Fighting for Book Workers’ Rights, Battling Book Bans, and Other Literary Resolutions For 2025

I’ve been dreading its arrival since November, but 2025 is finally here. As an American I feel overwhelmed. There are so many unknowns about the new (old) administration coming in and so much we’ll likely have to fight for. Also, in much less important news I have a debut essay collection coming out in 2025, and maybe it’s in this space where I can find an opportunity to grasp at some control and do my part, even if the rest of the world is on fire. These are my resolutions as an author in 2025.

Agitate for book workers’ rights.
From support staff at literary agencies and factory workers to booksellers and production assistants and book review writers, everyone who works in the book industry deserves a living wage and personal dignity (I mean, so do people who don’t work in the book industry, but that’s another essay). The entire book world will benefit—and even perhaps be able to concentrate on finding new readers!—if its workers feel safe and secure and aren’t living paycheck to paycheck.

I have a lot of faith in collective action. Recently we’ve seen The Strand workers strike to successfully obtain a new contract (I hope Barnes & Noble workers are next), and the HarperCollins Union (HarperCollins remains the only major corporate publisher to be unionized) was responsible for a 2022-2023 strike that can be credited, at least partially, with the rise of starting salary increases across the board. More of this please, especially at a time when corporate powers tend to value profits for stockholders and endless growth over their own employees, to the detriment of creating a more diverse and sustainable industry.

Fight book bans loudly and aggressively.
Earlier this year I joined the board of Authors Against Book Bans, because, even under a Democratic president, Moms for Liberty had been infiltrating school boards and libraries and already making the number of books banned during the 2023-2024 school year skyrocket. In 2023 PEN America said that authors whose books are targeted are “most frequently female, people of color, and/or LGBTQ+ individuals,” and that is no accident. Under Trump the targeting of marginalized authors and stories will likely worsen, with Project 2025’s suggestions threatening to be disastrous for the freedom to read. All is not lost, however. In the past few months alone we’ve seen many wins against book banners, which is a great reminder of how important it is to keep screaming about this and fighting back.

Don’t read the comments and/or Goodreads.
Here’s a tricky one: for years I’ve been telling authors that my number one advice to them is to avoid looking up reviews of their books on Goodreads and other book tracking and rating sites. They are none of your business, I tell them. Let readers have spaces of their own to talk freely and openly about books. Please remind me of this excellent advice when advance readers copies of my book get sent out later this month.

Learn more about AI.
I want to better understand AI simply to become more capable of defending writers from losing work and readers from being fed garbage by corporations that don’t care about art or creativity. But I also don’t want to waste too much energy on AI, quite literally. The amount of electricity required to use generative AI is enormous, with Google and Amazon already acquiring nuclear reactors to power it. So ideally I would like to be more educated about AI without actually having to teach myself by fucking around on Chat GPT and killing a bunch of trees.

An excellent solution I’ve decided to try is to read books written by people—ever heard of them? My reading list: Princeton University Press has an entire line of books on AI, but one title in particular has caught my eye: AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor. I’m also very much looking forward to author Vauhini Vara’s Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, a book that has grown out of her viral essay in which she used a precursor to ChatGPT to write a personal essay about the death of her sister and the limits of artificial intelligence in exploring what it means to be a human.

Shout out and support other authors, always.
It’s always helpful, whether you’re a writer or a reader, to tell other people about the books you’ve loved. Why don’t I tell you about some recent favorites in the hopes that maybe you’ll pre-order them, or request from your local library? These include Good Girl by Aria Aber, Dangerous Fictions by Lyta Gold, and The Employees by Olga Ravn (translated by Martin Aitken).

My list of upcoming books that I’m excited to read is much too long to include here, but why don’t I highlight the ones that are publishing in January? An incomplete list includes The Harder I Fight the More I Love You by Neko Case, Blob by Maggie Su, We Lived on the Horizon by Erika Swyler, Too Soon by Betty Shamieh, Y2K by Charlotte Shade, Dark Laboratory by Tao Leigh Goffe, and Everything Must Go by Dorian Lynskey. There are so many more to come, and I can’t wait to talk about them.

What are your resolutions for 2025? Sound off in the comments if you like, but if I stick to my own set of principles I certainly won’t be reading them.