The Author Games (print)

RELEASE DATE 9/19/2026

In a world where the Algorithm decides who gets read, one question determines everything: what are you willing to give up to be seen?

The Author Games is a dystopian literary novel set in a near-future publishing world divided into Districts — each one a genre, each one ranked by the Algorithm’s invisible hand. Once a year, eight authors are selected to compete in The Games: a thirty-day live publishing cycle where Rank determines survival, compliance earns amplification, and the truest voices are the first ones buried.

Zora Sutton writes from District Six — literary fiction, the place the Algorithm forgot to look. Her Rank is low. Her flag count is high. Her prose stops people mid-sentence.

She was Reaped because her work was dangerous.

She enters the arena knowing the system was designed for her to lose.

What she doesn’t know is that she isn’t alone.

Selah Beaumont writes faith that the church won’t allow — the I don’t know alongside the I believe, the grief that hasn’t resolved into testimony. Roman Okafor has been writing toward nothing for four years, giving the Algorithm what it wants and calling the giving a career. Simone Price has been de-platformed three times and has 847,000 readers who found her anyway. And Brianna Cole — District One, the Board’s preferred candidate, the evidence that the system works — brought coffee on Day Three and told Zora about her grandmother, and hasn’t been the same since.

Together they build something the Algorithm has no metric for.

The Board calls it a cooperative arrangement.

They call it a corner table. Six cups. The agreed.

Against a system that reaches backward through time to use their histories against them — that flags cultural specificity, penalizes honest Black voices, and calls suppression competitive integrity — these authors discover that the most radical act available to them is also the most ancient one:

Write the truest thing you know how to write.

For the specific people.

Without apology.

The Author Games is a love letter to every writer who has been told their work has limited crossover appeal. It is a mirror held up to the publishing industry’s most comfortable lies. And it is proof that the things the Algorithm forgot to count are the things that matter most.

For readers of Colson Whitehead, Jesmyn Ward, and Suzanne Collins. For every author who has ever written in a notebook no algorithm ever saw.