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For most of publishing history, audiobooks were a luxury reserved for authors with big budgets or big backlists. Traditional narration runs around $5,000 and eats roughly 40 hours in the recording booth. That math simply doesn’t work for most of us — which is why fewer than 5% of books ever become audiobooks in the first place.

That’s changing fast, and ElevenLabs is leading the shift.

The platform now offers a dedicated audiobook production suite called Projects, paired with a newer voice...

If you're a horror reader, August is not a month to catch up on your TBR pile — it's a month to watch it grow. Between a landmark anniversary edition from the genre's most recognizable name and a wave of new voices pushing the genre in strange, exciting directions, there's a lot worth talking about this month.

Stephen King's "It" Turns 40

The biggest release of the month isn't new at all — it's a 40th anniversary special edition of Stephen King's "It," out now from Scribner. This isn't a simple...

If you've spent any time on TikTok or YouTube in the last couple of years, you've probably seen the pitch: publish journals and planners on Amazon, no writing skill required, just upload and collect passive income. Some version of this has been sold as a side hustle to thousands of people who have never written a book in their life — and honestly, until recently, it kind of worked.

That's changing fast.

Amazon just rolled out a wave of 2026 policy updates aimed squarely at this exact business...

There used to be two doors. Traditional publishing or self-publishing. You picked one, and the choice defined your career.

That binary is gone.

The line between traditional and indie publishing has blurred more than ever, and the authors navigating it best aren't choosing sides anymore. They're splitting the difference on purpose.

Here's what that looks like in practice: an author licenses print rights to a traditional publisher, who has the distribution muscle to get physical copies onto...

Some stories deserve a second life.

Beautiful Velveteen — Sebastian and Kennedy's story — has just come back into the world completely reworked. This wasn't a light polish. This book went through a full literary overhaul, sharpened line by line until the prose finally matched the intensity of the story I always wanted to tell. If you read the original version, this one will feel familiar and completely new at the same time. If you're coming to it fresh, you're getting the best version of it...

There's a new industry report out, and it's the kind of data that makes you sit back in your chair a little. Fantasy just posted its strongest average sales performance ever recorded. The genre is, by every measure, at its peak. And yet buried in the same report is a number that stopped me cold: YA Paranormal Vampires are down 106% over the past twelve months.

Let that sit for a second. The genre is booming. Vampires are cratering.

So what's actually going on, and what does it mean if vampire...

If you've ever wondered why almost every self-publishing conversation eventually circles back to Amazon, here's the number that explains it: Amazon controls roughly 83% of the US ebook market. Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo — combined — don't come close.

But here's the part that surprises a lot of people, and it's not the part you'd expect. Amazon doesn't win because it pays authors the best rate. In many cases, it doesn't.

Apple Books and Kobo both pay a flat 70% royalty on ebooks...