Self-published authors among award nominees

Several self-published authors have been recognised in Australian book awards over the past few months.

Three self-published titles are shortlisted for the 2023 Aurealis Awards: MEAT4BURGERS (Christof Bogacs & Beck Kubrick) is up for best graphic novel/illustrated work; and Tansy Rayner Roberts is up for best fantasy novel for Of Knives and Night-Blooms, and best science fiction novel for Time of the Cat. The winners will be announced this month.

Ian Broinowski is longlisted for the 2024 Dick and Joan Green Family Award for Tasmanian History, worth $25,000, for his book Dogs in Van Diemen’s Land: The adorable, the mischievous and the downright nasty (Ian Broinowski, self-published). The illustrated title tells the story of the early colonial Tasmanian community’s love for dogs through newspaper articles, drawings, stories and paintings. The winner of the award will be announced in June.

Author and illustrator Paridhi P Apte was longlisted in the picture book category for the inaugural DANZ (Diversity in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand) Children’s Book Award, for Maharaja’s Quest. Apte’s book follows Maharaja Vamana, the glorious yet selfish king of Ananthi Kingdom, India, on his quest for a son.

SPN to pause operations, gauge ‘ongoing viability’

The board of the Small Press Network (SPN) has announced it will halt operations and social media for two months as it seeks to gauge the ongoing viability of the network, reports Books+Publishing.

The board of the Small Press Network, which runs the annual Independent Publishing Conference in Melbourne, said in a letter to supporters and members that although it had an increase in member numbers during the pandemic, membership had subsequently dropped and that since the pandemic SPN had ‘worked from a challenging financial position where the costs of operations have outstripped our revenue’. As well as a decline in membership, the board said the costs of delivering the annual conference via a hybrid live/online format had also eroded SPN’s financial position.

Former publishing executives launch profit-share venture

In the US, three former high-level staff from Penguin Random House (PRH) and Macmillan launched a new publishing company, Authors Equity

Authors Equity’s will ‘operate outside of traditional publishing business models, offering no advances but paying authors a high percentage of a book’s profits’, according to Publishers Weekly. Its stated core principles include ‘aligned incentives’, with the publisher stating that its profit-share model ‘rewards authors who want to bet on themselves’. As well as authors investing in their work, ‘profit participation is also an option for key members of the book team, so we’re in a position to win together’.

Former PRH US CEO Madeline McIntosh, former Macmillan CEO Don Weisberg, and former PRH US president and director of strategic development US Nina von Moltke are the co-founders of the company. Authors James Clear, Tim Ferriss and Louise Penny are among the five authors who are investors in the company, and an announcement from the publisher said Clear would publish future books with Authors Equity.

Inkitt secures funding for AI-powered publishing; HarperCollins partners with AI audio company

Self-described data-driven publishing company Inkitt has raised US$37 million (A$56.5m) to fund an expansion into AI-generated books, audiobooks, video, and games, reported Publishers Weekly (PW).

Since launching in Berlin in 2013 as a platform for self-published writers, the company has attracted a total of US$117 million (A$179m) in investments, with the Financial Times naming it the eighth fastest-growing company in Europe and the number one fastest-growing company in Germany. In 2022 it opened new headquarters in San Francisco.

Among the investors are Stefan von Holtzbrinck, the owner of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which owns Macmillan, and former Penguin CEO Michael Lynton.

Like Wattpad, Inkitt takes in self-published authors and publishes user-generated content, with readers able to access free stories, subscribe to new content, and follow and create a community around an author, with much of the work falling into mass-market genres including crime, erotica, fantasy, romance, science fiction and thrillers. ‘Inkitt, then, crunching data and employing proprietary algorithms, determines which work has the most commercial potential,’ said PW. ‘That work is then promoted and sold on the company’s Galatea platform.’

Inkitt said it has 33 million users and, on its website, claimed that ‘one of every two authors published on Galatea go on to become bestsellers’. ‘The company does not reveal by what metric they determine a book to be a bestseller, though the publisher states that it has had titles that have generated more than $1 million in revenue’, said PW, which reported the company plans to use its new financing to develop AI-generated and personalised fiction using large language models such as ChatGPT and Anthropic, and DeepL for machine translation, as well as to develop AI-generated audiobooks, videos, and games. It already offers AI-powered features, including a ‘Choose Your Own Narrator’ audiobook option, character chatbot, graphic novels generator, and summary tool.

Another AI-related story to come from overseas was the news HarperCollins is partnering with US-based audio AI company ElevenLabs to create audiobooks for its non-English language business.

According to the Bookseller, ElevenLabs’ text-to-speech technology will be used to create audio versions of select ‘deep backlist’ series books. ElevenLabs claims its AI-based tool makes it possible to ‘reflect the emotion, intonation, and pacing of the written word in audio, delivering a high-quality experience that sounds human’.

ElevenLabs was founded in 2002 by ex-Google machine learning engineer Piotr Dabkowski and former Palantir strategist Mati Staniszewski. The company said its Projects tool, designed for publishers and independent authors, can create an audiobook in around one hour, with creators able to ‘select or design the voices they want to use, easily assign specific text fragments to particular speakers, and adjust pause lengths between text segments’.

HarperCollins said it will ‘continue to devote time and resources to voice actor-led productions, which are intrinsic to its current audiobook creation strategy’. ‘Text to speech will be leveraged as a complementary tool to enable a broader number of audiobooks for backlist series books in non-English markets, leading to a more diverse selection of titles in the format and driving growth in the audiobook markets,’ the publisher said.

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