2025 Year in Review

Biggest headline: $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement

In Bartz v Anthropic, a class-action lawsuit brought by authors, the judge had to determine whether Anthropic’s training of its AI chatbot, Claude, on 7 million books constituted fair use. The judge ruled that Anthropic’s acts of training were fair use (legal), but that it was not legal for Anthropic to knowingly download and copy pirated works for its training library.

Ultimately, the two sides settled out of court to the tune of $1.5 billion due to copyright infringement (not AI training). But that settlement isn’t going to authors alone—it will be paid to rightsholders, which includes publishers in many cases. Even though the publishers were not the plaintiffs in this suit, a finding of blatant copyright infringement involves them, too. A large majority of commercial publishing contracts stipulate that authors and publishers split the proceeds of copyright infringement cases 50-50. As of today, authors and publishers expect to receive about $3,000 per title, but that amount may shift, depending on a variety of factors.

In one of the most horrible twists in this case, authors discovered that publishers don’t reliably register all books for copyright. (To be eligible for the settlement, the judge ruled that a book must have been registered with the US Copyright Office within five years of publication before being downloaded by Anthropic.) At least one US publisher, Tor, said it would pay authors any monies they would have received had their works been registered properly.

This early ruling indicates to me there will ultimately be a legal path to train AI models using copyrighted works; it’s just a matter of how much money rightsholders will receive. If the Anthropic ruling were the last word on the matter, then it would be considered fair use for AI companies to purchase authorized copies and use them for training without payment or licensing. That would mean authors and publishers would be able to do nothing to prevent AI models from training on their books. But such questions are far from settled; more lawsuits are making their way through the courts.

To learn more, read the Authors Guild’s comprehensive guide to the Anthropic settlement.

Biggest unresolved issue of the year: TikTok ownership

As soon as President Donald Trump took office for the second time, he issued an executive order giving Chinese company ByteDance a 75-day extension to sell TikTok before the social video platform would be banned in the United States. When that time period passed, he extended it again and again and—well, it’s nearly 2026, and things remain unresolved. A US-based joint venture has struck a deal to purchase TikTok, but it remains in limbo. Trump’s most recent deadline extension goes through January 23, 2026.

Biggest failure of the year: 8th Note Press

Ever since the pandemic, TikTok has been considered the most influential social media platform for marketing, promoting, and selling commercial fiction, especially romance. Circana BookScan, which tracks book sales in the US, even curates a list of BookTok authors and tracks their sales over time. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, launched 8th Note Press in 2023, saying little about its overall intentions, but they seemed obvious: to capture a piece of the action. Unless you count Wattpad, 8th Note Press remains the only instance of a major social media platform launching its own book-publishing venture in the US. Industry observers worried that TikTok would create an uneven playing field by boosting its own authors, just as some worried that Amazon Publishing would prioritize its own authors and titles.

But 8th Note Press shuttered around June 2025 without so much as a formal announcement, leaving their authors in a terrible lurch. The effort didn’t last even two years. Turns out you need more than just a popular social platform to successfully publish, market, and promote books. Learn more in the New York Times (gift link).

The year book criticism became a cultural loss but not a commercial one

When the Associated Press announced it would no longer run book reviews, the news unleashed a spate of commentary on the death of the professional book critic and/or book review. This has been playing out for more than a decade over countless articles in which professional critics try to argue how much their role matters and that they should be paid well. But the world has changed. Online creators and influencers, or self-styled critics, have become the main source of arts criticism. An Atlantic writer says, “Today, more and more critics pay their own bills, build their own followings, and invent their own rules. Recently, I’ve been reaching out to critics—new and old—to find out what those rules are. For better and for worse, the adage Everyone’s a critic no longer seems like an exaggeration.”

Meanwhile, authors’ importance in how books get marketed and promoted is growing and growing and growing. Publicist Cassie Mannes Murray wrote a cogent piece this year every author should read; she says, “In the larger landscape of book review publishing, I’ve seen the ‘traditional book review’ … replaced by the not-exactly-a-profile but a sort of hybrid ‘book story’ that isn’t a review at all but an attempt to influencer-infiltrate an author into the literary landscape. … It makes the author’s web of story much more important to the publicity of the work. We’ve been saying this for a while, but it’s telling authors that the work does not stand alone (not even fiction or poetry), it will not, at least in larger book coverage, be able to stand on its own.”

Professional book reviews in the mainstream media have never been so challenging to secure, but at the same time they have never mattered less to the overall picture of book sales.

Most dramatic AI advancement in publishing: AI-narrated audiobooks

Most major audiobook retailers now sell AI-narrated or synthetic-voice audiobooks, and self-publishing authors are finding myriad ways to profit off AI narration. That’s not to say AI narration has replaced human narration, but a two-tier system seems likely to emerge, with AI narration on one end and premium, human productions on the other (with higher pricing on the latter). The Audio Publishers Association, among others, are pushing for consistent labeling on audiobooks with AI narrators.

This year, Audible—in addition to opening the door to AI-narrated audiobooks—announced AI production technology for narration and for translated narration to select publishers. A range of AI narration startups entered the scene, including US-based Spoken, while ElevenLabs continues to be the leader in AI voice technology. In my interview with Stable Book Group president Keith Riegert earlier this year, he warned that AI automation for audiobooks will flood the market with audiobooks and create pricing pressures.

The end of an era: NaNoWriMo shuts down

NaNoWriMo was established in 1999 and operated as a nonprofit starting in 2005; this year it announced that it was shuttering due to financial problems. The executive director said, “If hundreds of thousands of people engage with us each year, but we bring in just over $1 million [in revenue annually], that’s a sign of distress. Over time, we became more dependent on revenue streams other than donations. Individual giving fell, and we tried to compensate by increasing merchandise sales and sponsorships.”

Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros: fastest-selling adult title in Circana BookScan’s history

Onyx Storm, the latest installment in the Empyrean romantasy series, sold 1,288,300 hardcovers (including both deluxe and standard editions) during its first week on sale, based on Circana BookScan figures. That’s the highest number of print sales for any adult title since the service started tracking book sales in 2004. (For comparison, the final title in the Harry Potter series sold 8.3 million copies in its first 24 hours on sale.) The publisher, Entangled, reported total sales of 2.7 million copies of Onyx Storm during the first week; the entire series sold 12 million copies overall in 2024. Learn more in the New York Times (gift link).

My favorite Bottom Line articles of 2025

The following articles are available to paid subscribers.

• What’s copyrightable when using AI? This issue is not well understood by writers, and my article still holds up well. 
• What defines acceptable AI use for writers? A close cousin to the above article. 
• Small press survival: How do literary presses in particular sustain themselves when book sales aren’t enough to pay the bills? I gathered insights from an informative panel at the 2025 AWP Conference in Los Angeles. 
• How is midlist marketed today? At trade shows this year, I heard about meaningful shifts in how traditional publishers market and promote books. In particular, the timeframe for achieving success has extended beyond the traditional launch window.