Publishing

I understood that if I was going to do it, I would have to put 100% of myself into it,” says Richard Osman about writing his debut crime novel The Thursday Murder Club, which was an immediate bestseller when it was published in 2020. He had attempted a novel before, but “I wasn’t giving it everything, I had too much on. And this was the first time where I thought: No, I’m able to focus on this for a couple of years now.” Osman’s agent, Juliet Mushens, adds: “He told me he was working on a novel, but he didn’t want to show…

When AI researcher Melanie Mitchell published Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans in 2019, she set out to clarify AI’s impact. A few years later, ChatGPT set off a new AI boom—with a side effect that caught her off guard. An AI-generated imitation of her book appeared on Amazon, in an apparent scheme to profit off her work. It looks like another example of the ecommerce giant’s ongoing problem with a glut of low-quality AI-generated ebooks.Mitchell learned that searching Amazon for her book surfaced not…

Since acquiring Business Insider nine years ago, Axel Springer has largely steered clear of intervening in the news outlet’s editorial operations, even when high-profile people objected to unflattering articles about them.That hasn’t been the case in recent days. Copyright ©2024Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8 Since acquiring Business Insider nine years ago, Axel Springer has largely steered clear of intervening in the news outlet’s editorial operations, even when…

Dear Reader, PREMIUM The Artist's Way Writers everywhere are talking about Cait Corrain. She created eight fake accounts on Goodreads, the online books community, and used these to trash other novels. She lied, fabricated evidence and finally fessed up. There is a dark side to being a writer. You scroll through your social media feed to see "beyond honoured to be on the shortlist for the JCB literary award" from a girl you knew at school. The writer in you is racked with jealousy. How is this possible you…

Via a post on Twitter, developer Frogwares has announced that they are now the sole publisher for 2019’s The Sinking City. As a result, they will be updating storefronts with the latest version of the game in the coming weeks. Folks, we got some big news!Frogwares is now the sole publisher of The Sinking City on all platforms! We're happy to finally put this whole thing behind us, and we look forward to sharing more news about the future of the franchise very soon.Please read our full statement…

The New York Times sued Microsoftand OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement, touching off a legal fight over generative-AI technologies with far-reaching implications for the future of the news publishing business.In a complaint filed Wednesday, the Times said the technology companies exploited its content without permission to create their AI products, including OpenAI’s humanlike chatbot ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot. The tools were trained on millions of pieces of Times content, the suit said, and draw on that…

Earlier this year, Waterstones Dad enjoyed a brief but burning moment in the sun. The description, coined by Gavin Jacobson in the New Statesman, referred to a very specific type of man – centrist, politically non-partisan, misses Jeremy Paxman – whose primary personality trait is formed by the type of books he reads.Books in his collection include Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, How to Be Right by James O’Brien, Ben Ansell’s Why Politics Fails and Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland. It will come as no…

Thelonious “Monk” Ellison has hit his breaking point. The students in his Southern-lit class at the prestigious university he teaches at are oversensitive snowflakes. His superiors think he needs a break from academia. Monk’s novels may still be in print, but you wouldn’t know it; they’ve all been relegated to the bottom shelf of the “African-American Studies” section of chain bookstores, simply because he’s a Black author. (“The Blackest thing about these books are the ink!” he yells.) An illness and a tragedy send…

A writer has been dropped by her agent and publisher after she posted a slew of reviews from fake accounts on book-ranking site Goodreads.Cait Corrain, whose book Crown of Starlight was due to be published in May next year, posted on X to apologise for her behaviour. “I boosted the rating of my book, bombed the ratings of several fellow debut authors, and left reviews that ranged from kind of mean to downright abusive,” she tweeted.Corrain’s US publisher Del Rey, an imprint of Penguin Random House, stated on Monday that…

Three in ten Americans read digital books. Whether they’re accessing online textbooks or checking out the latest bestselling e-book from the public library, the majority of these readers are subject to both the greed of Big Publishing and the priorities of Big Tech. In fact, Amazon’s Kindle held 72% of the e-reader market in 2022. And if there’s one thing we know about Big Tech companies like Amazon, their real product isn’t the book. It’s the user data.Major publishers are giving Big Tech free rein to watch what you read…