Over at Lit Mag Labs, they’ve been reporting on the demise of one alternative submission platform and the rise of three new ones this year.
Oleada, a quirky little submission manager that I wrote about awhile ago and even used once or twice, is soon to be no more, at least according to Lit Mag Labs. On the Oleada website, I didn’t see an announcement, but Lit Mag Labs says it will be phased out in February 2026 to be replaced by Ola.
So far, at Ola, I can only see information about the features publishers will have and the pricing publishers pay to host calls for submission there. So far, it’s a little unclear to me how writers will submit work on Ola and how they’ll track their submissions. From their Roadmap page, it looks like it will be six months or more before the site is fully functional, though maybe they’ll have some early adopters up and running before then.
Another new submission platform that is getting some attention isSubfolio, where users can login and where there are several actuve calls for submission, including from magazines like Agni, River Styx, and One Art. A few other publishers have created landing pages but currently don’t have open calls. Lit Mag Labs has a recent interview with the creator, which is especially enlightening for magazine editors. Of course, it is early days, but Subfolio appears to be based on a stable, working prototype and seems to be gaining traction. Publishers can get full details on pricing and features here.
Finally, Lit Mag Labs turned me on to Dapple. Read the Lit Mag Labs interview here. As with Ola, I can see how things are supposed to work for publishers, though I haven’t explored that fully yet, but I can’t see open calls for submission or tell whether those will be hosted at dapple.com or whether magazines will have their calls listed on their website. Will there be a discover feature, as there is on Submittable and Subfolio? Or will writers find calls. Will writers need to set up an account at Dapple to submit? Or will that happen through the publisher’s call. I haven’t had time to explore their site too much yet, so I’m curious how it will work from the writer’s perspective.
Every now and then, I use this blog to post a rant about customer service or tech issues. Since I’ve just spent a good 30 minutes on a chat with Walmart, I thought it might be good to relate my experience here, so apologies in advance for the rant. I hope it might help someone else in a similar situation.
First a little history. Even though I usually try to avoid them, I ordered a $60 item from Walmart because they had a good price. So did one other store, but I would have had to pay shipping and I happened to have Walmart+ so shipping was free. There’s a long story for why I had that, but to keep it short, it involved ordering something else a while ago and accepting a free trial of Walmart+ to get it on time — isn’t that how they get you?
Back to Christmas shopping. I grabbed this Black Friday deal for the free shipping and 1-day delivery (not that I needed it that soon), but the next day instead of delivering it, Walmart cancelled my order, saying it was out of stock at my store and had been scheduled for delivery from the store, even though that wasn’t what I originally chose for a shipping option. Walmart+ should have given me free 2-day shipping
Disappointed, I checked again online and found that the other store no longer had the same deal, but I could order again from Walmart, who seemed to have stock even though they cancelled my order. After searching for anyone else who had the same item at that price and coming up empty, I decided to try ordering again in hopes they would ship from their warehouse if the store didn’t have it in stock. My second order went through, and they showed there were 9 items in stock.
A day later, my order status again changed from shipping to delivery from store, but this time it got stuck on “Assigning a driver” and eventually by evening, the status changed to Delayed, which is where it was stuck this morning. So I decided to try chatting with Customer Support, which was a bust.
To get to Customer Support, I had to view my Purchas History, then View Details on the order that was delayed. On the Details screen there was a link to chat with Customer Support. Initially, I got their AI bot in chat, and it obviously couldn’t handle an issue like mine. After trying it with a few questions and getting nowhere, I decided to try an old trick from automated phone customer service lines. I typed “Representative” in the chat window, and that sent me to an actual person: Isiah.
He or she tried to be helpful, but we didn’t really get anywhere. I did get a little information after half an hour waiting for him to try to find a solution. It does appear that the item exists and is waiting to be delivered. They are trying to find someone to deliver it to my house. I offered to pick it up at my local store or to have it shipped, but they weren’t able to change delivery. That does make me suspect that the item isn’t in my town but is in the next town over, which is about at 20-minute drive for me. Not something I want to do unless it’s the last resort.
Apparently, there is no stock in the warehouse, but there is stock in a local store, so that’s why delivery keeps changing from 1-day shipping to delivery from store. I’d be happy if I got the item within a few days. Standard ground shipping would work for me, but they won’t do that. And they apparently can’t let me pick it up. So I’m stuck in limbo.
Isiah told me that if the item doesn’t arrive by 8pm tonight, I could contact them again and cancel the order. I said I didn’t want to cancel it, but would demand that I get it at the original price. Right now, Walmart lists it for $33 more than I paid. I would consider it bait and switch if I have to pay that much more for an item they canceled twice even though they had it in stock but can’t figure out how to get it to me.
My main takeaway is that I’ve been right to avoid Walmart like the plague all these years, and I’ll try to return to that policy and not be tempted by free shipping offers.
The other takeaway is that you can get to customer service, but often it isn’t easy. Even the chat feature was hard to find, and then I had to deal with a bot before I could type “Representative” to get to an actual person. Next time, if I have to go through all of that again, I’ll ask to speak with a manager, and I might choose the option to have them call me instead of doing it by chat. At least then I’ll be able to express my frustration verbablly and not be held hostage in chat while they put me on hold.
Update: Walmart did come through. My item was delivered this afternoon. Maybe it would have turned out this way even if I hadn’t called customer support, but I have to believe that the squeeky wheel gets the grease and that calling did make this order more or a priority. Of course, none of this would have been a concern if they hadn’t cancelled my initial order and then raised the price after my second order so that I was looking at a steep price increase if it got cancelled again.
Back in 2016, when Barrier Island Suite came out, I did a giveaway on Goodreads with a fair amount of success. Looking back, I gave away five copies and had nearly 500 people sign up to get one. The cost to me was the cost of five copies plus postage. I was okay with that. Did this actually result in sales? I have no way of knowing, but it did get some attention.
This summer, when I went back to Goodreads to set up another give-away for Tree Fall with Birdsong, I was surprised to see that they are now charging a fee to set up a giveaway: $119 or $599 for a premium plan.
Now, you might say that $199 isn’t too much to pay for advertising, but it did give me pause. I’m not planning to make a lot from a poetry collection, and in addition to the fee, it would cost me to provide and mail the books. By my calculus, it wouldn’t be worth it. If I did want to give copies away, there would probably be another way to do it on social media, though in the end, I chose to expend my efforts on in-person and virtual events, as well as interviews on Southern Review of Books and Mississippi Arts Hour. These seemed like better platforms for spreading the word about my book, and I wouldn’t be paying money to a subsidiary of Amazon.
If I were trying to build interest in a blockbuster title, my calculus might have been different. I can even see paying for the premium plan if it were part of a marketing campaign and if my publisher were behind it and willing to give out more copies than I could afford. If this led to more reviews and a greater presence on Goodreads, it might be worth it, especially if my book was the kind of book people care about there. I would want to know that there was an active community of readers who I could reach wiht my investment.
On a related note, I’ve been checking out a couple of other book social media sites, though so far they haven’t impressed me very much. StoryGraph is one that looks promising, but when I search for poetry books, I don’t see very much. They categorize books as either Fiction or Nonfiction, and poetry is a genre under Nonfiction. They claim to be able to find other readers with common interests, but so far, no one comes up for me, and they don’t give me any book recommendations. I suspect that’s because they haven’t figured out poetry yet.
Similarly, I had trouble finding books I’m reading on Page Bound, though it was easy to add them. All I had to do was go to Goodreads and copy the link to the book there, which seemed a little odd since Page Bound is billed as a Goodreads alternative.
I didn’t find a giveaway feature on Page Bond. On StoryGraph, there is one, but I couldn’t see how to sign up as an author or register to do one. I wasn’t too disappointed by that fact, since neither site seems to be all that interested in poets and I susspect that their reader base is more attuned to fiction.
It is always nice to get past the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium at Mississippi University for Women and be able to look back at the fond memories of the weekend. We had lovely weather, as usual for this time of year (though the rain set in Saturday night once everyone was gone), and we had even better company.
The readings were fabulous, starting with Ashley M. Jones, who took us through her four collections. Ashley is always a delight to host, and she focused on poems about family and heritage in connection with our theme, Secrets and Revelations: A Dark Thread Running Through My Story. In her family’s case, that dark thread has more to do with the history they were part of than any personal dark secrets. Here you see Ashley and me at the book signing table after her keynote. Thanks go my former student Magnolia (Jane) Dill, for offering to take the photograph.
Friday morning, we heard from Dr. drea brown, the Welty Prize Winner, whose book Conjuring the Haint looks at haunting in the poetics of Black women, a fitting topic after the previous evening’s reading. Ashley Jones isn’t considered in brown’s book, but who knows, after the symposium maybe they will become better acquainted and brown will consider Jone’s work in another context.
I won’t go through the whole list of writers, but you can watch any of the sessions you missed on our playlist at YouTube. We had a good crowd for each session, and there were some great conversations in the Q&A. Here you see one of our MFA students asking a question of Robert Busby, author of Bodock. It was great to hear fellow poets Kathleen Driskell and Olivia Clare Friedman on Friday, along with Carrie R. Moore, Rickey Fayne, and Addie E. Citchens.
My session was Saturday morning, and I kicked it off at 9:30 reading poems from Tree Fall with Birdsong. I had a good time reading, and I hope the audience enjoyed it as well. I also loved getting to know debut nonfication writer Jordan LaHaye Fontenot through her work, Home of the Happy, as well as being introduced to fellow poet (who is now at Mississippi State) Samyak Shertok through No Rhododendoron and hearing Lauren Rhoades read from her memoir Split the Baby.
Now that the symposium is over, I’m continuing my work on the second edition of A Writer’s Craft. This week’s chapter is the one on poetry, and though that is fun and familiar ground to tread on, I also have so much I want to say and I want it to be just right, so I have plenty of work to do!
And I’m not done with readings yet, either. Coming up next month, I’ll be visiting the Brandon Public Library on Nov. 4 and The Author Shoppe in Hattiesburg on Nov. 15. More on both of those readings soon.
It is time for the 37th annual Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium this week. We have another great line-up this year, and I will be on it. Since I’m on sabbatical, I also won’t be actively serving as director, though I did line up the authors and have helped out as much as I could in the background, so I still count it as my 18th year directing the symposium. My colleague Kris Lee has been taking on the day-to-day operations as acting director since August, though.
As you can see on the flyer, our keynote writer is Alabama’s poet laureate, Ashley M. Jones, who will read from her fabulous new collection Lullaby for the Grieving. Our theme is “Secrets and Revelations: ‘A Dark Thread Running Through My Story,'” which is inspired by Eudora Welty’s novel Losing Battles. The quote is said by the character Miss Gloria, who as an orphan has many unanswered questions about her heritage, themes that Jones takes up in her own way in her poems, mourning the loss of her father and also looking to her ancestors and community.
Other poets include Kathleen Driskell, Olivia Clare Friedman, myself, and Samyak Shertok. We will also hear from drea brown, our Welty Prize scholar whose book Conjuring the Haint explores the importance of haunting in the poetics of Black women.
Novelists include Addie E. Citchens and Rickey Fayne, and Robert Busby and Carrie R. Moore bring short story collections. And finally, Jordan LaHaye Fontenot and Lauren Rhoades will read from their creative nonfiction. We will also hear from the five Ephemera Prize-wining hich school students on Friday afternoon.
I hope you’ll be able to join us for all or part of the symposium, which is free and open to the public. If not, we’ll also live stream the event on our YouTube channel, where sessions will also be archived. I’m excited to joine this wonderfuld group of writers and to read from Tree Fall with Birdsong on Saturday, Oct. 25, at 9:30am.
Today I got a couple of emails reminding me that my WordPress renewal is tomorrow. I thought that was odd, since I’m on auto-renew and don’t have to manually pay my bill. That’s when I noticed the email was from a user at “hosting.com” and the link address was to some long url that wasn’t associated with WordPress at all.
I’m pretty cautious about clicking any links in email, and I was already suspicious from the outset, but it did look like a WordPress reminder. And my renewal is coming up, though not tomorrow, by the way. I went into the app and checked, also checking to make sure my payment info was still correct. Everything is good, and I can delete that email. But first I thought I ought to post about it as a reminder and a warning to other WordPress users.
Of course, one lesson is to never click a link in an email unless you trust the person who sent it to you. Even then, double-check, since it could be someone masquerading as that person or company. I’ve seen this kind of phishing from PayPal and Amazon and countless other places, but this is the first one I’ve noticed that was spoofing WordPress.
So far, I haven’t fallen prey to any phishing attempts, but I’ve known plenty of people who have, even people who are smart enough to be careful. It happened to my mother once, but fortunately she talked to me and we were able to extricate her before any irreparable damage was done. It happened to a colleague whose husband happened to check in on her before she got too deep into a call. I say this because we can all become too stressed out, confused, or just rushed and then do something we regret. The last thing I want to do is to think that it couldn’t happen to me.
But the only way to keep it from happening is to stop and think before clicking, which is not always easy to remember. Look for anything suspicious. Hover your mouse over that link to see if it goes where you think it goes, or better yet, close that email, go to the app or the website and verify for yourself whether there’s anything you need to do. If there is, there will be a notice on your account. An email or text will not be the only way a company will notify you.
Though this attempt at phishing didn’t fool me, I can see how it could. Be careful out there! And stay safe.
Kim and I had a great time visiting Vicksburg this past weekend. The main purpose of the trip was my reading, organized by Lorelei Books at the Old Courthouse Museum during the Bicentennial Fall Flea Market. More on that in a moment, but first, let me tell you that we had a fabulous time and found Vicksburg to be such a charming city. I’d been there once before to read at Lorelei Books and enjoyed the quick trip, but Kim and I had never been there together.
We stayed at Halpino, one of the properties associated with the Duff Green Mansion. It’s a small BnB-style lodging with four or five rooms and a common kitchen area. The furniture was all antique or at least in the style, and though there were a few of the kinds of quirks you expect in a place like that, we had a perfectly wonderful stay. There was no iron or hair dryer, though, so it’s a good thing I brought my clothes for the next day on hangers and Kim packed her blow dryer. There was coffee in the shared kitchen, though you had to get water from your room because there was no sink. That and the code to the front door were things we figured out along with another couple who were staying there, so we got to know them a little more than we would have in a hotel, which was fine. The room was clean and the bed slept well, so really, what more do you need? It was also the least expensive decent room I could find, so I’m not complaining.
In the morning, we went over to Duff Green for the included breakfast, which turned out to be a sit-down 3-course affair that we were served. The food was quite good, and we were seated with another couple and a young woman who was in town for a funeral. There were several other people at our table, but these were the ones we were sitting closest to and with whom we conversed over breakfast. After the meal, we took advantage of the included mansion tour, which really was just of the ground floor rooms, but we learned a bit about the history of the home: for instance, it was at one point a hospital that housed both Union and Confederate troops, which may have saved it from shelling during the siege.
After breakfast we stopped by the bookstore and then headed over to the flea market to have a look around. For an hour or so before the reading, I sat at Lorelei Books’ table and talked to people about Tree Fall with Birdsong. Lorelei’s owner, Kelle, called over a few friends and between them and a few people who wandered by, we rustled up a nice, small crowd for the reading. One draw was that it was indoors in the old courtroom, which was air conditioned. A few people wandered in and out, but several stayed for the full reading and discussion. We talked about the poems, and also about The W’s low-residency MFA program and the Welty Symposium, which I had mentioned in my bio.
Along the way, I met the husband of a former student. The husgand is an architect working on a project to shore up the stone wall around the base of the courthouse lot, and his wife, Tarasa, is now a teacher in the Jackson area. Unfortunattely, she wasn’t able to come along, but it was great to hear what she’s been up to and how successful she’s been in the twenty-five years since she left my classes.
After the reading, we headed downtown to grab a little lunch, though we settled for ice cream from the store where Coke was first bottled. We didn’t tour their Coke museum, but instead headed down the street to the HC Porter Gallery. We probably would have spent more time with Porter’s art, the woman working in the gallery turned out to be an MSMS alumna, so we got to talking about all the latest news from campus. She was a friend of Emma Richardson, so we promised to say hello, and she is also a writer, so we talked to her a bit about the symposium and the MFA program, too.
From there, we went to tour the Vicksburg National Military Park, since we had heard it was still open despite the government shutdown, thanks to a local group that was funding it. There also was no entrance fee, though we donated more than what our fee would have been to the Friends of Vicksburg National Military Park in gratitude.
If you haven’t been to the park, it is definitely worth a visit. We only wish we had left enough time to drive the full 15 miles of park road. We did make it through most of the Union side and to the military cemetery and remains of the USS Cairo, an ironclad wooden battle ship that was sunk in the Mississippi river and thus preserved. Other river battleships were torn apart and used for scrap or repurposed after the war.
We’ll have to return another time to see the rest of the park. We’re already thinking about planning a trip next September for a new art festival that the RC Porter Gallery started this year. It looks like a serious, juried art show with nationally known artists. If that keeps going, it will be a great boon to the arts world in Mississippi. We also met the woman who runs the Catfish Row Museum and would love to go back to visit that, and there was the Manhattan Short Film festival on Saturday night, which we were tempted to stick around to see.
But unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. When the park closed at 5, we headed on back to Columbus, stopping in Clinton for dinner and getting back by about 9pm. It was a quick trip, yet a rewarding one, and a good reminder that we just need to make the effort to do a few more day trips to places we haven’t yet explored in Mississippi, or to go back and explore of the places we have started to get to know.
Let me first say that I love book clubs, and most book clubs are doing fabulous work to get books in front of readers. However, as seems to be the case everywhere these days, there seem to be a few bad operators that are taking advantage of this great work to get money from unsuspecting writers.
I encountered a situation like this recently when Robert from the London Wine and Dine Book Club contacted me about possibly using Tree Fall with Birdsong for their club. I have to say I was suspicious from the outset because unless it is a poetry book club, these clubs usually don’t go for poetry. I also didn’t see why a book club in London would be interested. Still, he gave a flattering, if somewhat general, reading of the book, and I decided to at least explore a little further. And I have had some good experiences with an international group who wrote me out of the blue.
My first step was to see if the book club really existed. A search led me to a couple of listings on an events page for upcoming meetings, and I didn’t see any mention of them as a scam or of bad experiences in my searching. Willing to check it out a little further, yet still with my hackles up, I replied to the email and said I might be interested. One thing I didn’t do was to give Robert any more information than he already had, judging by what he’d written to me. I did indicate that I was doing some remote events already and was comfortable with that format.
Robert wrote back very quickly, thanking me for my interest and saying that the next step would be to “creating a clear strategy for how best to introduce your collection to our readers.” This was one of the red flags I was looking for. He suggested talking abou this, so when I replied, in addition to suggesting a few times when I would be available by Zoom or other video conferencing platforms, I wrote about my research on the availability of my book in London (two stores list it, though both would have to special order). I also suggested that he was looking at purchasing copies for the club, I could put him in touch with my publisher, and I mentioned that as this is a small press publication, there was no marketing budget for the book.
I haven’t heard back from Robert since, so I suspect that either my reluctance to spend on marketing or the fact that my book isn’t readily available overseas probably cooled his interest. I suspect it was the latter, though I was a little surprised he didn’t try to sell me on whatever marketing scheme he had in mind. That’s what I’d been concerned about from the beginning, so I wasn’t too surprised that this didn’t turn out to be anything very promising. It certainly wasn’t anything I would invest in, though as I said, I would be happy to provide information for marketing.
Coincidentally, a few days later I read an Author’s Guild discussion about this very issue. Apparently, fake or at least unscrupulous book club organizers have started reaching out to authors to offer marketing services to their book clubs. I assume these come with hefty fees and the promise of sales to the club. Maybe some are legit, but many writers on the discussion suspected they were being taken for a ride. I don’t know that anyone had actually given money for this, but they were at least tired of receiving this kind of solicitation.
Fortunately, for those of us who also make offers to authors to participate in events, the advice for screening out the scam artists from the legitimate offers is fairly simple. The more specific the offer is, the better. Someone who tells you what date an event will take place, what you’ll be paid (if there’s an honorarium), and details about history of their event is much more believable. If you get an offer without these details, tread carefully.
Recently, I received another kind of solicitation. This was from someone who claimed to want to represent me, not as an agent but as someone who could help me navigate submissions and get speaking engagements and such. They seemed iffy to me, and it’s not something I want to do a lot more of than I already do, so I ignored it. If I had read about the book club scam before I got that email, I probably would have ignored it, too. As it was, I wrote a couple of emails and didn’t give out any information or commit to any marketing plan. The most I lost was a little time. I hadn’t even gotten my hopes up that it would pan out to be anything, so I wasn’t even disappointed when it didn’t. I just chalked it up as another learning experience.
I don’t know for a fact that Robert or the London Wine and Dine Book Club aren’t legit, of course, though I do believe, since he stopped writing as soon as I mentioned not having a marketing budget, I dodged a bullet.
I want to start this post with a few words about reading at Bookends in Pontotoc, Mississipp last Saturday, my last reading of September. It was a busy month with the Mississippi Book Festival and another trip to Jackson to meet a class at Millsaps and read to the MUW Alumni Association. Read on to hear what it’s like to read in a small-town Mississippi Bookstore and learn more about my next reading in Vicksburg on Oct. 4.
It was a beautiful fall day, which meant I had a lovely drive through back roads of Mississippi to get from Columbus to Pontotoc. Alt 45 from West Point, up Hwy 245 to Ocolona, then 41 through Troy to the west side of Pontotoc, if you want to know my route. There were goldenrod blooming in the ditches and fields. The leaves haven’t started to turn (this is the South, after all), but the sun was golden and the sky was a clear blue.
I got to town a little early, not wanting to cut it too close since I haven’t been to Bookends before. That gave me a chance to drive by Pontotoc’s lovely farmer’s market that was just about to close up shop. I didn’t stop to look for anything, since I’d already shopped the Hitching Lot Farmer’s Market in Columbus and anything I got would have to sit in a hot car for a couple of hours. I parked by the store and even had enough time to walk down Main street a bit, where I saw a couple of antique stores, boutiques, restaurants, and the Pontotoc Community Theatre. It would be worth going back to explore when I have a little more time.
Bookends is a lovely little bookstore with two levels of books. I didn’t get a chance to explore all that much, since my signing was set to start at 11 when they opened, but I did see their display of local and Mississippi authors featuring my book, Gerry Wilson, and Robert Busby.
They had me set up at a table with a table cloth made out of pages cut from a book. A little boy ,who came to the store with his mother, asked if those were pages from my book, but I assured him they weren’t. His mother had seen me at Possumtown Book Fest and came by to say hi and to get her copy of Attached to the Living World signed. I’d already signed Tree Fall with Birdsong for her back in August. She and her son and daughter didn’t stay for the reading, though I imagine that would have been a challenge for the youngsters. Maybe next time, when we’re all a little older!
There was a small crowd for the reading: a local woman who’s working on a book of fiction or nonfiction, another local woman (I think) who said she saw my post on Instagram that morning, a young guy who was maybe in college or just out of collete, one of the owners and her husband and the young woman behind the cash register.
This was about what I expected, and in fact, I was pretty pleased to have that many people come out on a Saturday morning in a town of about 5,000 to listen to a poet they don’t know. We had a good conversation both before and after the reading.
The woman writing a book wanted to talk about her book and her writing process, which was fine. She’s doing many of the right things, like interviewing women from her church to get more background on the stories she wants to tell. I suggested she might want to give them copies of what she wrote down, so they would have those stories for their families if they want them. She’ll likely not use the actual stories, but draw on elements from several of them and combine them in new ways to create a fictional past that is reflective of the actual past. It seems like she has a lot to work with, both from her own history and the ones she’s researching.
We also talked a fair amount about working with lines in poetry and what I’m trying to do in the poems I read. And there was interest in The W’s low-residency MFA program, so I was glad I brought along a few brochures.
You never know where a small and intimate reading like this might lead, whether that is someone who gets interested in your writing program, or who thinks about buying one of your other books, or who tells someone else about the reading, maybe shares a poem or gets another copy for someone as a gift. The point, as I said on Saturday, is to get the poems out in the air where they can live and breathe, and where they can take on a life of their own.
I’ll also be happy if these folks become customers of Bookends and maybe send some of their friends that way. I do readings, not just to sell books, but to support local bookstores and develop community, which is one of the reasons the two sisters who opened Bookends decided to open up their store. Both were having a bit of a rough week, with some health issues for a family member, so they couldn’t both be there. I’m sorry about that and hope things will be getting better for them soon!
Next Saturday, October 4, I’ll be in Vicksburg for a reading at 1pm at the Old Courthouse Museum. I have a feeling that’s a pretty big space, so I hope we get a few more people to come out, though I’m always happy to read, whether there is 1 or 100 in the audience. I’m happier if there’s more than one, but I’ve done a reading when it was essentially the bookstore owner, one friend, and some of my own family who were in the room, so I’m not lying when I say I’ll read no matter the size of the crowd! Thanks to Lorelei Books of Vicksburg who helped to organize this. There’s a Bicentennial Flea Market going on that day, so hopefully that will draw plenty of people and a few will be curious enough to see what a poet has to say!
I’m only sorry that I won’t be reading at the bookstore, though reading at the museum is a much better choice for this day. Lorelei Books has a wonderful space for readings and they are such gracious hosts. I still fonly remember my reading there when Barrier Island Suite came out, so I’m very glad I get to go back. I will definitely stop by the store at some point next Saturday to see how it looks these days, though Lorelei will also have a booth at the Flea Market, so I’ll spend some time there, as well. Stop by and see me at the booth, and if you can stick around for the reading at 1, that would be wonderful!
And if I don’t see you in Vicksburg, maybe I’ll see you at the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium or at another bookstore near you!
No, I’m not talking about the newest ways writers can use AI (just don’t, if you ask me), but rather on the latest developments for writers whose work has been or could be used for AI training, including for me. That was too long for a title, though, so apologies if you came here looking for some other news.
I recently signed my first-ever AI opt-in addendum with Bloomsbury for the eventuality that they negotiate a deal or deals to use A Writer’s Craft in AI training. I was a little surprised to get this, and didn’t have a lot of time to consider it, but fortunately, I’ve been aware of what’s going on enough that I could make my decision. This doesn’t mean that my textbook will be used for AI training, but if does mean that my publisher can negotiate subsidiary rights to do that. Likely, this would be one on behalf of all their titles or at least a subset of their titles that the AI company is interested in. Bloomsbury also made it clear that opting in would likely make your title more accessible to AI search and other uses of AI that would make it more visibile in the future.
But why would I opt in if I’m opposed to AI? I will say that I’m not 100% opposed to its use for things like research where it could be very helpful. I am opposed to creative writers relying on it, though. And I’m opposed to the current AI engines because they have been trained on databases of pirated texts. I don’t trust AI, but I also don’t think they should be making billions when they have essentially stolen the content they used to get where they are.
Licensing agreements are one way that authors can get paid for the use of their work. They are also a way for publishers to enforce certain restrictions about how the work can be used, so that it can’t be used to create a competing work, for instance. Because licensing could lead to some income for writers and because it can also lead to some protections for writers and publishers, I support it. The opt-in addendum only means that my book will be considered for this, but it’s a starting point.
The Author’s Guild has advocated for these kinds of agreements, and I can see why, collectively, they see them as the best legal means to protect authors’ rights going forward. They have also been involved in lawsuits with AI companies, and have recently reported a settlement agreement with Anthropic where each author whose work appeared in the pirated databases they used would be paid $3000 compensation per title.
Oddly enough, this could affect me as well. This summer, I was surprised to learn that my third poetry collection Barrier Island Suite was included in one of the pirated databases they used. I suppose I shouldn’t have been, since a Google alert I have on myself had periodically turned up links to pirated copies of the book. I initially alerted my publisher, though I don’t know that they ever did anything about it.
Whether I’ll ever see my $3000 remains to be seen (probably minus legal fees, etc, so it might end up buying me a sixpack or two if I get it). That will depend on whether it is determined that my title was one of those actually used. A while back I reported it as one that appears on a list of titles in the database, but I don’t know more than that. It also depends on whether my publisher ever registered the copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office, which I believe they were supposed to do, but some publishers rely on only registering the ISBN and listing a copyright notice in the book. So if Texas Review Press didn’t dot all its i’s and cross all its t’s, I could be out that money. Or my contract may specify that only a portion of subsidiary rights goes to me, and I might not see much, if anything.
Still, it’s gratifying to know that some writers are getting compensation from at least one company. And it’s likely more settlements will follow. $3000 per title may seem like a pittance, but with the sheer number of titles included in these databases, which could number in the millions, the payout would be astronomical. Not all titles will meet the criteria for being included, though. Books must have an ISBN or ASIN have been registered with the copyright office in time, and it’s estimated that about 500,000 will qualify. The total payout is reported to be $1.5 billion.
There are, of course, many other AI companies, but hopefully this settlement will set a precedent that authors and publishers need to be paid for the use of their work. I don’t expect to get rich off of selling AI training rights to my work, but I also don’t like to see companies get rich by stealing access to the words and ideas of human writers, especially when they have been stealing that access in order to train a technology that could make our words less valuable.
I personally don’t believe that project will be completely successful, since I believe in the value of human expression over AI-generated expression. But writers will be in competition with AI for the attention of readers, some of whom might be satisfied with the predicatable and formulaic output of a machine as opposed to the often messy, unpredictable writing the emanates from the human experience.
Kendall Dunkelberg 