Jane Austen's Influencers, and your publishing questions

Here’s last week’s post on the $3,000 per book Anthropic settlement, now free for all.

This Sunday I’ll be showing off and selling books at the Belt Publishing table at the Brooklyn Book Fest. See you there?

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I usually write these newsletters very quickly (hence the chronic typos), summing up what I have been ruminating on in the back of my head during the week. But I spent hours trying to write this week’s issue, and decided to delete it all. It might have to do with how very hard it has been lately to remain curious, connect new dots, keep imagining: the world is increasingly too much with us.

So I’ve decided to send you something from the archives (eight years deep now!) on how Jane Austen got famous—see below.

If you’d like to help fuel future new newsletters, I’d love hear which topics are you interested in, which publishing terms or traditions are you curious about, which controversial topics are bouncing about in your world. If I think I can be useful, I’ll use these comments to create future newsletters. Thanks!

(adapted from the archives, originally published in 2020)

During long pandemic nights reading and watching adaptations of Jane Austen novels, I wondered how her books initially marketed, and how she got published.

So I read a Claire Tomalin’s biography, Jane Austen: A Life. I was annoyed by Tomalin’s arch tone, and got bogged down in her prodigious archival research into an assortment of Austens, but generally enjoyed the book. Everything that follows is due to her research and writing, and is indebted to her.

Perhaps because I read it to prove my own thesis, I came away concluding that Jane Austen’s marketing success lay in her family’s connections, as well as some strategic and lucky placement of her books in the hands of (wait for it), influencers.

First, some backstory. The first book Austen had luck finding an interested publisher was Northanger Abbey. Her brother Henry served as her agent, and he offered it to Richard Crosby, a publisher in London, in 1803. Crosby bought it for ten pounds. Then he did nothing with it: he didn’t print it, or publish it. He just held onto it. Gone was that book from Austen’s control. Seven years later, in 1810, Henry, using his military connections, got another publisher to agree to publish Sense and Sensibility. But this publisher, Thomas Egerton, offered Henry basically what we could today call a hybrid publishing model: Austen would have to pay for the printing costs, as well as contribute towards marketing and distribution. In return, she could keep the copyright. Thus this first edition of the novel includes the disclaimer "Printed for the Author.”

It took them a long time to print the book (printing was slow then, but not for the same reasons it currently is). It finally came out in October 1811. It’s thought about 1000 comes were printed, and two years later, in 1813, all had sold. Even though Austen fronted the costs, she still profited (140 pounds).

The book received some good reviews, but, as Tomalin writes, “Still more important, it had taken the fancy of the beau monde, the people whose taste and opinions were the most influential, and was passed round at dinner tables and in letters to friends and loves. Princess Charlotte, 2nd in line to the throne, then 16, said that “Maryanne & me are very alike in disposition, that certainly I am not so good, the same improducence, &c, however remain very like. I must say it interested me much. “

And so Egerton paid for the copyright of Pride & Prejudice (110 pounds). It sold for more than Sense & Sensibility (I was fascinated to learn that books were priced higher if they were seen as more desirable. Very logical! Too bad that is not done now!) Austen published both books anonymously (no platform).

When Mansfield Park was published (in a deal similar to that of Sense & Sensibility, as Egerton didn’t think it would sell as well as Pride & Prejudice), Austen decided to create a commonplace or cuttings book for the book. There were no traditional reviews of the book, but people wrote to each other about it, or talked about it amongst themselves, and Austen recorded their opinions (yes, I see you nodding: Goodreads!). Mrs. August Bramston of Oakely Hall notes that “she thought S. & S. —and P&P downright nonsense, but expected to like MP better, & having finished the 1st volume, flattered herself she had got through the worst.” On the other hand, a Miss Sharp liked Pride & Prejudice better.

Egerton sold all the copies of Mansfield Park he published, but he would not put out a second edition. He didn’t publish Emma: it came out with another publisher, who bought the copyrights for Sense & Sensibility and Mansfield as well. This publisher, John Murray (who was also Byron’s publisher), put out that second edition of Mansfield.

Turns out that the Prince Regent liked these novels by an anonymous lady, and told the Prince that the author was in London. The Prince’s librarian was instructed to invite Austen to the visit the library, which she did. There, the librarian suggested she might dedicate her next novel to the Prince, which is why Emma includes that dedication. This front matter increased the value of the book, and it was sold for 21 shillings, an even higher price, and 2,000 copies were printed.

For Emma, Austen put together another Goodreads/clippings file. As Tomalin says, “Out of the forty-three “Opinions” of Emma she noted down, twelve were distinctly hostile, and only six gave unreserved praise.” One of her neighbors said it was “too natural to be interesting; another friend said “if she had not known the Author, could hardly have got through it.”

Although Austen was well-like and -read throughout the 19th century, no paperbacks of her novels were published until the 1938; some of the books didn’t appear in paperback until 1966. And that’s in England. In the US, it took until 1956 for the first paperback to appear. There’s a mystery there, in how she became canonized, that I’d like to better understand. Clearly my next move in learning about Austen’s publishing history is to find out why, during the first half of the 20th century, Americans weren’t offered “classic” paperbacks of her novels, as they were so many other “classics” (now much less read, not to mention produced by the BBC).

Long story short: important people! the rich and the royals! Henry had connections, and then Jane’s book was found, read, and liked by fancy folks—or at least they found the novels a good topic for cocktail chatter—and that seems the key to why we read her today, and not another one of the other “anonymous lady” authors publishing at the time.

It’s all about connections.

That $3,000 Per Book Anthropic Settlement

what it does and does not involve, and what comes next, maybe

Last week’s post on tips for to read more (for fun) is now paywall-free.

I’ll be slinging books at the Brooklyn Book Fair on Sunday, September 21. Stop by!

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On Friday, Anthropic agreed to pay 1.5 billion dollars to settle a lawsuit brought by authors and publishers against the AI company for pirating millions of books. It’s the largest settlement in US copyright case history. It supposedly comes out to about $3,000 per book.

Is this good? Bad? Not enough? That’s something that it of course being debated by many now, and will continue to be. Exactly what the settlement will consist of isn’t yet clear, as Judge Alsop declared the details aren’t clearly enough outlined yet, so there are more updates to come on what, who, and how much will be paid. Alsop is concerned that class members (maybe me! maybe you!) aren’t being provided with clear enough guidance to opt in or out. The lawyers have until the 15th to sort that out, and by October 10 they are required to have an approved, complete list of class members and works.

Here are some bits about the case that many might not understand and I might be able to help explain:

—This settlement is not about training LLMs. Alsop declared that Anthropic did not violate copyright law when it fed works into their LLM. He decided it was fair use because it transformed the original work. (The way I imagine it: your book is a log. Anthropic’s LLM is wood chipper. They fed your book log into the wood chipper, and on the other side was a pile of chips that they made to create, say, a house constructed of wood chips. They transformed your book. It’s now a house, not a log. That’s legal, according to this judge (other judges may decide differently; there are other ongoing cases).

So if you are on the front lines of arguing that AI should not be allowed to train LLMs with copyrighted books, you are barking up the wrong tree (more tree metaphors!). This case already declared that to be legal.

—This settlement is about stealing books. What Anthropic did illegally was steal the books they fed into the chipper. They sourced their book logs from a forest but didn’t pay the landowner, as it were. They were found liable for not paying for the seven million books they apparently fed into the wood chipper: they took the books from databases that had pirated books. That’s what the $3,000 per book is for. It would have been much cheaper for them to buy the 7 million books, which probably would have set them back, say, an average of $20 each. Now they have to pay $3000 for each book. That’s an expensive copy!

—It’s not clear if the settlement is for authors or publishers or both. This part is still opaque to me, and as both an author and a publisher, and will hopefully become clear soon! As I’ve written before, in my earlier series on copyright, authors retain copyright but they often enter into contracts to grant someone else exclusive publishing rights. So is the class member the author or the publisher or, as with subsidiary rights (which I argue LLM training should be considered, though this is not that) some split—25/75, 50/50, etc). It may be, as it has been with AI companies that are now licensing books from publishers for LLM training, that it will be up to the publisher to determine the split, if any. But I don’t know so please don’t cite this paragraph as gospel, thanks.

—Anthropic has to delete all the pirated books from their LLMs, and cannot use them in the future. So it’s done and over. Anthropic also says they did not actually use the pirated books in any of their LLMs anyway. So, if we believe all of this and the terms of the settlement, no book stolen by Anthropic will have been, is now, or will be used for LLM training.

—To qualify as a class member, and be paid, the book must:

—been downloaded by Anthropic from LibGen or PiLiMi before August 2022
— has an ISBN or ASIN
—have been registered with the US Copyright Office before being downloaded

The final criteria is tripping many up. What many don’t realize is that is not required to register your book with the Copyright Office for the book to be under copyright. This means it’s an easy step to skip! Even if, as it is in many publishing contracts, something the publishers say they will do on the author’s behalf (plus it costs money, and requires filling out forms). So those books can‘t be considered, which is something you could be rightfully pissed if your publisher said it would do and did not, but also not an uncommon occurrence (and the book is still under copyright). You can look up if your book is registered here.

To help me keep up to date, and better understand this case and the many other legal cases and discussions around AI, I recommend Authors Alliance (often confused with Authors Guild, but different!). And if you are kicking yourself for not better understanding your contract, or copyright, or copyright registration, or the difference between pirating books and training LLMs, maybe become a member? I certainly have decided I’ve put this off long enough, and just did myself. It’s free, but a donation is appreciated.

A final note: out in the fresh air, standing behind legally produced ink on actual paper, I spent the weekend selling books at Chicago’s Printers Row. It was a delight to meet some of you, meet and say hi to some Belt authors, and just see how people respond to the books on the table (which covers draw their eyes? Which seem to escape notice?). Mainly, it was a balm to be with blood-pumping humans talking out loud. We should all do it more!

How To Read More

There is no test

Here’s last week’s post on Women Writing About Themselves; Men Writing About Other Things

I’ll be in Chicago next weekend selling Belt books at Printer’s Row. Come say hi!

On the week after Labor Day I still feel like I should be handing out syllabi. Maybe this link with all the books Belt is publishing over the next ‘two semesters’ would suffice?

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I hate newsletters filled with advice about something on which the writer does not have expertise. Nonetheless, I am going to write one now! Maybe I kinda have expertise on the matter, I don’t know. At any rate, I find myself having this conversation a lot now, and people seem to respond to my suggestions positively on how to read more.

Apparently (I don’t really believe these stats, but it’s a starting point), Americans are reading for pleasure 40% less than they were two decades ago. And given the people I talk to in airports and Ubers and over drinks, this general stat is not surprising. I wrote about how English professors and writers and all sorts of people whose job involves reading books are also reading less for pleasure last year.

But the random conversations I have usually involve people wishing they read more. and that’s who this is for: those who want to read more for pleasure.

So first a bunch of advice, hacks, tips for how to read more (and I am speaking here of reading outside of my day job: all my adult life I have had jobs that require reading books, but what I’m talking about here is entirely separate from this. It’s about pleasure). At the end I talk a bit about why it is so meaningful to me.

• Saying things like “I don’t have time” or “I think I must have ADHD” —which I hear a lot—don’t sit always comfortably with me. I mean sure, some people truly do not have the time! But lots of folks who say they don’t have time do watch tv or spend time on social media. So they are making choices about what to do with their leisure time, which is different than not having it. And the ADHD or inability to concentrate? Sometimes, sure! That’s the reason! But often: It’s not actually about you! IT’S THE DAMNED PHONES. It’s the phones. Not your brain. My simplest first suggestion for overcoming these two hurdles is to remove all screens from the bedroom. It’s simple, and, bonus, it’s freeing, even if you just fall asleep earlier than you would have otherwise, and with less of a screen headache, or wake up slowly while reading instead of checking email.
  

• I do not think reading is morally good, creates empathy, or a duty. Take all that off the table. We’re just talking about fun here.
  

• The above connotations put undue pressure on the act of reading. Instead, conceive of reading as pure, unadulterated pleasure. A hobby, a way to shift gears, a way to get away from the damned phone, a thing you can do in bed, an outlet for curiosity. A way to counter loneliness, a way to soothe, free therapy. Conceive of it in any way you can that strips it of whatever pressures, should’s, competitions you may have placed on it.

• Read whatever the fuck you want to. Whatever sounds appealing to you in the moment. (One reason I love using an ereader is the freedom to download a book I feel like starting at 10:00 pm in bed, and be 1/3 through it by the time I fall asleep).
  

• Get yourself some help getting off your phone: there are apps you can set up to block apps and websites off for you. That’s what Kate McKean does: “The evening routine is titled ‘Books Are Better’” is how she puts it.

• Skip parts. There’s no test! This is about fun. Bored with the war scenes in War and Peace? With those long descriptions of trees? Turn the page. Or stop reading the book. The only goal is to have fun.
  

• Get in the habit of bringing a book, in any form, with you. Read while waiting for a friend for dinner, or at the doctor’s office, or on public transit, instead of scrolling. Much more calming! One person I asked carries a book in their hand, instead of in their bag, to make it even easier.
  

• Book clubs and other forms of communal reading are great, but might they sometimes get in the way of reading what you want to? If someone else chooses a book for your club that you don’t really want to read, and you keep putting it off and not reading other books you would rather read, is it cutting down on your overall reading pleasure? (This is one of the main reasons I have never been in a book club. I always just want to read whatever I feel like!)
  

• On the other hand, some people work out reading goals with someone else to keep them accountable: one friend has one to do 10 pages a day. It’s not the book, but the act of reading, that is emphasized.
  

• Have options. When you open up Netflix, you have hundreds of choices. How often do you say “I must watch this DeNiro movie tonight” instead of saying “hmm what do I feel like watching?” Set yourself up to have lots of choices as to what to read when as well. Buy print ones or check them out from the library and pile them by your nightstand, or do like me and download a bunch of ebooks from Libby at once.
  

• Whatever you think of Amazon, you can get the first 10% of any book sent to you free to your Kindle. I sample SO MANY books this way. My ereader is stuffed with Kindle samples I can open up whenever I want.
  

• Remember: pleasure fun hobby fun pleasure. Strip all that shit in your head away—your high school English teacher, the social media stuff about tracking how many books you read in a year, the folks who tell you it is political or resistance or moral or healthy like vegetables or a hack for getting ahead. It’s not competition. There is no test. It’s something you want to do. Full stop. God have we piled associations and connotations and pressures upon doing something fun and interesting. It’s burying us, and the books we desire to spend time with.

• Consider physical reasons you might not feel like reading, and work around them. One reason I switched to an ereader years ago has to do with my eyesight. I wear progressive lenses, which makes reading print books more difficult. An ereader solves this problem for me completely. And as I always say over and over and over the ereader screen is not same as a phone or tablet or computer. It’s gentler; it’s not harsh. It’s not connected to the internet. If there are physical things that prevent you from reading, maybe you can switch things up. Another example: I have never enjoyed reading hardcovers, because I spend a lot of time reading while lying down on my side; hardcovers are awkward in that position. So if it’s a print book it’s always a paperback.
  

• Listen to audiobooks instead of podcasts while doing the dishes or walking the dog or whatever. You can even switch from listening to reading the same book. An audiobook can offer you more immersion than a podcast.
  

• Stop reading a book you aren’t enjoying or don’t feel like reading. Again: no test! Again: you probably do this with streaming all the time! It’s the same idea! It’s entertainment!

Here are some more suggestions from folks I asked on social media:

“The chair. It’s all about the chair. I have a reading chair I sue almost exclusively when reading a book for pleasure.”

“Before bed I end up reading comic books or something super light. Makes it easier after these stressful, exhausting days. For other books I end up reading in the mornings and early evenings.”

“When I get in a reading lull, I find a genre I liked as a kid and look for new books in that genre. Usually mysteries, thrillers, or sci-fi. It’s a good way to clear through any clutter of books I feel I “should” read” (I do this too, and it’s usually business history—like Bad Blood or the recent ones on Facebook and Conde Nast— or mysteries)

“The only thing that worked for me what I had lost the habit was scheduling reading time the way you would exercise of music practice. Sn hour a day is not hard and can be totally life changing. Try some in the morning —bedtime actually isn’t great because your mind can be too tired.”

“I actually read novels on my phone. CloudLibrary and Kindle give me a good selection to pick from. I let myself get obsessed and binge the last 100 pages in the. middle of the night if I want to.” (I do this sometimes too).

“It’s wild now few people have library cards. Get one and go browse! They usually have book clubs and county-wide reading campaigns, and you can get audio ebooks for free too. Loaning gives you a deadline and eliminates the cost.”

And now some of the reasons I read a lot for pleasure:

It was early in the pandemic that I began reading about twice or three times as much as I had been doing before. It was then I finally threw away all the “shoulds” —I should be up on contemporary literary fiction, I should read more of the classics I skipped doing my PhD, I should read that book on urbanism in the city I live in. They all went out the window. Suddenly, I was ecstatic! I could read anything I wanted to. Since then I’ve read dozens and dozens of mysteries, a bunch of dumb business history books, minor novels by beloved authors instead of the big novel by the famous author, and so many truly glorious books that offered me the most intensely wonderful active respite from the world while offering me portals of insight into this world, and myself.

I follow rabbit holes through books instead of doing it online. For instance, after the election in November, I found myself desperate to learn ancient history. I started by listening to history podcasts, and then I would read books on the people and topics discussed that I was particularly interested in. I read about Sparta and the French Revolution and Samual Adams and Cleopatra. I’d rarely read these big trade histories before, and now I have a gazillion more still waiting for me, and we might all agree that having something to look forward to is much needed these days. But if I don’t read any of them? That’s okay too! And if I already don’t remember anything about Samual Adams, after being obsessed with him for two weeks in January? That’s ok too! I had fun.

If I watch a movie about, say, Stalinism (sorry that’s dark but it’s my latest rabbit hole), and want to know more, I read a book about it. If I hear about a dumb buzzy book and am curious, I read it. I love Edith Wharton but had never read her less famous ones so I read all the ‘minor’ ones. They are great! Soon it became, well, kinda like when you have started to exercise more than have for awhile and it slowly starts to become somewhat addicting. You just want to more and more and the resistance falls away.

Plus, for me, leisure reading has always been connected to my mental health, but now it’s probably my baseline. For example, on vacation recently, I read voraciously, hours and hours a day, but since I’ve been back, I’ve started and stopped four books. I’ve scrolled in bed, breaking my number one rule. My mood, and mental health, completely tracks with my leisure reading.

But why, you might ask, do any reading? You don’t have to! IT’S FINE NOT TO READ. I do it because I love to, and because when I am deep in certain books I am absorbed. I am immersed. I experience a state of flow. I’m in the zone. It’s all-encompassing, and the pleasure can be so intense as to be physical. And to know that I have an infinite number of such easily accessible, free or cheap such experiences available to me, for the rest of my life, no matter how long or short it might be, is the greatest solace.

This advice may be ill-advised—who am I to give it? Isn’t the very idea of a newsletter of tips the very opposite of my pleasure only modus operandi? Yeah maybe. Feel free to sound off below.

Women Write About Themselves; Men Write About Other Things

Here’s my previous post, on the book I’m working on, now paywall-free.

I joked to friends recently that “every middle-class white woman over 55 is writing a memoir.” I came to this spurious conclusion from talking to friends, being a guest editor for a query bootcamp, and reading the queries in the Belt inbox.

This trend is not new, but it does seem only to be accelerating. There is certainly no problem, on the face of it, with deciding to write a memoir, no matter your age, class, or gender. The difficulties arise when the memoirist wants to publish their memoir with a traditional publisher (self-publishing is problem-free). There two main issues arise : 1.) These writers are often not experienced, or published previously; they want to skip any apprenticeship track—publishing essays in magazines, etc. It’s usually to possible to skip from amateur to professional instantly— home cooks can’t just open haute cuisine restaurants, etc. ; 2.) They are often working from a (loose) therapeutic framework—writing as a way to process grief and trauma. This is a good thing to do! But it can create quite a complicated and difficult clash when they then seek to move their writing into a professional framework, one that inevitably involves rejection. (And gatekeepers—professionals— need not, and should not, consider the feelings of writers they turn down, beyond common courtesy.) There is also a robust world of editors and coaching you can pay to get help with your memoir, which opens up the possibility of bad faith actors, more interested in the money than in realistic advice (there’s a good article that touches on this here).

But that’s not really what I want to write about today, though it’s certainly a longstanding and interesting cultural trend. What I want to write about it how it might be tipping the balance of books being published. If women are writing memoirs, who is writing other forms of nonfiction?

I keep my eye on gender parity; I aim to publish a demographically representative number of male and female authors. Over the years, many times—here in this newsletter—I’ve noted that I receive far fewer queries from women than from men. Again—this is not a new issue. And redressing the imbalance was not terribly difficult in the past: it involved me doing more proactive outreach out to women.

But with the continued rise in memoir writing—from younger as well as older women—I find myself in a new muddle. Because Belt publishes few memoirs. This means our gender parity has gotten out of whack, and looks like it’ll stay that way for the next few years at least, given our forthcoming catalog. If my first take above is “women are writing about themselves,” my next one is “men are writing about other things.” Since Belt mainly publishes books about other things, most of our authors are going to be men.

For now, I’m going to just let it be, though I wish it otherwise.

In other news!

• I’ll be at Printers Row in Chicago September 6 and 7 showing off and selling Belt books. Printers Row is always exhausting but also so energizing. IRL readers! How fun.
  

• I’ll also be tabling for Belt at the Brooklyn Book Fair on September 21, so come on by, NYC folks.
  

• I took a trip to Finland and Estonia last week, which was wonderful. While there I read Sofi Oksanen’s novel Purge, one of the best contemporary novels I’ve read in years; highly recommend!

American Made: Or, What I'm working On

Last week’s newsletter on AI and publishing is now free to all. I tried to walk folks through issues that are complicated and controversial, as well as give my current two cents. I hope it’s helpful.

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I’ve been working on what we call an “in-house” book for Belt. “In-house” is our term for books that are authored by the staff of the press. Often my name is attached to the book, mainly because trade books tend to want a person or persons to credit, instead of an entity. Our most recent “in-house” books is the Best of the Rust Belt anthology.

We also have a line of Revivals, reissues of previously published works we think merit a new audience, and are usually in the public domain. I usually choose these, and the process involves me clicking about, asking people for suggestions, and remembering my PhD comprehensive exam reading lists.

Over the winter, I was researching new possible Revivals, so I went to the Library of Congress archives, where I always poke around for ideas. This time, I happened upon I collection I knew nothing about: oral interviews taken by writers employed by the Federal Writers Project (FWP). Many of the interviews center on the working conditions of Americans in the late ‘30s. (If you are thinking “Studs Terkel” right now you are exactly right: it’s similar, except these interviews were done in the moment, not later, as were Turkel’s.)

While I was reading the typescripts that have been (wonderfully!) digitized and made public to all from this collection, the folks in charge in D.C. were touting their desire to ‘bring back manufacturing’ and ‘have Americans do factory work instead of immigrants’ (I could explain this more fully but trust my readership is well aware of what’s going on). The interviews I was reading were both a stark parallel and contrast to those sound bites coming from the Sunday morning shows. Not only that, but Belt’s parent company has been working to publish books that connect to next summer’s 250th sesquicentennial. (I would like to pause here to clarify that this event was on the calendar long before anyone knew who would be in White House next summer.)

So I put all these pieces together and decided to compile a book of these oral interviews, to publish in June 2026. It’ll be an “in-house” book that also fits into our Revivals rubric. I’m thrilled that Kim Kelly has agreed to write the introduction.

The interviews are fascinating to read, and often in gorgeous prose, as with this snippet from one I’ll be including, from a Russian immigrant who ended up in Chicago and then spent his working life walking to Midwestern farms:

The experience of reading these, now, is to both compress history—how easily one could replace the nouns above with other nouns and make of this paragraph a description of changes happening today—and extenuate it—the past a foreign country; they do things differently there.

Oddly, I can find very little that has been published from this collection, though Knopf published one fabulous book on it in 1980. The intention of the project, after all the interviews had being taken and transcribed, was for the FWP, a subset of the Work Progress Administration (WPA), to publish them in a series of anthologies. But the funding for the program was cut before all the projected interviews could be done, curtailing it entirely, and no books were produced. For this and all the above reasons, it feels good to make something new out of these transcripts now, and to spend time appreciating the hard work of the interviewers, the interviewees, and the fine folks at the Library of Congress who have made them accessible.

Stay tuned for more info about American Made: Stories of Work from the WPA (June 2026), a pre-order link, and to see if David decides to use the photograph above for the cover.