This Week In Books

Sunday, October 1, 2023 Edition

This Week In Books: Publishing insider news with a healthy side of snark (like carbs, only you’ll still fit in your jeans).

Photo Credit: Library of Trinity College, Ariel Lawhon 2023

Sunday, October 1, 2023 Edition. Oh, friends. It’s been a spicy week or two in books. The whole wide world is bringing fire to the industry and we’re here to say “No, not the books! We have a stack of bills or fifth grade homework you can burn, but leave our books alone.” The world may be burning, but we still want to curl up in a dark corner with a good book and a beverage of choice and block it all out. Okay, maybe we want to stay in said dark corner and never leave. But, if we must move on…

• The big news in books this week is, of course, AI. Authors are suing Meta and OpenAI for copyright infringement claiming that their books were used to train the AI’s language models and that AI then reproduced inferior copies for profit. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of works of literature. They “seek a court order that would require the companies to destroy AI systems that were trained on copyright-protected works” since a computer can’t unlearn something once it’s been programmed. Yes, I like this plan. Let’s reverse–Terminator this sh*t  and start a war on AI! 

• In another twist, The Atlantic just released a new search tool for authors to find out if their books were one of the 183,000 works of literature used to train The Evil Machines. If you’ve been on social media at all this week you will have seen the truly alarming posts roll in from authors showing which of their books were used without permission. On a personal note, novels by both The Book Tide founders Ariel Lawhon and Marybeth Whalen were used for this purpose. 

Note from Ariel: “I found out this week that my third novel, I Was Anastasia, is one of these titles. Knowing that a pirated copy of my book was used to train a robot really makes me angry. Particularly since Anastasia was the most intellectually challenging novel I’ve ever written. Could a robot accomplish what I did? Almost certainly not. Did Meta have the right to steal my work to train its evil machine? 100% no.”  

Note from Marybeth: “I think every author who has books on this list feels violated. We work hard on these books - many times spending years putting tens of thousands of words on a page, not to mention editing those words. And then someone co-opts those words so a machine can “learn” how to replicate them? The thing is, AI is artificial intelligence, but these are real people behind it. People should be ashamed of themselves for attempting to automate art.”

If the pen is mightier than the sword, surely it is also mightier than a supercomputer.    Mortem in machinis! #authorsagainstai

• Also big news for writers this week: The writers strike is over. Unless you’ve been under a rock (or in that dark corner with a good book) for the last 148 days you know about the Hollywood writer’s strike. One of the most crucial parts of the strike negotiations was the use of AI. As reported by The Guardian, “The strike began just five months after OpenAI released ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that can write essays, hold conversations and craft stories from a handful of prompts. The new agreement does not ban all uses of AI. Both sides have acknowledged that it can be a useful tool in many aspects of filmmaking, including scriptwriting. Under the contract, studios and production companies must disclose to writers if any material given to them has been generated by AI in full or partly. AI-generated storylines will not be regarded as “literary material”, meaning that writers will not have to compete with the emerging technology for screen credits. The companies are not barred from using AI to generate content but writers have the right to sue if their work is used to train AI.” These are crucial protections for writers and we celebrate with the WGA on their successful negotiations. Way to stick to your guns (or should we say pens)!

• Jessica Knoll’s new book Bright Young Women became an instant NYT bestseller this week. A review by Patton Oswalt in the NYT said of the book, “Enough about the serial killer, let’s talk about his victims…[Knoll] shifts our attention from a notorious criminal to the women who died by his hand.” The key word here is shift. Throughout her novel, Knoll deftly avoids ever naming one of the most notorious serial killers in American history, and in doing so, renders him impotent. As it should be. With Americans increasingly obsessed with true crime (the recent show Based on a True Story spoofs this obsession), this shift is needed. Serial killers shouldn’t be made into celebrities. But their victims should be championed. The NYT review adds, “One hopes, the telling of this tale (and more like it) will shred the myth of the ‘murderer/genius’ one cut at a time.” We predict there will be more books like it. And we are here for it. 

• Speaking of the New York Times, we learned more about how their reviews work: Gilbert Cruz, editor of The New York Times Book Review, gives a fascinating inside look at what books are chosen to review, who reviews them and how the “Top Ten Books of the Year” are chosen. Go give this week’s episode of the Books, Beach, and Beyond podcast a listen. 

• Congrats to Richard Osman on the release of The Last Devil to Die which is the latest in his Thursday Murder Club series. It was an instant New York Times bestseller! The books are about four amateur, geriatric sleuths who solve murders from their cozy retirement village. It’s about time pensioners take center stage as heroes in our fiction. I’m betting we all know a septuagenarian or two who can kick butt, take names, and make it back in time for the early bird special. (*clears throat* my mother) Check out the other new fiction released this week and last week. Are there any you are excited about? 

• There’s a lot of talk right now about book bans (and we mean a lot of talk) so much so that it feels a little like Oprah is out there handing out bans like free cars. You get a ban, and you get a ban, and you get a ban, everybody gets a ban! (We gest, of course, Oprah is very much opposed to book bans. Or so we’d assume given what a champion of literature she has been throughout her career). As readers and writers, dare we say fellow-humans, surely there must be a solution that doesn’t involve the government telling us what we can and cannot read? Historically that doesn’t end well. First they ban the books, then they burn the books.

• But Texas disagrees. In June, Texas passed a law, requiring book sellers to rate books based on sexually explicit content. A challenge was immediately brought against the law and last week a federal judge moved resoundingly to block it.  “The Court does not dispute that the state has a strong interest in what children are able to learn and access in schools. And the Court surely agrees that children should be protected from obscene content in the school setting.That said, [the law] misses the mark on obscenity with a web of unconstitutionally vague requirements. And the state, in abdicating its responsibility to protect children, forces private individuals and corporations into compliance with an unconstitutional law that violates the First Amendment.” But! Plot Twist! On September 26th an appeals court struck down that injunction, so now the law is in effect again. It is literally the Wild West in Texas, ya’ll. 

• Meanwhile reading rates are going down, way down. Test Prep Insight conducted a poll in 2022. Almost half of the people surveyed hadn’t read a book in the last year. “The American Time Use Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that, on average, Americans age 15 and older spent about 7 minutes per day reading in 2017. This was down from 9 minutes in 2014.” I will repeat that: SEVEN MINUTES PER DAY reading. There are some other interesting numbers in the poll about what demographics are actually reading books–spoiler alert: it’s women–and the rise of audiobooks among younger generations. But the real question for The Book Tide is this: why are we all hot and bothered about the books people CAN’T READ when we have a whole generation coming up that isn’t reading at all? How about we spend more time focussing on literacy and the love of reading in our kids? NPR just released an article about a new way of teaching reading that is surging amongst educators. “As schools look to address low reading scores, phonics and other elements of the science of reading are getting fresh attention.” As self-appointed captains of the Grammar Police, we are very pro phonics instruction around here. And we firmly believe that the love of reading is caught not taught–starting with us and what we read aloud to our kids. 

• In the “random book deals we’re excited about” category, we submit this: Grillos presents PICKLED. If you like pickles, this is the brand for you. If you don’t like pickles, this is the brand that will change your mind. Grillos are to pickles what Godiva is to chocolate. Absolute perfection. So yes, bring on that (admittedly random) cookbook, even though we will never ever, as long as we live, put your delicious pickles in any of our cocktails. And do not fire back with, “what about a bloody mary?” because tomatoes were never meant to be juiced, much less drunk. Tomatoes are for sandwiches! As are pickles.

• Here is a cool infographic that shows how the various imprints of publishing all filter upstream into the Big Five. We don’t know about you, but this helps us make sense of the big, beautiful, messy business of book publishing. Of course, this was last updated in August and since then Knopf/Doubleday has decided to phase out Anchor Books, and Simon and Schuster has been sold to a private equity firm KKR. There is currently a great deal of anxiety about how the private equity firm will handle underperforming imprints at S&S. (Keep in mind, this is the same private equity firm that bought, then systematically dismantled Toys R’ Us). All we can say is, “Hold onto your books, folks, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!”

• And as always Kathleen Schmidt at Publishing Confidential, Courtney Maum at Before And After The Book Deal and Kate McKean at Agents And Books are serving up valuable insider information every week on their Substacks. Go check them out. 

Catch Up with Ariel over at I’m So Glad You Asked

See what Marybeth is up to at I Will Tell You This. 

Copyright The Book Tide, 2023. All rights reserved.