Fan fiction is one of the greatest gifts humanity gives to each other. People getting inspired by one person's creativity and using it to spawn whole new realities, beautiful relationships, explorations of the nature of humanity. I love  fan fiction.   But here's the thing. Fan fiction is a labor of love, not money. It's possible for authors who write books and  fanfic to "file off the serial numbers" so to speak, rewriting it to write out the IP of the original and create th

Now I personally despise AI because of psychos like this, pumping out complete slop at a pace that buries actual writers' work: But let's be honest, generative AI isn't good for anything. Not for anything, folks, seriously. Gen AI has a massively negative environmental impact It is crippling people's ability to critically think for themselves It cannot actually think or analyze . Because all it does is chain likely words together,  it "lies" and "hallucinates" all the time It

In a world where every streaming service and software company seems hell-bent on funding fascism and the end of the world at an ever-increasing monthly cost that doesn't permit you to own  anything, it's no surprise piracy has taken off. And maybe pirating software and movies directly hurts the corporations—I don't know. I'm not in those industries.   I am  in the publishing industry, where I can guarantee all the risk and costs are passed along to the authors, not the compan

I've read a lot  of discourse lately about people returning books after they've read them, or after they'd read some portion and didn't like it, or without reading them at all, just changing their mind.   One common sentiment keeps creeping into these conversations that made me realize a lot  of people don't know the 'math' behind books: the idea that Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or any given bookseller can certainly afford to eat the cost of a few returns.   That's super  not how