New at Pencrafters: Copyright, Audiobooks, Translations, & AI Updates

If you haven't visited Pencrafters lately, now's a good time to stop by. As you may or may not know, Pencrafters is my pay-it-forward project for new, aspiring, and indie authors — a free resource covering everything from writing your first draft to publishing and marketing your book. I've been doing some significant updates to the site lately, and there's new content that I think every indie author needs to read.

First up, Copyright now has its own dedicated page — and if you're not registering your books at publication, you really need to read it. I'm not going to sugarcoat it: unregistered copyright is copyright with no teeth. The difference between registering on time and registering late could be the difference between recovering your losses from a piracy incident, versus just eating it. It's $45 and fifteen minutes. Do it.

I've also added a brand new Audiobooks & Translations page covering all the options available to indie authors right now — human narrators, AI narration through services like AuthorVoices, Amazon's own Virtual Voice, and on the translation side, human translators, DeepL and Amazon's new Kindle Translate service. There's a lot happening in this space and it's moving fast, so I tried to lay out the real tradeoffs rather than just listing options.

Finally, the page dedicated to AI has a new recurring section called "Meanwhile, in the Legal Department" — a running, dated log of the legal and industry developments related to the ever-changing landscape of AI. Rather than overhauling the whole page every time something changes, I'll just add a new entry at the top. Check back periodically to keep informed!