Union Square & Co. has launched Singularity, a new line of paperback novellas led by Union Square editorial director Mika Kasuga. They plan to publish “10-12 titles each year” of “high-impact, one-sitting fiction.”
Works of genre interest scheduled for Fall 2026 include Zero Lives Remaining by Adam Cesare, a new edition of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison, and The Waiter by Kwan Ann Tan. Those scheduled for early 2027 include You Just Have to Ask Me by Hadeer Elsbai, The Upper Tentacle by Amanda Helms, Sweet Saints by Cassandra Khaw, and Shouting Distance by Cherie Priest.
Senior vice president and publisher at Union Square Emily Meehan said,
The Singularity program was born out of conversations Mika and I had about reduced attention spans and the desire for more a more snack-sized reading experience that doesn’t compromise depth for length. We wanted to celebrate the novella as a format and use the program as yet another platform to showcase Union Square’s commitment to create books that resonate deeply with readers—especially ones looking for accessible, sophisticated stories in our ever more distracted, digital reality.
For more information, see the official announcement.
WENDY N. WAGNER is stepping down as editor-in-chief of Nightmare Magazine and senior editor of Lightspeed “to focus on her own writing.” Founding editor John Joseph Adams will resume the role at Nightmare starting with the January 2027 issue; in her place, associate publisher Christie Yant will assume the role of senior editor.
BOOKS SOLD
C. RHOAD ELLIS sold The Poison Vein, first in the Saga of Ruined Saints trilogy, with two more books to Anne Groell at Del Rey via James McGowan of BookEnds. UK rights sold to Delayna Spencer
GRACE D. LI sold You Bring Death to Our Shores, “an epic told in two timelines, the Trojan War and the Greek afterlife,” and another book to Ruoxi Chen while at Tor via Kate Schafer Testerman of kt literary. Stephanie Stein will edit for Wildthorn. UK rights sold to Daphne Tonge and Davi Lancett at Daphne Press (UK).
REBECCA TEMPLETON’s Lochbound, “a reimagining of The Little Mermaid set in 18th-century Scotland,” went to Jessica Case at Pegasus via Jessica Purdue at Little, Brown UK.
CHARLOTTE IDYLLWILD’s historical fantasy The Bottom of the Library and another book sold to Nate Lanman at Del Rey via Lauren Bajek of Liza Dawson Associates. UK rights went to Kate McHale at Del Rey UK.
MILES LYON sold The Price of Fear, first in a trilogy, and two more titles to Joe Monti at Saga Press via John Baker of Bell Lomax Moreton Agency. UK rights sold to Jorgie Bain at Michael Joseph.
CATELYN WILSON sold two dark fantasies to Rebecca Hilsdon at Michael Joseph via Stevie Finegan of Zeno Agency.
RICARDO MENÉNDEZ SALMÓN’s Ark, “blending noir, speculative fiction and metaphysical mystery,” went to Brian Etling at Knopf via Cristina Hidalgo of Grupo Planeta.
Helen Knott (2024)
JUSTIN SLOAN sold “military progression fantasy” Yokai Protocol to Daniel Ehrenhaft at Blackstone Publishing via Connor Smith of Hesperides Literary.
L.K. STEVENS’s The Kindling, “pitched as Fahrenheit 451 for the ChatGPT generation,” sold to Daniel Ehrenhaft at Blackstone Publishing at auction via Chloe Seager of Madeleine Milburn Literary Agency. UK rights went to Charlotte Trumble at Voyager UK.
JASON KASPER’s The Vesper Hour, “first in a post-apocalyptic thriller series,” and at least one other book sold to Andrew Watts at Severn River. Catherine Streissguth will edit.
HELEN KNOTT sold The Dreams We Remember and another title to Janice Zawerbny at Harper Canada at auction via Carolyn Forde of Transatlantic Literary Agency.
P.C. VERRONE’s The Blond, “a genre-bending historical thriller following queer communities from the 18th century and into the 22nd,” went to Elizabeth Pankova at Catapult via Alyssa Jennette of Stonesong.
P.C. Verrone (2025)
ALBERTO LAISECA’s Los Sorias, “pitched as the Latin American Gravity’s Rainbow,” translated by Max Lawton, sold to Will Evans and Sarah McEachern at Deep Vellum via Zacarías Lara Peláez of Barrett.
M. JOHN HARRISON’s post-apocalyptic adventure The End of Everything, “set in a drowned world where government barely functions and entire continents have been mislaid,” went to Parisa Ebrahimi at Riverhead via PJ Mark of Janklow & Nesbit on behalf of Will Francis. UK rights sold to Serpent’s Tail
JENNIFER DIARENZO sold An Act of Flesh and Fins, “in which a scorned marine biologist becomes queen of a hidden mermaid kingdom beneath the Bermuda Triangle,” to Lynn McNamee at Red Adept via Lindsay Guzzardo of Keystone Literary Agency.
M. John Harrison (2022)
JESSICA WIDNER sold In Residence, a ghost story about a married couple in Edinburgh who start an artist residency in a remote, luxurious house, to Caroline Zancan at Mariner at auction via Kate Johnson of Wolf Literary Services. UK rights went to Jenna Gordon at Verve Books, and Canadian rights to Shivaun Hearne at House of Anansi.
KEVIN MACK sold Glide Ratio, set in an alternate 1937 where Jim Crow rules the south and Florida is an independent nation, to Geoff Habiger at Shadow Dragon Press.
OFELIA J. VAZQUEZ sold fantasy Grave of Petals, “loosely inspired by the Mexican Revolution,” to Michael Kist at Bindery Books via Miriam Cortinovis of Ki Agency.
Ofelia J. Vazquez (2024)
JACK SHERWIN writing as JKSMANGA sold Return of the Legendary Dragon, “in which a sickly young man becomes host to the soul of an ancient dragon and enters a deadly game that the government has rigged against the underclass,” and two more books to Rhett Bruno at Aethon & Vault via M.H.F. Saint of Achilles Literary Agency. The First Vampire Punisher by Sherwin and L.E. GRAVES plus two more books also went to Bruno at auction via Saint.
BROOKE ABRAMS’s Annie Torres Checks In, “pitched as Jane the Virgin meets Practical Magic,” went to Selena James at Lake Union Publishing via Joanna MacKenzie of Nelson Literary Agency. Pippa White will edit.
GWENDOLYN WOMACK sold The Last Immortal, the final book in the Last Labyrinth duology, and another title to Elizabeth Agyemang at 47North via Alec Shane of Writers House.
KELLIE WALLACE’s Heavenly Bodies went to Jean Lowd at Creative James.
SARAH FOX sold Barking in a Winter Wonderland to Sara Porter at Severn House via Jessica Faust of BookEnds (world English).
TANYA GUERRERO sold Meet Me in the Future, “about a time-traveling Soviet space dog,” and another title to Wendy Wong at Bantam Dell via Amy Bishop-Wycisk of Trellis Literary Management.
SEREN ROSE sold “siren-pirate romantasy” The Song of Salt and Shadow and another title to Juliana Nador at Simon Maverick for six figures at auction via Angie Ojeda Hazen of Lunar Literary Agency.
ELIZABETH HELEN sold Her Dark Empire, first in a trilogy “set in a world ravaged by storms and divided by magic,” and two more titles to Christa Desir at Bloom Books via Susan Velazquez Colmant at JABberwocky Literary Agency. Kylie Hagmann will edit.
JESSIE SYLVA’s My Big Fat Halfling Wedding went to Tiana Coven at Orbit and Jenni Hill at Orbit UK via Maeve MacLysaght of Aevitas Creative Management.
PIXIE RELLA sold Blackheart, “first in a romantasy trilogy following a seamstress for the army and prisoner condemned for a crime she didn’t commit,” and two more books to Marilyn Kretzer at Blackstone Publishing for six figures via Jeanne De Vita of Martin-Newens Literary Management. UK rights sold to Rebecca Hilsdon at Michael Joseph via Stevie Finegan of Zeno Agency on behalf of JABberwocky Literary Agency.
RY HERMAN sold This Fairy Stabs Everyone, “based on the Kalevala, an epic poem recounting the myths and folktales of Finland,” to Katy Nishimoto at Dial Press via Michelle Hauck of Storm Literary Agency.
FINNEGAN MARCH’s “dark sapphic fantasy” What Crawls from the Forest went to Katie McGuire at Alcove Press via Katie Blagden of The Ampersand Agency.
MAX WALKER sold Dating & Dragons to Thaisheemarie Fantauzzi Pérez at Alcove Press via Kirsten Lang of Zeno Agency.
SAMANTHA DEVEREAUX’s Healer’s Touch and two more titles in the Gifted Legacy fantasy romance series sold to Ajebowale Roberts at Macmillan via Stevie Finegan of Zeno Agency.
DANI RAANAN sold The Crafter’s Wife to Ian Whates at NewCon Press via John Jarrold of John Jarrold Literary Agency.
JENNA LEVINE sold Accidental Main Character and another title to Kristine Swartz at Berkley via Gaia Banks of Sheil Land Associates.
MEGHAN LE FAY sold Twisted Fates, “a series of interconnected yet standalone dark fairy tale retellings,” and two more books to Meredith Wild at Page & Vine via Diego Harrison of SBR Media.
E.A. Noble (2020s)
E.A. NOBLE sold “sapphic dark fantasy” Blessed Be the Fall, following an immortal mermaid and a priestess, to Cassandra Thompson at Quill & Crow.
HAYLEY REESE CHOW’s House of the Chosen, a dark fantasy with a side of romance, went to Cassandra Thompson at Quill & Crow via Kristen Terrette of Martin-Newens Literary Management. Lisa Morris will edit.
HEATHER HEAL’s Crown of Void and Starlight went to Lisa Green at City Owl Press.
H.M. WOLFE resold originally self-published The Book of Cin and Blood Rains Down and sold an untitled third book to Sarah McCabe at Scarlett Press via Angie Ojeda Hazen of Lunar Literary Agency.
NOAH BODIE sold I Think I’m in Love With the Villain’s Son to Lisa Green at City Owl Press.
CHRISTA CARMEN’s Threshing Rock, “in which a pregnant doomsday prepper/influencer discovers her every fear can be banished via a ritual atop a threshing rock,” and another title went to Mika Kasuga at Union Square & Co at auction via Jill Marr of Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.
REBECCA MAHONEY’s Otherling, “pitched for fans of Jordan Peele’s Us and Severance,” sold to Olivia Zavitson at Hyperion Avenue via Michaela Whatnall of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret.
CARLIE ST. GEORGE sold We Were Meant to Rot, “in which a distraught mother embarks on the last road trip she’ll ever take with the body of her dead daughter,” and another title to Rachel Gilmer at Poisoned Pen Press at auction via Lucienne Diver of The Knight Agency.
V. CASTRO sold “erotic horror Latinx novel” Jaguar Nights to Christoph Paul at Clash via Jessica Berg of Rosecliff Literary
ERIK HANSON’s Wake the Mariner, in which an expedition to the wreck of the Titanic inadvertently frees an ancient vampire from its grave, sold to Michael Dolan at Winding Road Stories.
ROBIN BECKER sold “Southern gothic horror” Dear Connie to Dan Franklin at Cemetery Dance via Connor Smith of Hesperides Literary.
WENDY DALRYMPLE sold Liquid Gold, in which a young mother becomes trapped in a cult of lactation specialists, to Cassandra Thompson at Quill & Crow.
SHANNON IVES’s We Have Ruined Each Other with Our Love, “pitched as Lovecraft meets Little House on the Prairie,” went to Alexandra Murphy at Page Street Horror via John Baker of Bell Lomax Moreton Agency.
ARIES AMIAN sold Boycraft, “a Filipino folkloric retelling of Frankenstein through the hands of a trans girl,” to Alexandra Murphy at Page Street Horror.
Mathew L Reyes’s Its Hour Come Round at Last sold to Cassandra Thompson at Quill & Crow. Lisa Morris will edit.
SANDRA BECERRIL sold The Unspeakable to Cassandra Thompson at Quill & Crow. A.L. Garcia will edit.
RAMSEY CAMPBELL sold Embrace the Dark to Don D’Auria at Flame Tree Press via John Jarrold at John Jarrold Literary Agency (world English).
EMILY SHINER sold My Summer Camp Slasher to Ariana Sinclair at William Morrow via Logan Harper of Jane Rotrosen Agency.
DENNIS MAHONEY’s Dear Demon, “about the cat-and-mouse game of a battle-hardened exorcist and the demon desperate to possess her,” sold to Taz Urnov at Hell’s Hundred via Stacia Decker of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.
STEPHANIE SANDERS-JACOB’s Nothing Gentle Walks Here went to Cassandra Thompson at Quill & Crow. Lisa Morris will edit.
DANE ERBACH’s Skitters sold to Cassandra Thompson at Quill & Crow.
HOLLY HAMMOND’s Doll Eyes sold to Cassandra Thompson at Quill & Crow. Lisa Morris will edit.
SHAWN SELDERS sold Shark Rising to Marcia Markland at Crooked Lane via Jess Gilbert of D4EO Literary Agency.
STACI LAYNE WILSON’s short story collection The World’s Oldest Baby went to Jarret Keene at Dark Wolf.
BLAINE DAIGLE sold The Devil’s Keeper to Rhett Bruno at Wicked House. Andrew Najberg will edit.
AMBER HAMILTON’s “dark academia romantasy Little Mermaid retelling” Three Wicked Lies sold to Mary Kate Castellani at Bloomsbury Children’s via Caitlin Blasdell of Liza Dawson Associates.
LINDSAY RIBAR sold We Brought Her Back, in which a girl resurrects her girlfriend but learns “that the demon who caused her death has hitched a ride back to the land of the living,” to Clare Vaughn at Avon A via Brenda Bowen of The Book Group.
HAILIE KEI’s Tokyo Shadow Games, about a group of teens taken to a parallel Tokyo and forced to compete in a tournament to win a wish from the gods and a chance to go home, went to Lauren Knowles at Page Street Kids via Saffron Dodd of ASH Literary.
ANNA MERCIER’s YA fantasy romance Scatter the Night sold to Carina Licon at Holt Children’s via Michaela Whatnall of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret.
BRANDIE JUNE sold “dark gothic Slavic fairy tale” Ruler of the Dead City and an untitled standalone to Tamara Grasty at Page Street Kids in a pre-empt via Connor Smith and Jennifer Pien of Hesperides Literary.
GINA BANKS sold debut novel We Have So Many Problems, “pitched as The Martian but with kissing,” and another title to Ghjulia Romiti at Forever at auction via Joanna MacKenzie of Nelson Literary Agency. UK rights went to Sanah Ahmed at Orion in a pre-empt.
TYLER WEST’s debut novel A Covenant of Starlight sold to Delayna Spencer at Hodderscape via Daisy Arendell of CAA.
IRIS ANDERSI’s debut “cozy fantasy” Potions Unincorporated, “following a chronically ill witch who sells her excess pain management potions to a greedy corporation” until the company pushes her too far, sold to Thaisheemarie Fantauzzi Pérez at Alcove Press via Mara Hollander of Azantian Literary Agency.
NATALIE S. PAGOLA sold debut, “cozy fantasy” The Garden of Otherworldly Delights to Maya Guthrie at Little, Brown in a pre-empt via Andie Smith of Creative Media Agency.
ANNEKE SCHWOB sold debut, “queer fantasy… with a folk horror flavor” and another title to John Morgan at Grand Central and Jenni Hill at Orbit UK in a pre-empt via Martha Perotto-Wills of David Higham Associates. Cassie DeNicola will edit for Grand Central.
LARA SLABBER’s debut, post-apocalyptic romance Zombies to Lovers and another book went to Jess Verdi and Eugenie Szwalek at Afterglow via Saskia Leach of Kate Nash Literary Agency UK.
SOPHIA ZHAO sold debut, supernatural horror Sleeping Beasts and another book to Angelica Chong at Run For It at auction via Paul Lucas of Regal Hoffmann & Associates.
ANDREA ANDERSON’s debut They’ll Eat You Alive sold to Olivia Zavitson at Hyperion Avenue via Aurora Fernandez of Trident Media Group.
LIZ PINTO’s debut Melbourgh Manor, “pitched as The Housemaid meets The Haunting of Bly Manor,” went to Cassandra Thompson at Quill & Crow.
TERI DEDERER’s debut young adult romantic fantasy Feast of Hearts sold to Mallory Kass at Scholastic via Alexandra Machinist of CAA. UK rights sold to Tom Bonnick at Harper Fire.
ADWITIYA CHOWDHURY sold debut romantasy We Burn by Starlight, “inspired by Indian mythology,” to Lauren Knowles at Page Street Kids via Kristina Pérez of Pérez Literary & Entertainment on behalf of Anuj Bahri of Red Ink Literary Agency.
MIA DALIA sold “sapphic horror novella” A Witch to Live to David-Jack Fletcher at Slashic Horror Press.
BOOKS RESOLD
LIV ZANDER’s previously self-published duology Crown Me Dead and Crown Me Yours resold to Lisa Yoskowitz at Requited at auction via Pete Knapp and Stuti Telidevara of Park, Fine & Brower Literary Management. UK rights went to Kate Byrne at HQ at auction via Safae El-Ouahabi of Rogers, Coleridge & White on behalf of Olivia Malesco at Park, Fine & Brower Literary Management.
GUILLERMO DEL TORO and CHUCK HOGAN resold previously serialized “fairy-tale thriller” The Boy in the Iron Box, “soon to be a Netflix movie,” to Joe Monti at Saga Press via Richard Abate at 3 Arts Entertainment.
B. CELESTE resold Not Another Vampire Romance to Puffin UK on behalf of Kim Ryan of Penguin Young Readers.
PUBLISHING
LISA GREEN has been promoted to senior editor at City Owl Press.
KIRSIAH DEPP has been promoted to senior editor at Grand Central
MEDIA
Film rights to REBECCA YARROS’s forthcoming Peculiar Stars, “for development as a series,” went to Apple TV in a pre-empt via Weintraub Tobin and Untitled Entertainment on behalf of The Fury Agency. Yarros’s Full Measures Productions will be executive producer.
The HWA (Horror Writers Association) has undergone several changes throughout August and early September. Many of these changes were announced via video message by the organization’s president, Lisa Wood, as well as a September 6 text update on their Facebook page.
Due to timing conflicts with World Fantasy convention, the HWA general meeting has been moved to 3:30pm, October 3.
Wood stated, “We have dissolved the Executive Director position and will now be taking strides to determine how to move forward with the very good work that needs to be done from a position like that but from a different trajectory and a different focus as it suits our organization.” Following this, it appears that Maxwell Gold is no longer the HWA Executive Director.
Michael Bailey has been brought on as the organization’s new Treasurer. He has begun posting information of HWA finances on their Facebook page.
The HWA has made the text of their “standard Non-Disclosure Agreement for HWA Volunteers, Trustees, and Executive Officers” public.
The HWA has dissolved it’s Grievance Committee. They stated that “In conversation with MWA, SFWA, and our attorney, it was made clear to us that any HWA Grievance Committee had no legal standing and the committee we had in place did not make that clear.”
Sèphera Girón has been removed from the HWA board of trustees. This comes following backlash to her opinion piece published in the HWA newsletter, which condemed anti-AI “gatekeepers.” The HWA board stated that, “the column in question fails to uphold the principles of the organization, (and) does not reflect the consensus of leadership and membership alike on the subject…”
KUZHALI MANICKAVEL is now represented by Michael Curry at Donald Maass Literary Agency.
KATH RICHARDS is now represented by Bethany Weaver at Weaver Literary Agency. Fangs with Benefits resold to Sam Brody at Forever via Jessica Purdue at Sphere.
The Horror Writers Association will partner with Raw Dog Screaming Press to publish HWA Poetry Showcase Volume XIII and future volumes.
KATHERINE LOCKE is president of the executive board of Authors Against Book Bans as of July 1, replacing Maggie Tokuda-Hall after her term.
BOOKS SOLD
CLAIRE MCKADE sold The Bridge to Nowhere and Everywhere, set in a postapocalyptic world with a mysterious skyscraper stretching into space with a televised gauntlet, and two more books to Laura Schreiber at Voyager at auction via Laura Rennert of Andrea Brown Literary Agency.
JAMIE CASS’s Starfall, first in the historical fantasy Oxford Book of Magick series, and two more titles went to Chelsea Villareal at Podium Publishing for six figures at auction via John Baker and Julie Gourinchas of Bell Lomax Moreton Agency.
TRINITY MONTOYA’s “feminist techno-thriller” Kitsune 2.0 sold to Gemma Creffield at Solstice in a pre-empt via Barbara Zitwer of Barbara Zitwer Agency.
ANTOINETTE VAN SLUYTMAN sold The Red Then to dave ring at Neon Hemlock via Julie Crisp of Julie Crisp Literary Agency.
R.A. SANDPIPER resold romantic fantasy To Touch a Silent Fury and sold an untitled sequel to Gretchen Durning at Berkley XO via Alyssa Morris of Trellis Literary Management. UK rights sold to Alexa Allen-Batifoulier at Del Rey UK via Maddalena Cavaciuti of David Higham Associates on behalf of Tori Clayton and Allison Malecha of Trellis Literary Management.
REBECCA ZAHABI sold The Monkey Queen, “a gender-flipped retelling following the trickster god Sun Wukong,” and another title to Toni Kirkpatrick at Diversion Books via Alice Speilburg of Speilburg Literary Agency.
CASSANDRA KHAW’s “cozy fantasy” Sweet Saints sold to Mika Kasuga at Union Square & Co via Michael Curry of Donald Maass Literary Agency.
MICHAEL SIMON sold Dark Passage, Lost Nexus, and Chosen Destiny in the Stellar Crossing series to Marilyn Kretzer at Blackstone Publishing at auction via Michelle Hauck of Storm Literary Agency.
CAMILA URIOSTE’s “speculative literary novel” Fearsick, set in a Midwestern town on the anniversary of a school shooting, went to Jim McCoy at University of Iowa Press via Veronica Goldstein of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.
JAMIE KILLEN sold The War of Hours, “an anti-capitalist time-travel novel,” and its sequel to Nidhi Pugalia at Viking at auction via Elizabeth Pratt of Trellis Literary Management.
JANNA MILLER’s contemporary fantasy Blessings from War Island sold to Darian Bianco at Apex.
ANNE BISHOP sold the third novel in the Isle of Wyrd series to Anne Sowards at Ace via Jennifer Jackson of Donald Maass Literary Agency.
ASHLEY POSTON sold Elodie and the Dark Lord, first in a fantasy duology, and another book to Amanda Bergeron at Berkley via Holly Root of Root Literary. UK rights went to Priyal Agrawal at HQ.
ELLIOT GISH’s “historical speculative novel” Ruby and Jude, set in an underground 1960s lesbian bar, went to Jen Sookfong Lee at ECW Press via Geffen Semach of Westwood Creative Artists.
ZANDER WOOLLEY’s How to Raise a Human, “set in a galaxy rebuilding after a devastating war,” sold to Peter Joseph at Crown via Sarah Scarlett of Penguin Random House UK. UK rights went to Jorgie Bain at Michael Joseph via Sam Edenborough of Greyhound Literary.
KHALIA MOREAU’s Tainted, about a cursed young woman whose attempt to defect from her militarized unit goes wrong, sold to Ashlyn Inman at Keylight via Sara Megibow of Megibow Literary Agency.
J.D. ROBINSON sold When Tomorrows End, about a man who is stuck in time and must ally with a fellow time-traveler to escape a temporal storm and get home, to Marilyn Brigham at 47North via Brandi Bowles and Ethan Schlatter of UTA.
JOANNA RUSS’s The Collected Stories went to Jeanne Thornton at Feminist Press via Diana Finch of Diana Finch Literary Agency.
LASHAWN M. WANAK sold collection The Works of Her Hands to Patrick Swenson at Fairwood Press via Kristopher O’Higgins of Scribe Agency.
WILLIAM SHUNN’s collection Scouring the Deep Skies sold to Patrick Swenson at Fairwood Press via Barry Goldblatt of Barry Goldblatt Literary.
JAMES VAN PELT’s collection Slow Dance at the High School and Other Imaginings went to Patrick Swenson at Fairwood Press.
CALLIE ROWLAND sold Gate of Nightmares to Elizabeth Agyemang at 47North via Safae El-Ouahabi of Rogers, Coleridge & White.
CHARLEIGH FREDERICK’s Pete Versus the Heroes, following a notorious antihero in a world where superheroes have absolute power, and two more titles went to Anna Stileski at Bow’s Bookshelf.
LEE A. EVERETT’s The Oaths that Bind Us went to Gwyn Jordan at Rogueheart Press via A.J. Van Belle of Booker Albert Agency. Chelsea Karol will edit.
PAUL CORNELL sold historical fantasy Oh Fortuna!, set in an alternate Britain, and another book to Marcus Gipps at The Broken Binding Press via Stacia Decker of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.
BASIL TALBOT sold Soulstones to Hannah Graves at Olive Press. Kelley York will edit.
KYLIE CHEUNG sold “speculative, autofictional, literary novel” Genesis to Christoph Paul at Clash.
N.E. Davenport (2020)
N.E. DAVENPORT’s Immortal Empire, first in a dark romantasy duology, and a second title sold to David Pomerico at Voyager for six figures via Emily Forney of BookEnds.
BRITTNEY ARENA sold Prince of Night and another title, a romantic fantasy duology “about a chronically ill sculptor caught dreaming in a land where dreams are forbidden,” to Viengsamai Fetters at Erewhon at auction via Jennifer Azantian of Azantian Literary Agency. UK rights went to Vicky Leech Mateos at Bloomsbury Archer UK for six figures; Sam Bradbury will edit.
TIFFANY DAUNE sold Love is Dead, first in a five-title paranormal romance series with a vampire hunter, and four more books to Jasmine Callaghan at Boldwood via Kayla Bramante of Storyteller Talent Agency.
KRISTINA FOREST sold The Unrequited Love Department, “a workplace romance with a light speculative twist,” to Emilia Rhodes at Atria via Sara Crowe of Sara Crowe Literary.
BETH MERLIN and DANIELLE MODAFFERI’s A Kingdom of Skyscrapers and Fire Escapes went to Marilyn Kretzer at Blackstone Publishing via Mark Gottlieb of Trident Media Group.
CORAL VEGA’s A Dance of Fire sold to Jean Lowd at Creative James.
MILA FINCH resold previously self-published Runebreaker and sold two more books to Alessandra Roche at Bloom Books at auction via Haley Heidemann of WME. UK rights sold to Calah Singleton at Voyager UK in a pre-empt via Kimberley Atkins of WME.
RUBY RUNE’s “dark academia romance” A Game of Cat and Witch and another book went to Ghjulia Romiti at Forever in a pre-empt via Angie Ojeda Hazen of Lunar Literary Agency.
TASHA SOLOMONS’s Blood Goddess, first in a dark academia romantasy duology, went to Sydney Collins at Delacorte Press in a pre-empt via Ariele Fredman and Kelly Karczewski of UTA on behalf of Sue Armstrong at C+W.
JENNY L. HOWE, writing as LUCY HELEN HOWELL, sold A Frenzy of Fae and Feelings and Kaiju and Kisses to Elora Hartway at Titan Books via Katelyn Detweiler of Jill Grinberg Literary Management.
SOFIA AVES’s That Time I Fell for a Sea Monster and at least one other book went to Emma Grundy Haigh at Boldwood via Nicky Lovick of WGM Atlantic Group.
LILY X’s “sapphic time-slip rom-com” Loched in Time and another book sold to Junessa Viloria at Forever at auction via Patrice Caldwell of The Caldwell Agency.
ALEXANDRA KENNINGTON, writing as A.A. KENNINGTON, sold “sapphic horromance” The Minotaur Project to Gabrielle Pachon at Ace via Bethany Hendrix of Spencerhill Associates.
LORA SENF sold Death No. 114 to Ardyce Alspach at Union Square & Co via Ali Herring of Spencerhill Associates.
KEALAN PATRICK BURKE’s Nightlights for Eyes, set against the Satanic Panic and following a group of teenagers who “mess with the occult in the ruins of an abandoned church,” sold to Alan Lastufka at Shortwave.
GABE CONVERSE sold The Body Remembers, “in which a trans man’s pre-transition body washes up on the beach in his hometown and is coaxed back to life by his transphobic family,” to Rebecca Brewer at Bloomsbury Archer via Mara Hollander of Azantian Literary Agency.
Rudy Ruiz (2014)
RUDY RUIZ’s “Southern gothic horror” Diablo Creek went to Marilyn Kretzer at Blackstone Publishing via Laura Strachan of Strachan Literary Agency.
TR ROWE sold “queer horror romance” Backsliders to Katie McGuire at Crooked Lane via Dorian Maffei of Kimberley Cameron & Associates.
SARAH UNDERWOOD’s The Changeling Rule and another book went to Kristin Daly Rens at Storytide for six figures via Catherine Cho of Paper Literary. UK rights to both books and a third went to Sarah Levison at Electric Monkey, also for six figures.
BRIDGETTE WAY sold How to Seduce a Dark Lord, “about a famous necromancer hell-bent on becoming the trophy husband to the most dangerous man in New York,” and another title to Esi Sogah at Berkley and to Stephanie Alleyne at Random House Canada on behalf of Amanda Ferreira at auction via Cheyenne Faircloth and Courtney Miller-Callihan of Handspun Literary. UK rights went to Elora Hartway at Titan Books via Tawanna Sullivan at Berkley.
TESSA STONE sold “paranormal suspense” book Strange Neighbors and at least one other title to Kreceda Tyler at Black Odyssey Media in a pre-empt.
JOE KOCH sold “cosmic-erotic slasher and queer anti-murder mystery” Dead Boys Don’t Cry to Christoph Paul at Clash.
NEAL SHUSTERMAN’s second and third books in the First Blades series sold to Justin Chanda at Simon & Schuster Children’s via Andrea Brown of Andrea Brown Literary Agency.
ANN LIANG sold speculative novel The Lost Life of Sylvia Song to Claire Stetzer at Harper Children’s via Kathleen Rushall of Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Sara Schonfeld will edit.
SASHA PEYTON SMITH sold The Fox Bride and another title to Erica Sussman at Harper Children’s via Hillary Jacobson of CAA. UK rights sold to Sarah Levison at Farshore via Sarah Mitchell of CAA.
R.M. GRAY sold The Bloodwolf Trials, “pitched as Spirited Away meets Wednesday,” and another book to Alexandra Hightower at Little, Brown Children’s via Gwen Beal and Peter Steinberg of UTA.
ROZ MACLAREN’s Burning Skye, second in the fantasy trilogy Ruined Skye, went to Sofia Aves at Evernight Teen.
S.M. DAVIS’s Disconnected, set in a future of shared knowledge through neural implants when a teenager finds his connection is failing, went to Sofia Aves at Evernight Teen.
SADIE SUKSIRI’s The Undoing, in which girls are born with a magical gift they must give up in adolescence, sold to Katherine Harrison at Knopf Children’s at auction via Molly Ker Hawn of David Higham Associates.
MARISA URGO sold The Midnight Coven, involving a celestial curse at a haunted boarding school, to Afua Antwi at Puffin UK via Moe Ferrara of TriadaUS Literary Agency.
S.G. PRINCE’s YA fantasy No Glory for Thieves went to Kortney Nash at Godwin Books via Haley Casey of Creative Media Agency.
MARIANNA SHEK’s “time-traveling dystopian adventure” The Wrangler’s Daughter sold to Shalu Vallepur at Chicken House.
GABRIELA MARTINS’s Love at First Bite sold to Carolina Mancheno Ortiz at Avon A.
DANA GRICKEN sold paranormal fantasy Ghost Game and mystery The Lost Pharaoh to Sofia Aves at Evernight Teen.
SASHA HIBBS and CHRISTINA HOOKER sold paranormal romance The Wicked Door to Sofia Aves at Evernight Teen.
Vickie Lan (2020s)
VICKIE LAN’s debut But First Take Off Your Shoes, “in which a biracial daughter and her estranged Vietnamese mother try to reconcile as cities crumble, green laser beams rain down, and old grudges reemerge,” and another title went to Ardyce Alspach at Union Square & Co in a pre-empt via Ali Herring of Spencerhill Associates.
KIRSTEN GARRISON’s The Godbound King, debut and first in a “dark quest fantasy duology,” and another title sold to Jela Lewter at Saga Press via Jane Chun of Transatlantic Literary Agency.
DANI RAANAN’s debut fantasy novel The Crafter’s Wife sold to Ian Whates at Newcon Press via John Jarrold of John Jarrold Literary Agency.
HELENA BAILACH ADSUARA’s debut Monstrous Alchemy, a “dark academia fantasy,” went to Kirsiah Depp at Grand Central at auction via Hayley Steed of Janklow & Nesbit UK. UK rights went to Sania Riaz at Harvill Secker via Steed.
SALLY HAMILTON sold debut fantasy The Greenglass Guide to Magical Antiques to Brianna Fairman at Putnam in a pre-empt via Sara Crowe of Sara Crowe Literary.
AUGUST PONTHIER’s debut Everywhere Isn’t Texas, “blending speculative, horror, sci-fi, and Western elements,” sold to Pilar Garcia-Brown at Dutton in a pre-empt via Julie Flanagan of CAA.
SHANNON RAMPE sold debut Gods of Sky and Dust, pitched as Empire of Silence meets Final Fantasy, and another title to Toni Kirkpatrick at Diversion Books via Susan Velazquez Colmant of JABberwocky Literary Agency.
CARRIE KWIATKOWSKI’s debut, historical fantasy The Bindery Guild went to Stephanie Stein at Wildthorn at auction via Alexandra Machinist of CAA. UK rights sold to Gillian Green at Wildthorn UK via Daisy Arendell of CAA.
SADIE NICOLE sold A Haunted House Is Not a Home, pitched as Get Out meets Practical Magic, and another book to Sam Brody at Forever via Jessica Faust and Keifer Ludwig of BookEnds.
SHAYA LIN SUSAN sold debut There’s Something Wrong with the Girls, pitched as “The Stepford Wives for the TikTok girls,” to Abby Knudsen at Gallery via Thais Afonso of Azantian Literary Agency.
CLAIRE WELLS sold debut, “apocalyptic rom-com” Shoot Prey Love, and another book to Maxine Shen at Alcove Press via Sandra Sawicka of Marjacq Scripts.
ALEXANDRA RENWICK’s debut Horn, “reimagining the unicorn myth,” went to Olivia Zavitson at Hyperion Avenue via Jennifer Weltz of Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency.
KRASH MEGIDDO’s debut, SF Pax Bin Yil sold to Bloom and Nectar Books.
J.I. LOCATELLI’s debut, YA horror Little Sisters, Big Lies, “about a freshman sorority pledge investigating a fellow pledge’s disappearance… as she begins to literally lose parts of herself in seductive sorority bonding rituals,” went to Tyiana Combs at Penguin Workshop via Rebecca Matte of Bradford Literary Agency.
NICOLE CREMEANS sold debut Deities and Calamities, Conquer Your Demons, and Bound by Law to Sabine Berlin at Roan & Weatherford via Bonnie Swanson of FinePrint Literary Management. Lindsay Flanagan will edit.
ZIN E. ROCKLYN delivered a novella tentatively titled Blue Plate to Claire Eddy and Oliver Dougherty at Tordotcom via Arley Sorg of kt literary. Mal Frazier will edit.
JAMES PATRICK KELLY, JOHN KESSEL & JONATHAN LETHEM sold Ninety Percent of Everything, which will contain the story of the same name, and “a separate new or rare story from each author,” to Patrick Swenson at Fairwood Press via John Silbersack of the Bent Agency.
Chesya Burke (2022)
CHESYA BURKE sold Let’s Play White, Too, “exploring the existence of Black women in America” with horror fiction and nonfiction essays to Jason Sizemore at Apex.
SILVIA MORENO-GARCIA and illustrator STEPH C. SOLIS sold a graphic novel adaptation of Mexican Gothic to Sebastian Girner at BOOM! Studios via Eddie Schneider of JABberwocky Literary Agency for Moreno-Garcia and via Jane Chun of Transatlantic Literary Agency for Solis. Maya Bollinger will edit.
K-MING CHANG sold “speculative essay” Ghostworld: On Girlhood to Lizzie Davis at Transit Books via Julia Kardon of HG Literary.
BOOKS RESOLD
KATE ASHER resold Crown of Olympus, Blood of Olympus, Blade of Olympus, and another book to Christine Ebbs at Penguin Australia via Saffron Dodd of ASH Literary.
MICHAEL SWANWICK’s fantasy book The Iron Dragon’s Daughter resold to Caroline Tew at Saga Press via Danielle Bukowski of Sterling Lord Literistic.
MARIAH MONTOYA and GRACE PEARCE resold the Guardians & Monsters duology to Alessandra Roche at Bloom Books via Rikki Bergman and Caitlin Mahony of WME. UK rights sold to Natasha Bardon at Voyager UK via Francesca Ali and Suzannah Ball of WME.
SHIM EUNJUNG and CHOI HYUNYU resold The 25:00 Magic Lantern Express, translated by Gene Png, to Anne Sowards at Ace in a pre-empt via Stella Giatrakou of Bonnier Books UK.
SAM MILLER resold previously self-published SF collection Still Lost to Nidhi Pugalia at Penguin at auction via Angeline Rodriguez of WME. UK rights went to Ben Brusey at Del Rey UK via Francesca Ali of WME.
JULIANN GAREY resold Grace, Falling to Mark Doten at Soho Press via Paul Bresnick of Bresnick Weil Literary Agency.
JIM BUTCHER resold The Law to Kate Runde at Podium Publishing via Jennifer Jackson of Donald Maass Literary Agency.
PUBLISHING
KATIE DENT has been appointed commissioning editor at Orbit UK. She was previously fiction editor at Titan.
FAYE IOSOTALUNO has been appointed as president and chief operating officer of Entangled. She was previously CEO of Tinder.
NINA LEON has joined Hardman & Swainson as literary agent, “focusing on romantasy, YA, upmarket, and contemporary romance.” Leon was previously at Pérez Literary & Entertainment.
GABRIELLE PACHON has been promoted to associate editor at Berkley/Ace Books. #noinsta
Object permanence: RIP Poul Anderson; P2P at PC Forum; Waitress handed her own stolen ID by carded diner; PDX bans fixies; Digital Economy Bill was a stitch up; NZ copyright disconnection flowchart; Fry v Widdicombe on Catholic Church; Moxie Marlinspike profile; V&A bans sketching; Gernsback's intro to the first Amazing Stories; "Simplicity."
Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
From its inception, I've loved Creative Commons. I hung out with Lisa Rein, Matt Haughey and Aaron Swartz while they coded up the first version of the site, and my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was the first professionally published text ever released under a CC license, just weeks after CC itself launched:
In those early days, CC licenses were primarily of interest to people who were steeped in copyright law, lore and litigation; so many of the early debates about these licenses turned on esoteric (but important!) questions about copyright; for example, how CC would interact with copyright's "limitations and exceptions."
You see, copyright has never meant the absolute right to control all uses of a work. Every system of copyright includes a set of "limitations and exceptions" for people making use of copyrighted works without permission, even if the copyright holder objects to that use. The best-known example of this is "fair use," a concept from American law.
Fair use is (potentially) extremely broad, but it's also extremely "fact-intensive" – that's the phrase lawyers use to describe the kind of legal question whose answer is almost always "it depends." Fair use might let you copy the entirety of a work, even for a commercial purpose. It might let you create new works based on existing works. It might let you do these things specifically to discourage people from buying the original. But…it depends.
If you know anything about fair use, it's probably something about a "four-step test" used to determine if a usage is fair. These four steps are just questions a judge might ask of someone who's been sued for copyright infringement, but who claims that they were making a fair use. The questions are:
I. What was the "nature and purpose" of your use? Were you doing something "transformative?" Were you criticizing the work? Were you using the work for educational purposes?
II. What was the nature of the work you used? Was it primarily factual (like a news article) or creative (like a short story)?
III. How much of the work did you take? Did you take more than you needed to transform the work, to accomplish your criticism, to teach someone?
IV. What impact did your use have on the original? Did the copyright holder lose money as a result of your use?
These questions are indeed enshrined in US copyright law, but (for better and for worse) you can't figure out if a use is "fair" just by asking these questions. Fair use is ultimately subject to "the rule of reason," a legal principle meaning that the law shouldn't result in obviously stupid restrictions. What's "obviously stupid?" Well, that's the tricky part – you'll have to convince a judge!
For example, the author of a book called The Wind Done Gone was sued for taking the characters, plot and setting of Gone With the Wind in order to tell the same story from the perspective of the enslaved Africans who were denied agency and moral consideration in the original. The court found for The Wind Done Gone:
Wind Done Gone took the "heart" of Gone With the Wind (III), but then again, Done Gone was highly transformative (I), Gone With was also a work of fiction, entitled to the highest level of protection (II). Even worse, the point of Done Gone was to point out the gross defects in Gone With (I) and thus directly undermine sales and licensing for the original (IV). Anyone who claims you can answer fair use controversies by running through the four factors as though they were a checklist really doesn't understand fair use:
But even after you've acquired an appreciation of the fact-intensive, nuanced flexibility of fair use, you still don't understand copyright's limitations and exceptions. Fair use is important, but there's also "first sale," the doctrine that says that after you buy something, you own it, and copyright can't be used to interfere with your traditional property rights. That's why you can buy and sell used books, paintings, records, and other copyrighted work, even if they are sold with fine print that says you're not allowed to:
When it comes to copyright's limitations and exceptions, "fair use" and "first sale" are the big ones, but just as important are the small ones – the really small ones. Like other laws, copyright is subject to the principle of "de minimis" (from a longer Latin phrase that translates as "the law does not concern itself with trifles"):
Technically, it may be trespassing to step on someone else's yard. But if your shoe brushes up against their lawn while you're walking on the sidewalk out front of their house, it's not trespassing. Or if it is trespassing, it's a de minimis trespass, too small to matter to the law. A lot of potential copyright violations – like taking a picture of a passage in a book and posting it to social media – are so small that we don't need to apply a fair use analysis to them. They're trifles, and "the law does not concern itself with trifles."
These limitations and exceptions all apply without permission from rightsholders. They apply even if they make rightsholders furious. They are your rights, as a member of the public, as a purchaser of a work, or just as someone who whistles a song that's stuck in your head.
And that's where the esoteric early Creative Commons copyright debate comes in. Creative Commons is a way to formally codify and convey permission to use copyrighted works. Without Creative Commons, it's really hard – and expensive – to provide legally reliable permission to someone else to use something you've created.
If I want to let you adapt one of my short stories for the stage, we should both probably hire copyright lawyers at several hundred dollars per hour to draft and review a contract setting out what my permission really means. Worse: even after we've paid the lawyers, neither of us will likely really understand the fine legal technicalities of the deal. We just have to take the lawyers' word for it that the complex jargon in the contract is sufficient for our purposes. Between the complexity and the expense, there are lots of potential creative collaborations that would cost so much to paper over that they're just not worth doing, even if they'd delight everyone involved.
Creative Commons cuts through this with its standardized licenses, which spell out in plain language which permissions are being granted. Even better, these licenses are international, translated into the language and laws of dozens of countries. That means that you can take a CC licensed short story from Japan, animate it using CC licensed 3D models from Italy, set it to a CC licensed soundtrack from Indonesia and release it in Ukraine, and the whole thing just works.
Those uses – turning a story into an animation, using a 3D model, syncing a soundtrack to a video – are all pretty ambitious uses, especially if you're going to make the final result indefinitely available to the general public. It makes sense to paper over these uses, and Creative Commons makes that legal work as simple as linking to your sources and their licenses in your final product.
But there are plenty of uses that don't need licenses – even ambitious ones. Remember Wind Done Gone? There are circumstances when you can adapt someone else's story without permission, relying instead on a limitation or exception to copyright. And of course, there are plenty of trivial uses – pasting a photo into your groupchat, say – that are de minimis and also don't need permission.
These copyright flexibilities are critical. Imagine if you could only criticize someone's work if they gave you permission to do so! From the founding of CC, copyfighters raised serious concerns that CC would teach people that they can only remix other people's work if they have a license, be it a CC license or the kind that you negotiate with a lawyer.
Today – 25 years later!- CC is an unqualified success. Without CC, we wouldn't have Wikipedia! You find CC licenses on Youtube, Flickr, Bandcamp, the Internet Archive, and in many of the most important scholarly and scientific journals in the world.
But, also, 25 years later, the world is even more convinced that you should always ask permission: "better safe than sorry." I don't know if CC contributed to this culture of timidity. More likely, it was bullying copyright trolls who terrorized people into a reflex of asking permission for everything, always.
As the creator of more than 30 books, hundreds of collages, and tens of thousands of essays and blog-posts, I am often on the receiving end of these permission requests.
For example, people often ask me if they can use my CC licensed works in ways that the associated licenses clearly permit. I'm sure the people who email me for permission to do things I've already granted them permission to do think they're being polite, but I really wish they'd stop. When someone asks me if they can make a use permitted by my CC licenses, I need to carefully parse through their use to make sure they're not asking for something more.
This is time-consuming work that often involves several volleys of email just to confirm that, no, they're just asking if they can do something I've already told them they can do. This is not a good use of anyone's time! By all means, drop me a note with a link to something you've remixed from my work. That's fun! It's a lot more fun than making me play detective in order to figure out if you're exceeding the license's permissions.
There are also a lot of requests that clearly amount to fair use and/or de minimis usage. You don't need to email me to get my permission to read a brief passage from one of my books on your Youtube video! You don't need my permission to quote one of my stories in an English exam! What's more, the world would be a lot shittier if you did, so let's not act as though that's reasonable behavior, lest we shift the (already far too restrictive) norms, which might even lead to a legal change.
Finally, there's the people who email me about their desire to make uses that are more (ahem) ambitious, but that no one could possibly find out about or get angry over…except for the fact that they emailed me to ask my permission.
You want to make a tiny bootleg edition of one of my novels for your anarchist book fair? That's totally a copyright infringement, it's super-illegal, and if my publisher found out about it, I'm sure they'd send you a sphincter-puckering legal letter telling you to knock it off (and maybe even demanding that you disgorge the seven dollars, three bottlecaps and eleven cool feathers you took in trade for those pirate books).
But my publisher won't ever find out about it – unless you email me asking for permission. I absolutely cannot give you permission to do this. I have a contract with my publisher promising that I will never authorize someone other than them to publish that book. Once you tell me about your intention to do this, I'm obliged to tell my publisher, so that they can tell you no in language that would strip paint off a barn.
Buying a classroom set of books, but you also want to paste chunks of one of my books into your educational institution's classroom intranet for use as a teaching aid? There's no way my publisher would ever find out you did that, and if they did, sure, you'd also get a blood-curdling legal letter. But dude, all my books are DRM-free. You could have just pasted the text into your CMS. In what universe is my publisher going to pay one of their lawyers to review, adjudicate and paper over your request to make a use that you're not proposing to pay them for?
Let's be clear: I'm not giving you permission to pirate my work. I already spend far too much of my time chasing down dickheads who sell competing editions of my books on Amazon and Audible. I'm sick to the back teeth of wrangling Ingram's takedown process to get rid of bootleg print editions of my books.
What I'm saying is, all of your interactions with copyrighted works need not involve the author and publisher. There is a whole universe of uses that might technically violate copyright, might technically not fit into de minimis, first sale or fair use – but these are also uses that no one would ever find out.
I get it. You may feel like you can't tell the difference between the kind of uses that no one would give a shit about; the uses that might attract a bone-chilling lawyer letter; and the uses that might land you in court. I'm sorry, but I can't help you figure that one out. I'm not a lawyer. Even if I was, I'm not your lawyer.
This is one of those areas where I break with my friend, the wonderful John Hodgman. On his indispensable podcast "Judge John Hodgman," he frequently admonishes people who are uncertain if they're overstepping a bound in a commercial establishment to ask an employee for permission. For example: should you fill up a water glass with soda water from a self-serve dispenser?
John says you should always ask the cashier. But I've worked jobs like that, and I can tell you that there were plenty of jobs where my boss felt very strongly that taking $0.0000001 worth of water and bubbles without paying for it was theft…and where I thought my boss was a dick for thinking that. If I pretended I didn't see you getting a glass of fizzy water, the worst that would happen is my boss would tell me to keep a closer eye on the customers lest they steal his precious CO2. But if you asked me whether you could fill your glass, and my boss caught me saying yes, I'd be fired.
There's a lot of normal, perfectly fine stuff that technically violates copyright that I can't give you permission to do, because I've signed a contract with my publisher. If you ask me, I'll have to ask my editor, who will say no, even though he thinks it's fine, too. If I push it, he'll have to ask the lawyers, who will almost certainly also say no, even if they think it's fine, because it doesn't make sense to spend hours papering over a legal agreement with someone who wants to sell seven copies of a book at an anarchist book-fair or upload a couple chapters of a book to a school's intranet.
Are there instances in which you might misjudge which category your use falls under and end up in court? I guess so. But if that's your concern, asking my permission does no good, because I'm just gonna tell you no.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
Object permanence: Fonz thumps x Linux; CBC v DRM; Aussie mall v photos; English town x CCTVs; Pay no taxes x Big Tech; Games Workshop v gamers; Delta x surveillance pricing.
Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global (permalink)
It's safe to say that the past couple of years have been good ones for me publishing-wise, thanks to a string of international bestsellers, both novels (Picks and Shovels) and nonfiction (Enshittification, Reverse Centaur), as well as plenty of awards and accolades:
Over the past two months, I've won the Locus Award (Enshittification), had a NYT bestseller (Reverse Centaur), gotten a word in the OED ("enshittification"), and had the number one bestselling nonfiction paperback in Canada for more than a month running (Reverse Centaur). I also turned 55 – and my radiologist told me I'm now cancer-free, so it's been a good summer all around.
These books have done especially well internationally because they deal with technopolitics, which means that my readers are disproportionately Internet People, and for historical reasons, these are folks who are more likely to speak English, even if they live outside of the Anglosphere.
This post is primarily for those readers, who often write to me to let me know how much they enjoyed the books, so much so that they'd like to share them with their less online, less English-conversant friends, and want to know whether there is a translation coming in their own language.
Good news! Both Reverse Centaur and Enshittification have many foreign editions that are either published or forthcoming in the next year or so. The foreign rights team at Farrar, Straus and Giroux were good enough to prepare a list of all these editions, which I'm about to reproduce below.
If your preferred language isn't on the list, I apologize. Translation deals are primarily "pull," not "push" – that is to say, a foreign publisher contacts my publisher and asks for the rights (though my publisher does market the rights and attends all the book fairs where these deals are often made).
The upshot here is that I am not really in a position to do more than has already been done to get an edition published in your preferred language or territory. If you happen to have a favorite local publisher, you could always ask them if they would like to get in touch with Farrar, Straus and Giroux foreign rights team to secure a license.
I also need to note here that these deals are generally with established publishers who have relationships with national booksellers and distributors (rather than enthusiastic individuals who want to produce a translation and see if they can get it read by other people in their country). The hard part of publishing isn't the translation, the typesetting, the book design or even the writing – the hard part is connecting a text with its readers:
Spain : Capitán Swing Enshittification (as Mierdificación), Mar 2026
Reverse Centaur, not yet scheduled
Taiwan : Acropolis Enshittification, first quarter 2027
Thailand : Salt Publishing Enshittification, Oct 2026
Türkiye : Okuyanus Enshittification, Fall 2026
Ukraine : Athena Publishing Enshittification, not yet scheduled
(These are the confirmed deals. There are lots of other deals in negotiation, especially for Reverse Centaur, which is only a month old.)
I hope some of you found this useful! If not (or if so!), don't worry, I'll be back with more essays in the days to come.
One final note for newsletter readers: I realize that I have violated my "one emoji per edition" rule with the flags above. Rest assured this will not be a regular thing.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
Following a “careful review,” Apex Magazinehas removed the story “Vigil of the Tenth Air” from Apex #153 amid skepticism around the author’s potential use of AI tools for its writing.
Though ultimately not selected for publication, a shortlisted story for Apex imprint Violet Lichen’s upcoming ECO25: the Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction was also struck from website listings after it came to light that other work associated with the author’s pen name was “recently removed from several other short fiction publications under suspicion of AI usage.”
In response, Apex Book Company, Apex Magazine, and Violet Lichen announced plans to reevaluate their submission guidelines, including “refining the language” of its AI clause and “expanding” the team’s internal review processes to more ably respond to concerns around LLM usage. The editorial team clarified that they do not intend to use AI screening applications or request early drafting papers for evidence “in the event a piece is suspected of AI use after publication,” and will converse directly with the author(s) involved “to discuss the story in further detail” and come to an appropriate resolution.
The Apex team is resolved to apply the lessons learned both from our experience, and from the invaluable reports and statements compiled by fellow indie publishers, to fortify our submission process against AI-assisted work, and to continue uplifting strange, surreal, beautiful speculative fiction written with passion and care by humans, for humans.
This comes after the recent news covered by Locus concerning speculation that some of the regional winners of the Commonwealth Prize may have at least partially used AI to generate their work—the Commonwealth Foundation has since announced that they are “satisfied that AI was not used to write the winning stories” after an investigation—and Hachette’s March decision to pull horror novel Shy Girl by Mia Ballard from shelves after information alleging its contents were AI generated was shared with the company by the New York Times.
Object permanence: Disney characters x clean underwear; Transparent Pontiac; Makers v dog with LED collar; Microsoft buys Linkedin; Legitimate greatness.
Upcoming appearances: LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago, Edinburgh, South Bend.
Over the weekend, I did an interview about my forthcoming book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (a book about being a better AI critic), and the interviewer said she was surprised that I wasn't an AI booster, based on my demographics and work history:
I could see where she was coming from. I encountered computers in the mid-seventies, as a small child. My first computer was a CARDIAC, a working, Turing-complete, mechanical computer made entirely of cardboard, that I spent endless hours with:
Then I graduated to a teletype terminal and acoustic coupler connected to a minicomputer at the University of Toronto. My mom, a kindergarten teacher, used to smuggle home 1,000' rolls of paper towel from the kids' bathroom. I'd get 1,000' feet of computing up one side, then another 1,000' down the other side, then I'd carefully re-roll the paper towel so she could put it back in the bathroom for the kids to dry their hands on.
After that, I got an Apple ][+ in 1979, and shortly thereafter acquired a modem, and that was it: I was hooked for life. I became an amateur programmer, then a professional programmer. I hosted forums on dial-up BBSes where I distributed software and offered support to strangers who wanted to connect their computers to the internet. I got a job as a gopher developer, then a web developer, then a CIO-for-hire, helping wire up small businesses and connect them to the net. Eventually, I co-founded a free/open source software startup, before transitioning to 25 years as a digital rights activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And for most of that time, I was energetically writing science fiction, eventually becoming associated with a school sometimes called "post-cyberpunk":
The force that energized all this work was a dialectical one, the contradiction that powered cyberpunk literature itself. For all that cyberpunk was undeniably enamored with the coolness and combustibility of new technology, it was also terrified of how technology could be a force for oppression, surveillance and control. As William Gibson says, "cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion."
Gibson's more famous quote, of course, is "the street finds its own use for things." In Gibson's novels (and in my own life in technology) all the most interesting things happen when users of technology (often without formal training or credentials) find ways to adapt the technology they use to suit their needs:
This is why I remain an ardent fan of Hypercard, Scratch and other meta-tools that are designed to allow non-programmers to write software that exactly conforms to their desires. Whatever the apps produced by these tools lack in sophistication and efficiency is more than offset by the fact that they give everyday people the power to directly control the tools they rely upon.
If "epistemic humility" means anything, it means acknowledging that no amount of "requirements gathering" can capture the needs of people totally unlike yourself as faithfully as those users can capture their own needs. Giving people the tools to produce their own software is always going to make tools – vernacular, idiosyncratic, homespun – that are more suited to their own hands and minds than anything a technologist working on their behalf could make.
The ancient dictum of "nothing about us without us" – born in 16th century Poland and taken up by the modern disability rights movement – asserts the right of people to control their own living conditions, and also the unique capacity of people to understand their own needs. You know what's even better than being consulted on the design of the technology you use? Having direct control over that technology!
This is why I was so suspicious of the iPad. The iPad's much-lauded "ease of use" was entirely about how easy it was to use an iPad to consume technology. But the iPad remains the single most user-innovation-hostile technology in modern history, a device designed to make it impossible to produce technology without permission from a remorseless multinational corporation. This is cyberpunk as a demand, not a warning:
The technology I've championed all my life is technology that gives more control to its users. One of my immutable precepts is that people who are different from me know things I can't know, and the only way I can get the benefit of their unique knowledge and perspective is if they are free to make and share things that matter to them. As Dan Gillmor said, back when he was inventing the study of citizen journalism, "My readers know more than I do":
And while I am broadly very skeptical of AI, and deeply alarmed by the proliferation of "vibe coded" software in production environments, vibe coding for personal projects is a useful and exciting addition to the lineage of tools that let computer users decide how their computers will work. For people making personal projects, vibe coding extends the power of shell scripting, cron jobs, Applescript, and other desktop automation tools to a wider audience.
One of the journalists I spoke to last week about my book described how he had vibe coded an app that showed him an alert every time a plane flew over his house, giving the tail number and other details of the flight. This is information that I have no need for and no interest in, and that I'm therefore excited to learn about, because its very existence affirms that the world is full of people who are delightfully, irreducibly, amazingly different from me, and moreover, that their unique needs can be directly met using their imaginations and their personal computers.
I recently sat down with my colleague Naomi Novik, a brilliant author who also co-founded Archive of Our Own. Naomi demoed her followup to AO3 for me: Wreccer, a system to help you find small groups of people with taste similar to your own, in order to facilitate media recommendations within that group – a kind of personal, relationship-driven alternative to massive, centralized, monolithic algorithmic recommendation systems:
Naomi told me that Wreccer was being built using the same design ethos that the original Twitter embraced. When Twitter launched, it was an API first, and the official Twitter front end was built on that API – but anyone could build their own front end for Twitter that worked in the way they wanted it to. Now, the word "anyone" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because most people don't even know what an API is, and of the people who do, most of them were not capable of writing their own software front end for Twitter.
But Wreccer is being designed for the age of vibe coding, and the API will really allow anyone who uses the service to design their own interface to the system, one that elevates and centers the features they find useful and tucks away the ones they're not interested in. Your personal, custom front end could also bring in other data-sources – pulling in your Mastodon messages, for example, or even showing you an alert with the tail-number of any plane flying over your home.
This is the part of vibe coding that I'm quite excited about, but it's not the part the industry focuses on. Instead of hearing about how personal, homemade software utilities can be an end unto themselves, we hear about vibe coded projects as prototypes for commercial production code. We hear about clueless bosses vibe coding software products and services that run fine for one user on a siloed desktop computer, and then demanding to know why it takes 50 engineers a year to make the same thing work for millions of users on the public internet. We hear about people who vibe code and submit patches to free/open-source software projects with millions of users, overwhelming project maintainers with slop code that is riddled with security vulnerabilities.
Of course, there's an obvious reason why the industry wants to focus on the potential for vibe coded software to replace production code. The AI bubble has burned up $1.4t to date, while bringing in mere tens of billions of dollars per year, even as its unit economics grow steadily worse:
To keep the bubble inflated, AI hucksters must promise massive economic returns to the technology. They want investors to believe that vibe code is about to replace working programmers, who are skilled, high-waged, high-demand workers. Their pitch is that for every million dollars' worth of programmers that an AI salesman and a boss conspire to fire, half a million dollars will go to the AI company whose bots shit out that vibe code.
That's par for the course with the AI bubble, whose focus is entirely on how AI can centralize, control and homogenize our lives. Whereas early desktop publishing, web publishing and social media gave us a glorious higgledy-piggledy of chaotic, weird and transgressive hobbyist media and retina-searing designs, AI art and design are instantly recognizable at a thousand yards, and it all looks the same, boring, and washed:
AI companies have released open weight/open source models that can run on your own computer, but these are treated as side-shows and toys and demos. The real action, we're told, is in "frontier models," which is industry-speak for "a piece of software whose running costs exceed the GDP of most countries":
Perhaps this is why the dynamics of AI are so different from the early dynamics of the web. Early web users were workers, who demanded that their bosses allow them to use the web and so devolve more power to people doing their jobs. By contrast, today's most ardent AI boosters are bosses, who threaten workers who don't use AI enough in the course of their duties:
Where we do see idiosyncrasy emerging from AI usage, it's often terrible. AI can help you create a folie-a-un in which you and a chatbot team up to reinforce your delusions and drive you deeper into a world of dangerous mirage:
There's a (false) story that's told about people who championed the early internet: that we were blithely certain that technology could only be a force for good, and negligently disinterested in the possibility that technology could control, extract and harm. That's demonstrably untrue: recall cyberpunk's dualism of "the street finds its own use for things" and "cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion."
More true is to say that early internet champions were alive to the importance of the internet, and therefore both excited about the possibilities of the internet to deliver a world of connection, idiosyncrasy, love and solidarity; and about the danger of the internet as a dystopian system of surveillance and manipulation:
History isn't finished. Long after the AI bubble pops, there will be local models and people vibe coding homemade software that respond directly to their needs. The stuff we make on our own computers, for ourselves, is deplatformed from its inception. It's part of the life we can build in technology's "shadowy corners" that we used to just call "technology." The fact that this stuff is utterly unsuited to be production code makes it inherently unmonetizable. It's how the street finds its own use for things:
Virtual: The future of world governance, with Kim Stanley Robinson (UN Independent Expert on International Order), Jun 19 https://www.youtube.com/live/wJvBvYdaAMY
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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