishers put 2025 industry sales at $32.5 billion, a 2.5% increase over 2024. Unlike 2024, when unit sales fell, the number of books sold in 2025 inched up 0.4%, to 3.15 billion.

I copied this to a writer friend who replied, in effect, “So publishers are selling a lot of books but are nickel-and-diming us writers to death.”

And yes, PW reported that religion-themed books had seen the biggest increase, but:

Adult fiction sales had the second biggest sales increase, with revenue up 3.9%, to $7.1 billion.

There’s a lot to digest in the report, but here’s a bookstore tidbit:

In terms of channels, physical stores had the biggest increase in the year, with sales up 6%, to $5 billion, an increase likely due in part to the opening of more Barnes & Noble stores as well as more independent bookstores.

Amazon was still the largest channel for book sales, with $11.3 billion in sales.

“This year’s report reflects a healthy and agile publishing industry,” commented Syreeta Swann, chief operating officer of AAP in a statement. She pointed to the resilience of print even as digital formats continue to grow.

Things can change and there’s just no doubt it’s hard to concentrate to read when it feels like we’re teetering on the brink of climate, social and political collapse with a strong tailwind, but the message to writers seems to be:

Write your asses off. There’s a readership out there.

Here’s my CrimeReads piece from a while back about getting into the publishing industry, with comments from some absolutely first-rate writers:

How Some Crime Writers Are Finding a New Path to Publishing

With latest AI accusations, book publishing industry continues to melt down

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The book publishing industry continues to work hard to self-destruct.

Everybody who writes about book publishing and particularly the harm wrought on books, writers and largely unsympathetic publishers is reeling today and writing about this, so while I’m not reeling I am writing – and slapping my forehead.

And yes, I’m being mean with that headline, because it’s not solely, or even primarily, the publishing industry trying to self-destruct. The big tech AI firms, which make generative AI possible, steal everything that isn’t nailed down, whether it’s writing or art or even something mundane that can be used to generate email.

And yes, I feel strongly about this because, last time I checked, two of my early true crime books were stolen to train AI book theft programs. “Wicked Muncie,” my co-written 2016 true crime book, and “Muncie Murder and Mayhem,” from 2018, turn up in a search of my name on the database of pirated books as provided by The Atlantic.

Without going into too much detail, in the course of this week, at least two “big” books have been withdrawn by their authors, stillborn by their publishers or otherwise fingered for having artificial intelligence elements. This can include AI writing or AI editing. A lot of people are giving the authors the benefit of the doubt and I can understand and appreciate that. Others are crediting the publishing companies for throwing a flag on the books because it’s not clear, despite their “we tested this book and our tests show it was written and/or edited with AI” claims.

Everyone from Publisher’s Marketplace to newsletters by Kathleen Schmidt (Publishing Confidential, an essential newsletter) and others have recounted the allegations and resulting controversy.

As Schmidt says, “Things can’t go on like this.”

Why do we care about this? Well, besides the fact that AI is an absolutely unnecessary tool in the creative arts, and besides the fact that data centers used to create AI products and portals are horribly destructive to the environment because they use rampant amounts of water and often run on heavy-polluting diesel generators, the fact is that the use of AI in creating art of any kind is destructive to creators, authors, artists, editors and, as much as we don’t sympathize with many of them, publishers.

As Schmidt notes, “a $2.5 million, two-book deal that was acquired by Minotaur (Macmillan) in a 14-way auction, (was) pulled by the author’s agents due to concerns about AI use in writing .”

This followed on the heels of another book and author questioned. As Schmidt reported, “Earlier this week, the author H.M. Smith was accused of using AI to write her new book, Daggermouth. In that case, Pangram returned the book as 60% AI. It is currently ranked at 73 on Amazon. Before that, Hachette canceled the book Shy Girl because Pangram returned it as 78% AI. What’s notable is that in each case, it was an individual from a media outlet feeding book files to Pangram without the authors’ permission. Welcome to the new world of “Gotcha!”

Schmidt is among those who note that programs that use AI to supposedly detect AI are highly probable to find AI where it doesn’t exist. There have been reports of long-ago-published books that, when tested by AI, come back with a false positive for the use of AI. Schmidt notes that she ran some of her newsletters through Pangram and the result was that they were 80 percent AI. And, of course, she’d written every word.

Here’s where I get to the self-destruction part. As Schmidt notes: Whether you admit it or not, there is A LOT of jealousy in the publishing world, so it wouldn’t surprise me if someone who disliked author X decided to use Pangram on their work and made the results public. This is not the publishing world I want to live in.

As Publishers Lunch/Publishers Marketplace notes, Sources tell PL that more deals are being cancelled behind the scenes following the discovery or suspicion of AI — one publisher noted that multiples imprint have had to cancel a book over this — including books that originate in the self-publishing sphere and are then picked up by Big Five publishers. This usually happens quietly and under the public radar, and is only brought to light by fans online.

There’s plenty of blame to go around here. There are apparently a ton of AI-written or AI-assisted books on Amazon. People who want to be authors but are unable to produce a book themselves or unable to hire qualified human editors to read their work – hell, just find writer friends who will edit your manuscripts and maybe pay them or repay them in kind – are causing readers to buy and read dreck and causing publishers to suspect everybody.

Before this latest AI controversy, I was going to write about another AI controversy: the abysmal practice, which became known in the wake of author Andrea Bartz’ $1.5-billion-winning class-action lawsuit against the AI company Anthropic, of Anthropic and other AI pirate companies, of buying copies of books and cutting off their spines in the process of feeding them into AI readers then shredding what’s left. (By the way, you should follow Andrea Bartz on social media. She’s become the face of authors fighting back against AI, but she’s also a great writer of thrillers.) This slice-and-dice process was allowed by a judge because once you’re bought a physical copy of a book, you can do as you want with it. Including destroying it.

So yes, Schmidt is correct. This mess can’t continue like this. It will, of course, as long as AI companies, publishing companies and some authors continue to make money. But in the meantime, the environment is suffering, authors and editors are suffering and writers whose work was stolen or must compete with AI slop are suffering.

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