Nathan Bransford | Writing, Book Editing, Publishing

Helping authors achieve their dreams

Copyright

State-sponsored censorship week (This week in books)

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This week! Books! I’m back, and luckily nothing at all happened while I was away (okay everything happened while I was away). Lots and lots of links this week! Let’s get to it. 2026 We Need Diverse Books Mentorship Program Application – Applications are now open for We Need Diverse Books’ terrific mentorship program for […]

Copyright still requires human authorship, but read the fine print (This week in books)

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This week! Books! The Trump tariffs are tanking your 401k at the moment (if you’re lucky enough to have one), but how will they affect publishers, whose books are often printed in Asia and Europe? According to Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at the WSJ, they don’t really know either. The U.S. Copyright Office, apparently one of […]

No, AI-generated work is not copyrightable (This week in books)

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This week! Books! GPT-4 has arrived, leading to all sort of breathless headlines like this one from The Atlantic: ChatGPT Changed Everything. Now Its Follow-Up Is Here. Uhhhh… what exactly has it changed apart from prompting tech types and their financial enablers to lose their collective minds? Longtime readers know I am far from a […]

Watch out for book to film scams (This week in books)

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This week! Books! First up, we continue to live in a golden age for scammers, and Anne R. Allen has an important post about a new, more polished publishing trap: the book to film scam, where a “film scout” suggests you pay for a new screenplay or treatment so they can shop it to streaming […]

Buying a rare book doesn’t mean you own the copyright (This week in books)

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This week! Books! Some eclectic links for you this chilly week. A group of misguided “Dune-loving cryptocurrency enthusiasts” banded together to pay €2.9 million for a rare copy of filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s plans to adapt Dune for film, thinking that then meant they could release it to the public, produce an animated series, and/or produce […]

S&S cancels Josh Hawley’s book deal (This week in books)

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This week! Books! This week has been a heck of a decade. I don’t really know what to say about the incredibly distressing events of this week that others haven’t said more forcefully and eloquently, so I’m just going to move on to the books links. One consequence of the insurrection at the Capitol this […]