Megan Gad Reads: Sarah's Beef with Bloomsbury?

so good i just love what's happening in the bookstagram world right now i just love the way that indies are getting bigger than ever and we're just seeing so many transitioning over to trad pubs now with dagger mouth with the poison daughter i don't know if you've read that one that's an amazing standalone um there have just been so many just recently that you you know, we find them, we go, oh my God, this is amazing.

And then they get all the accolades that they very rightly deserve, but also just the amount of effort that goes into some of these books.

Like when you're an indie, you don't have the editors and things necessarily supporting you along the way to help make it into this beautiful thing.

And yet they still managed to produce these amazing pieces of work, which I think is really stunning.

yeah and it was it i did like someone did ask her a question of like okay well now you're traditional is that gonna change the content of your book because her book is very political and she's very open and honest that she wrote this book out of her pure rage of like our political climate and she was like nope they told me go for it full you know steam ahead like we're not gonna restrict you and i thought that was really awesome because i'm sure that's a huge concern for a lot of authors who go traditional, you are afraid you might maybe lose a little of your freedom.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

You don't get the opportunity to be completely open with everything that you wanted to do, that you're worried that they will try and dilute you and be like, can we change this a little bit? And yeah, definitely Dagger Mouth.

It's very out there.

You know, it's sexy, it's political, it's rough, like it's very, it's like gritty and dirty, but real.

And I think that's what makes it a really special book.

This obviously happened around all, I feel like we should talk about it since we're talking about Dagger Mouth, because it's been a huge piece of discourse in the last week or two about, you know what I'm about to talk about.

I do.

And I'm sure there's going to be a lot of rage about this, but the AI slop article that came out about HM Wolf, what like that obviously happened right around her doing this whole press release, which was just awful, like awful to have this at such an important time for her.

But was that covered at all? What are your thoughts on that?

I actually made a video about it.

I feel like the timing of the release of that article was intentional to harm her reputation.

And I kind of went into it a little bit.

I think we're seeing a bit of a pattern with these accusations for AI.

And what I didn't appreciate is in the article, most of these online newspapers now, you have to pay to read them, right? Once you hit the part where you can't read anymore without paying, that's where, beyond it, is where the journalist actually admits there's no proof that she used AI.

And then there's a quote from HM saying she adamantly denies it.

She doesn't think there should be AI used in the writer space at all.

But it's behind that paywall, and I thought that was just really icky.

They

do it as clickbait.

Let's be honest.