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Has your book been pirated by Meta? (This week in books)

March 21, 2025 by Nathan Bransford

This week! Books! Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Meta allegedly pirated millions of books to train its A.I. via Library Genesis, or LibGen, a piracy library. The Atlantic created a searchable tool to see if your book(s) are available on LibGen, with the caveat that this means your book could have been used to train A.I. They […]

Filed Under: This Week in Books Tagged With: A.I., David Moldawer, Kate McKean, LibGen, LitHub, Meta, Scholastic, Science, Skibidi Toilet, We Need Diverse Books

RIP Mike Shatzkin (This week in books)

November 8, 2024 by Nathan Bransford

What a week. We lost a really wonderful person this week as my favorite publishing sage Mike Shatzkin passed away yesterday at the age of 77. Mike knew more about the industry and publishing history than just about anyone (along with Robert Riger, he literally wrote the book about it), and he was incredibly generous […]

Filed Under: This Week in Books Tagged With: A.I., Barnes & Noble, Donald Maass, Donald Trump, DongWon Song, Mike Shatzkin, Scholastic, Simon & Schuster

Was the publishing industry really serious about diversity? (This week in books)

October 20, 2023 by Nathan Bransford

This week! Books! First up, I don’t mean to paint an entire industry with too broad of a brush and there have certainly been pockets of commitment to reversing a checkered legacy of hiring and publishing patterns within the book business. But one of the looming questions was whether the publishing industry would really sustain […]

Filed Under: This Week in Books Tagged With: Aaliyah Bilal, Adania Shibli, Armed Services Editions, Barnes & Noble, Diversity, Kat Brauer, LeVar Burton, Scholastic, Susan Dennard, The Mighty Pens, We Need Diverse Books

Cormac McCarthy is not on Twitter (This week in books)

August 6, 2021 by Nathan Bransford

This week! Books! After the sudden death of longtime Scholastic CEO Richard Robinson, there’s now a succession drama surrounding his estate that’s worthy of, well, HBO’s Succession. This would be merely the stuff of tabloids, and not fit for the esteemed halls of This Week in Books, except that control of a $1.2 billion publisher […]

Filed Under: This Week in Books Tagged With: Chanté Griffin, Cormac McCarthy, James McGowan, Jessica Faust, Kim Lionetti, Kristen Lamb, Lincoln Michel, Scholastic

WNDB moves away from #OwnVoices (This week in books)

June 11, 2021 by Nathan Bransford

This week! Books! We Need Diverse Books announced this week that they are moving away from the term #OwnVoices, which had been used to refer to authors writing books and characters that reflect their background, citing the vagueness of the term and lack of safety for authors. As others have noted, the phrase had already […]

Filed Under: This Week in Books Tagged With: Ashleigh Renard, J. Michael Straczynski, Kristen Weber, Naomi Osaka, Ralph Ellison, Scholastic, We Need Diverse Books

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About Nathan

Hi, I’m Nathan. I’m the author of How to Write a Novel and the Jacob Wonderbar series, which was published by Penguin. I used to be a literary agent at Curtis Brown Ltd. and I’m dedicated to helping authors achieve their dreams. Let me help you with your book!

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My Books

How to Write A Novel
Cover of How to Publish a Book by Nathan Bransford
Jacob Wonderbar and the Cosmic Space Kapo
Jacob Wonderbar for President of the Universe
Jacob Wonderbar and the Interstellar Time Warp

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