More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’
wired.com – Wednesday July 29, 2026
Novelists, journalists, and power LinkedIn posters are embracing first-person narratives and idiosyncrasies to avoid being mistaken for chatbots.
Last year, when the novelist Laura Brooke Robson began writing Love Is an Algorithm—a love story between the cofounder of an AI dating app and a musician trying to survive in the age of large language models—she took extra care not to sound like AI herself.
She wrote sentences she doubts she would have attempted before the advent of LLMs, avoiding what she calls “wishy-washy metaphors,” and took “a more winding path to avoid an em dash or a tripartite list.”
Since the widespread adoption of LLMs, Robson says her writing has fundamentally changed for the better, becoming a deliberate inverse of what she sees as AI’s default lack of style.
“I find myself writing less mechanically,” she says. “I have this urge to make little mistakes, like winks to the reader, to show that there’s a human behind the words. Like: What if I just invented a phrase? What if I did something unexpected with my punctuation?”
Robson is part of a larger cohort of writers who are practicing what could be called an anti-AI writing style. Across journalism, criticism, creative writing, and especially among compulsive LinkedIn posters, writers are converging on a set of choices that implicitly resist the trappings of AI-generated prose.
The style mostly takes shape through negation, often of the obvious AI tells, like lists of three, passive voice, not x but y, and em dashes. But it also prizes idiosyncrasy as its overriding principle, tapping into specific first-person anecdotes and eccentric similes that demonstrate the necessary drudgery of writing.
Agent Business Models May Be Shifting: What I Fear Will Happen
janefriedman.com – Wednesday July 29, 2026
However you measure it, I find more literary agents operating today than in decades prior. The Guide to Literary Agents directory, published since 1995, started with about 400 listings. The most recent edition, released in 2021, had about 1,000. According to my own reporting, the number of new agents announced per year in 2023, 2024, and 2025 was at least double the number announced in 2022. If you look at the number of contacts in Publishers Marketplace that carry the agent label, there are more than 3,000, although not all of them have reported deals. The number of Publishers Marketplace editors? About 3,800.
What’s driving the increase? It’s probably some combination of the following: Anyone can and does call themselves an agent, more people are agenting as a side gig, and consolidation among major and mid-size publishers has led some industry professionals to take up agenting. For career agents who’ve been in the business for the last couple decades or more, this is probably not a welcome development. It increases competition and creates more submissions for editors to sift through; for years now, agents and authors alike have complained of increased editorial response times. Some part of that is due to increased workloads for editors, but reportedly they’re also getting more material to consider. Longtime agent Kristin Nelson cited this as one reason agenting is harder today, and the situation is not improving.
The surest sign the profession is under pressure: changes at the Association of American Literary Agents. In 2022, the AALA loosened membership requirements. Prior to that year, membership required selling at least 10 books in an 18-month period. Now, anyone working in the field of author care at a literary agency can join. This isn’t in and of itself a bad thing—the organization is moving toward a more equitable and inclusive membership. But it definitely attracts more members unlikely to make a living by selling books.
Is This What Comes After AI Slop?
theatlantic.com – Tuesday July 28, 2026
Daggermouth could be the first best-selling novel partly written by a chatbot.
Most self-published authors can only dream of writing something as popular as Daggermouth. Set in a surveillance state ruled by a masked elite, the novel traces the unlikely romance between the president’s son and an assassin hired to kill him. Since H. M. Wolfe uploaded Daggermouth to Amazon as a Kindle ebook, it has been a viral hit. “Did I finish Daggermouth, or did Daggermouth finish me?” a TikTok book influencer gushed. In February, Simon & Schuster paid seven figures to secure the publishing rights to the book and its sequel, which is due out next year.
Daggermouth has spent months on USA Today’s best-seller list and is ranked No. 1 in Amazon’s “science-fiction romance” genre. It also tops a less prestigious list, one compiled by academics studying AI writing. Among thousands of self-published Amazon ebooks that they identified as containing “substantial AI text,” none was more popular than Daggermouth.
Until recently, AI fiction has been easy to dismiss as slop. On Amazon, new-book releases nearly tripled from 2022 to 2025. (That’s probably not because humans suddenly dedicated themselves en masse to the written word.) Many are blatant copycats of existing titles, seemingly intended to trick readers into buying them. Their sales figures are generally meager; the reviews, indignant. A suspicious number of them feature protagonists with the same names. Last year, readers of one fantasy novel noticed a line that seemed to be responding to a prompt asking a chatbot to write in the style of another author. But if a book as beloved as Daggermouth were written with a chatbot, it would raise an awkward question: Could AI fiction be getting … good?
‘Dungeon Crawler Carl’ author on how he went from self publishing to New York Times bestseller who is developing a TV adaptation with Seth MacFarlane
pagesix.com – Sunday July 26, 2026
It takes a lot of work to be an overnight success, and nobody knows that more than Matt Dinniman, author of the massively popular “Dungeon Crawler Carl” series of books that’s sold a whopping 13.5 million copies.
“I’ve been writing since I was a kid. My first book came out way back in 2003. It was published with a small press. Back then, you didn’t self-publish because if you did, it meant you weren’t good enough. That stigma still exists,” Dinniman tells Page Six Hollywood during a brief respite from his packed schedule at San Diego Comic-Con.
He finally caught the self-publishing bug in 2017, releasing “Dominion of Blades” in the lesser-known (at the time, at least) Literary Role-Playing Game (LitRPG) genre. In the years that followed, he made a living selling drawings of cats and dogs at conventions (he attended 42 of them in 2019 alone). When those cons took a hiatus in 2020 due to the pandemic, he decided to get serious about his next project: “Dungeon Crawler Carl.”
How to Get Your Book Published: 5 Takeaways from You Are A Writer
pen.org – Friday July 24, 2026
For the final installment of You Are A Writer, PEN America’s workshop series for early-career writers, four industry experts delved into how a book makes its way from a writer’s hands onto shelves. They discussed what agents, editors, and publicists are looking for in proposals and manuscripts, how writers can find the right path for their book’s publication, and why they should never quit their day jobs. Scroll down to read five takeaways from the discussion.
Moderated by Sarah Bowlin, a senior literary agent at Aevitas Creative Management, the session featured Juli Kiyan, editor and associate director of publicity at Penguin Press, Kate Gale, co-founder and managing editor of Red Hen Press, and Liz Garriga, senior director of publicity at Little, Brown.
If you missed them, catch up on the earlier sessions of You Are A Writer.
1. Sweep readers off their feet with your manuscript.
Kicking off the session, Bowlin asked the panelists what they’re looking for in any given submission. Kiyan responded that when it comes to fiction, the writing needs to leap off of the page and wow readers.
Garriga agreed. “Really, it’s just about an immersive reading experience,” she said. “So that’s the good news there: You just have to enchant someone with the writing.”
Later, Bowlin stressed that you should contact agents only once you have a complete (and thoroughly edited) manuscript. “My dad had the very cheesy [saying], ‘You only get one chance at a first impression,’ but it is true in the sense that I have 700 unread novels in my inbox right now and the only way that I get through that material is for something to really stand out,” she said.
Jessica Knoll’s Guide to Writing a Novel Without Losing Your Mind
polyesterzine.com – Friday July 24, 2026
Jessica Knoll knows what it takes to build a life around writing. The bestselling author of Luckiest Girl Alive and The Favorite has spent years turning complicated stories into page-turners, all while navigating the pressures that come with making writing your livelihood. Now, after moving from LA back to New York, raising her young daughter and publishing her latest novel, Helpless, she’s thinking more than ever about the long game, and how to keep writing without letting it consume you.
Helpless is Knoll’s most ambitious novel yet - an erotic thriller about two exes who reunite at the funeral of their beloved professor, only to find themselves pulled into a dangerous story that forces them to question everything they thought they knew about their past.
When we speak, Knoll is candid about the less glamorous side of writing a novel - the days when a thousand words can take four hours, the weeks when the story won’t cooperate and the difficulty of remembering that your life is bigger than your writing.
Here, Jessica Knoll shares her guide to writing a novel without losing your mind.
The Writing Course Gold Rush
litopia.com – Friday July 24, 2026
That old scoundrel Sam Brannan would have felt completely at home in today’s publishing business. Sam, you may recall, was the original promoter of California’s 1848 Gold Rush. After first cornering the market in picks, shovels and pans (paying a mere 20 cents each wholesale), Sam proceeded to run though the streets of San Francisco shouting at the top of his lungs “Gold! Gold on the American River!”.
Accounts indicate that Sam’s brilliant sales promotion all but emptied San Francisco, as most of its male population departed en masse for the mines – equipped, of course, with a Brannan shovel at an eye-watering $15 a pop. It is hardly necessary to add that while most failed to find their own pots of gold, Sam certainly found his – becoming the Gold Rush’s first millionaire.
Fast Forward 160 Years…
The industry is different, but the conversations are the same. “There’s gold in them thar slushpiles,” says one publishing executive to another. “If we had £15 for every submission sent in – why, pardner – we’d never need to sell books again!”
Suddenly, it seems as if every Tom, Dick and publishing Harriet are running writing courses, setting up seminars, organising conferences, selling critiquing services, creating writing groups, providing manuscript doctoring and generally trying to monetize the slushpile. Our industry appears to have declared open season on the naive, sometimes gullible hopes of aspiring writers. It’s the Wild West out there, and someone has to say that much of what is happening now is simply not right.
While many of these offerings are merely guilty of being extremely poor value for money – why anyone would pay hundreds or thousands of pounds for advice that’s available in any how-to book is beyond me – others are less benign.
What I know now about publishing a book
newsroom.co.nz – Wednesday July 22, 2026
It’s Saturday morning, five days after my book launch. I’m at a GP conference in a provincial town. I hadn’t considered seeing my book in an actual book shop. That was only an ethereal idea. But I make myself duck uneasily into Whitcoulls and PaperPlus, self-conscious that every shop assistant knows I am an author looking for their own book, and I pick up a Chelsea Winter, then Become Unstoppable, then Lessons on Living, then Habits of High Performers, flicking through them like I’m legit. I edge around shelves and finally at floor level, in the health and wellbeing section I find one copy of my book Everything but the Medicine: A doctor’s tale between Befriending Your Gut Biome and Menopause Conquered. WTF. I run out the door.
On Google maps I find the Indie bookshop. That will be better. The door sticks and clatters. I avoid eye contact, pretending to browse the Māori and literary sections, my eyes flicking around for my book cover but I can’t see it anywhere. I pause, consider running again, but bravely go to the desk, introduce myself and my book. She looks blank, consults her computer and the computer says, “No.” I desperately wish I’d stayed at the conference and learned more about heart failure.
Publishing your first book is a strange experience. There’s a lot I didn’t know. Here’s what I would tell my pre-book self now that I’ve done it.
The Real Book Ban No One Talks About
dailywire.com – Sunday July 19, 2026
Move over, Leonardo Da Vinci. There’s a new Renaissance humanist on the block — at least, according to the internet. You might know her as the global pop star Dua Lipa, and she wants you to read banned books.
This past week, the “Levitating” singer unveiled her new “Manifesto Library” in Portugal, which features hundreds of books she claims were once banned or otherwise controversial. Posing with a copy of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a book that has now sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, she tells her 650K+ “Book Club” followers that her initiative opens up “conversations around censorship, resistance and the importance of preserving voices that challenge power and refuse to be silenced.”
There’s only one problem. None of the books in her library were ever “banned” or “censored” in the first place.
Among the other titles in Dua Lipa’s library are George Orwell’s “1984,” a book that has sold over 30 million copies as of 2024, and J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” a novel that is read in virtually every single high school English class across the country. I don’t necessarily disagree with Dua Lipa that we all should read these great books, but calling “1984″ and “The Catcher in the Rye” “banned” books is like calling “Game of Thrones,” one of the world’s most widely watched TV shows, a “banned” show.
Meeting the publishers – self-publishing vs a publishing house
yorkshirebylines.co.uk – Sunday July 19, 2026
The most popular tickets at any literature festivals are always the Meet the Publisher slots. For the average aspiring writer, getting a face-to-face with a publisher is well-nigh impossible, with the most sought-after speaking only to agents, not authors. Tickets to the event sell out almost instantly and the waiting list is substantial.
The brief is to send an example of your work ahead of the meeting, to allow the publisher to provide you with feedback. No-one’s going to find themselves signed to a company at one of these meetings, so it’s important to limit your expectations. However, you’ll receive feedback and you’ll make contact, both of which are essential to a future as a writer.
This year’s publishers at the Bradford Literary Festival were from Bloomsbury Publishing, one of the biggest publishing houses and most famous for publishing the Harry Potter series, and Bluemoose Books, an independent publishing company based in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. Bluemoose publishes literary fiction and has just celebrated its 20th anniversary with a star-studded event at the local town hall.
Solid advice based on experience
As a creative writing lecturer tasked with guiding aspiring writers, I’m constantly assessing the best route to publication. My students are currently very keen on the idea that self-publishing is now a better route than the soul-destroying traditional route of first finding an agent, then a publisher, usually across years of submissions and disappointment. They love that self-publishing appears to allow the writer to retain greater control as well as avoiding high agency fees.
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