Oleksiy (ALEX) Kapusta

Author of the smash-hit bestseller “Liquid Cube.”

[Oleksiy (ALEX) Kapusta @OKapusta]

Six regional US indie bookseller shows this fall, ~1,500 booksellers attending. The conferences aren't the story. The membership numbers are.

Midwest IBA: 425 member stores, 102 of them joined since July 2025.

Mountains and Plains IBA: 372 members, +128 in twelve months.
Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance: 385 members, +115.
Roughly a quarter to a third of each association's membership is new. Other regionals report the same direction.

The function of these shows is shifting too. Editors now pitch acquisitions in person, and booksellers leave with ARCs not just for the fall list but for 2027 titles.

Useful counterpoint to the "death of the physical bookstore" genre. In the US indie segment the network isn't contracting — it's adding stores and moving further upstream in discovery.

[Oleksiy (ALEX) Kapusta @OKapusta]

HarperCollins just hired Amazon's books vendor services lead as VP of online and digital sales, US Trade.
Scott Sanders spent years running Amazon's relationships with the Big Five and 20+ other North American publishers. Now he's on the other side of that table.

The interesting part isn't the move — it's what it signals. Digital commerce and marketplace data are now strategic enough for a Big Five house to hand the whole direction to someone who knows exactly how the platform side negotiates.

He'll work across editorial, marketing, ops and data science, plus the key retail partners.
Publishers aren't hiring a sales VP. They're buying platform literacy.

[Oleksiy (ALEX) Kapusta @OKapusta]

Ingram just started handing out digital review copies.

The company that prints your book, warehouses it, and takes the order now also runs the catalog where buyers discover it.

That's not a NetGalley competitor. That's a toll road with four toll booths.

The setup: a software rollup bought Edelweiss in late 2024, raised prices, publishers screamed. Ingram announced Covered in February and shipped it this month.

[Oleksiy (ALEX) Kapusta @OKapusta]

The UK print market passed £1bn this week — about six days earlier than in 2025, and the earliest point in BookScan’s comparable records. Value sales up 2.3% year on year.
Worth saying plainly what this does and doesn’t prove.
It doesn’t prove print is “back” — it never left. What it shows is that reader demand for physical books is not the constraint in this industry. Money is still moving toward print, earlier every year.
The constraint is upstream: which books ever reach the reader who would have paid for them. A market that hits £1bn faster each year while mid-list discovery gets harder is a distribution problem wearing a demand problem’s costume.

[Oleksiy (ALEX) Kapusta @OKapusta]

A German children’s book publisher just sued OpenAI — and the detail that matters isn’t the lawsuit itself.
On 19 August, Carlsen Verlag, author Marc-Uwe Kling and illustrator Astrid Henn filed against OpenAI Ireland at the Munich Regional Court over “Das NEINhorn”. Backed by Bonnier. They want an injunction, disclosure, and damages.
What they showed the court: simple prompts produced stories and illustrations close to the original — and ChatGPT went further, offering complete print-ready mock-ups with a cover, an imprint page, a fabricated ISBN and the publisher’s logo. Their claim, not yet a finding of fact.
My read: this is the start of a mass wave, not an isolated case. GEMA already won at first instance in Munich. The Authors Guild, Danish publishers, Indian publishers are all in court. What changes now is who’s filing. Not collecting societies, not a class of famous names — one publisher, one author, one illustrator, one children’s title.
Once that becomes normal, every mid-list rights holder with a lawyer becomes a potential plaintiff. And the disclosure demand is the real weapon: if OpenAI has to open the training set, the next thousand claims write themselves.

[Oleksiy (ALEX) Kapusta @OKapusta]

A former Chicago bookseller just launched Lit Circle — a free national database of author events, book clubs and literary festivals, with alerts for whatever’s happening near you. The stated ambition: BandsInTown, but for books.
The reasoning behind it is the part worth reading. Local print media is gone. Newspaper book sections shrank to nothing. Facebook and Instagram still work, but only when the algorithm decides they do. So an author event now happens in a room that nobody was told about.
Look at what the model deliberately excludes. Indie stores and literary organizations list events for free and can link to their own site, https://t.co/SuTQz84KST or https://t.co/dA8MyUzJ6I. Chains get listed too — readers deserve to know Ann Patchett is in town — but with no purchase link attached.
Publishing keeps solving production. Printing is cheap, distribution is solved, formats are solved. The bottleneck is telling four thousand specific people that a book exists. Every new platform in this industry is really an attempt at that one problem.

[Oleksiy (ALEX) Kapusta @OKapusta]

Poland’s Unia Literacka is pushing to write a minimum author royalty into law — 10% of the cover price. The Culture Ministry says it’s planned for the book market protection act.

Median monthly income for a Polish writer: 2,500 zloty (~€580 / $680). Minimum wage: 3,545 (~€820 / $960).

[Oleksiy (ALEX) Kapusta @OKapusta]

Börsenblatt asked two German children's and YA editors what editing actually does. One answer: sometimes the Instagram-ready metaphor has to be cut — because social media marketing pushes authors to build sentences that work as bookquotes and do nothing for the plot.

The test isn't "is this beautiful." It's "does this move the story."

Quotability and prose quality are separate variables. Plenty of writers now optimise for the first.

[Oleksiy (ALEX) Kapusta @OKapusta]

Sweden spent fifteen years putting a screen on every desk.
It is now spending 2.1 billion kronor putting printed textbooks back on them.

The trigger was PISA. Swedish reading and maths scores fell sharply in 2022 — nearly a quarter of 15–16 year olds failed to reach basic reading comprehension.
Preschool digital mandate: dropped in 2025.
National school phone ban: July 2026.
Textbook-based curriculum: 2028.

This is not a Nordic quirk.
114 education systems now have a national ban on phones in schools — 58% of all countries. In June 2023 it was under 25%.
Netherlands, 2024. Italy, up to upper secondary. Denmark, from this August. England, statutory from September.

The Dutch have the cleanest data. After one full school year without phones, 75% of secondary students said they could concentrate better and 59% said the social climate improved.
Attention turned out to be the resource nobody was measuring.

Publishing angle nobody is pricing in:
An entire European cohort is now being taught, by law, to read on paper.
Print is already ~78% of global book revenue. Nielsen finds 80% of readers aged 14–25 prefer a physical book.
The "print is dead" decade ended without a press release.

[Oleksiy (ALEX) Kapusta @OKapusta]

A subscription box just put a debut novel at #1 in the UK.
Taylor J. LaRue’s Steelborn: 3,642 copies one week, 14,596 the next. +300.8%. Top of the Official UK Top 50.
The lift came from FairyLoot — a box that ships to readers who paid months in advance.
Ten years ago that was merch. Today it’s a publisher: FairyLoot’s imprint with Transworld won Steelborn in a nine-way auction.
Retail didn’t make this bestseller. A list of names did

[Oleksiy (ALEX) Kapusta @OKapusta]

Russia spent two months burning Ukraine's books.
~13 million copies destroyed in July and August — a third of the country's annual output. 1.2 million of them school textbooks.
Warehouses. Printing houses. Editorial offices. At least nine companies.
This isn't collateral damage. It's an inventory.

[Oleksiy (ALEX) Kapusta @OKapusta]

MacKenzie Scott — Bezos's ex-wife, who worked on Amazon's early business plans and still holds ~1.3% of the company — just published her first novel in 13 years. Not Knopf. Not Harper. Not Amazon. 80,000 words, free, chapter by chapter on Substack.

A publisher hands you a supply chain and keeps the reader list. Substack hands you the list.

At $40bn, a direct relationship with your reader is the one thing left you can't buy. You can only decline to sell it.

[Oleksiy (ALEX) Kapusta @OKapusta]

Do people really want to read more text generated by artificial intelligence?

That is what the headlines said this week. The study says the opposite, and it is worth reading before repeating.

Sears and Weisberg at Villanova, published 5 August in Judgment and Decision Making, a Cambridge University Press journal. 2,587 readers, 18 to 81. Three short stories by published authors against three from ChatGPT-4.0. The machine came out roughly 6% ahead on quality and 8% on engagement. In one experiment readers named the author correctly 39.4% of the time. Worse than guessing.

But the top score in the study went to one specific combination: an AI story with a human name attached. Tell readers the truth about the same text and the rating drops.

So the finding is not that we want machines. It is that we still want an author and have lost the ability to detect one.

The mechanism is unglamorous. Machine prose is flatter and cheaper to process, and the brain files low processing cost as quality. Ask a reader to rate a text and much of what they rate is how hard it was to get through.

I spent thirty years in media before I started writing novels about it, and this is the oldest trick in the file. Attach the right source to a message and the message scores higher. Nothing about it is new. The tooling is simply cheaper now, and it writes fiction.

[Oleksiy (ALEX) Kapusta @OKapusta]

404 Media hid an AirTag in a shipment of rare books. It ended at Amazon's LAS8 warehouse in Las Vegas, where a unit called VGT3 slices the bindings off books, scans the pages and destroys the paper. The data trains Amazon's Nova models. Amazon won't say why the books have to die.

[Oleksiy (ALEX) Kapusta @OKapusta]

Next week Prague becomes a film set. Netflix starts shooting Dan Brown’s The Secret of Secrets, Morgan Spector inherits Robert Langdon from Tom Hanks, and cameras move into the old town in September. Trucks, crews, closed streets, a budget most publishers will never see in a lifetime. All of it downstream of one man sitting alone in a room with a text.

Here’s what stops me as a novelist. Netflix ordered the series in 2025 — months before the book was published. No sales, no reviews, no proof of anything. They bought a manuscript. We keep being told the market decides what literature is worth; sometimes the manuscript decides, and the market catches up afterwards. And Brown didn’t sell the rights and step aside — he’s developing the series with Carlton Cuse of Lost, writing and executive producing it himself. The author stayed in the room. That’s the part younger writers should study.

And Prague plays Prague — not a stand-in for Vienna or Paris — because the novel is nailed to real places: Charles Bridge, the Klementinum, Josefov. That’s the quiet power of the form. Hundreds of people with cameras are converging on a city this month because one writer imagined it precisely enough first. Everything you’ll see on screen existed as sentences before it existed at all.

[Oleksiy (ALEX) Kapusta @OKapusta]

AAP’s 2025 numbers: $33.4B in revenue, up 2.5%. Units: 3.15B, up 0.4%.
Six times more growth in dollars than in books.
Everyone’s 2026 plan is hiding in that gap — and most of them are calling it “pricing strategy.”

[Oleksiy (ALEX) Kapusta @OKapusta]

€705 million and 4,900 jobs a year. That’s what book piracy costs Italy, according to the Italian Publishers Association — more than a quarter of the market’s total value.

[Oleksiy (ALEX) Kapusta @OKapusta]

A record five Pulitzer winners this year disclosed using AI, and the Pulitzers were clear about the terms: it’s fine for digging through data, but not for writing or editing the story itself. Next year that same question appears on the book entry forms, which means novelists are about to have the conversation journalists have already finished having.

[Oleksiy (ALEX) Kapusta @OKapusta]

ElevenLabs put out The Odyssey narrated by Michael Caine's licensed AI voice. Four people, six weeks, 13 hours of finished audio.

I sell my thriller direct, in Ukrainian, from my own site. Audio is my second-best-selling format — ahead of the e-book, behind only print.
Audio stopped being an add-on. In some markets it's the format