If you’re planning to pick up any Warhammer 40k novels from online retailers, make sure you check they’ve got the Black Library publishing logo. A rash of unlicensed 40k books have appeared online across various retailers, featuring AI covers and apparently written using AI – what’s going on?
These books have been on sale since winter 2024 or earlier, with Warhammer 40k fans reporting on them in social media groups as early as December. The books are published under at least three names: Tony Bui, Uno Nguyen, and Torrin Nightflare.
At that time they were available through Amazon, but all listings on Amazon are now dead. However, we have found listings for new and second-hand copies of the titles on Abe Books, Bookshop.org, Booksamillion, Waterstones, Foyles, and eBay.
Currently, only Games Workshop’s Black Library imprint publishes Warhammer 40k, Age of Sigmar, and other Warhammer fiction. Beyond this, Warhammer 40k RPGs are published by Cubicle7, Dorling Kindersley has published a Warhammer 40k encyclopedia, and Marvel was the most recent license holder for Warhammer comics.
Hachette has published a very small number of books alongside its various Warhammer magazines, and did reissue many older Black Library titles under a special subscription deal.
Unlike all those publications, these books are self-published – meaning they’re not official Warhammer 40k books. And their writers don’t seem keen on public attention, either.
Of the three authors, we’ve only found one publicly accessible online presence attached to any of them: a Facebook page for Torrin Nightflare. This lists a Nevada home address, a Georgia telephone number, and has a stock photo in place of an author portrait.
The phone number rang out when we called it, and our search of online phone lookup services found no individuals attached to it. Likewise, the email address listed is dead – all our attempts to write to Nightflare got bounced back.
Notwithstanding the use of AI generated covers, Bui, Nguyen, and Nightflare each published at least 20 books in 2024, many of them explicitly focused on Warhammer 40k factions. That’s a writing speed that not even the mighty Michael Moorcock could match. The simplest explanation is that the text of the books is AI generated.
They could, conceivably, be the work of multiple authors, but that could only have been achieved using volunteers or underpaid contributors, since these books are not best sellers. There have been book publishing scams that involve subcontracting to other writers under exploitative terms – this video by Folding Ideas examines some of the ways that works.
In short, this looks like an attempt to use the Warhammer 40k brand to get money out of people who are only loosely familiar with it, such as gift buyers. The fact that the books are no longer available on Amazon may suggest someone has alerted the firm to the unauthorized nature of these books.
Intellectual property law has a mixed reputation: most people are inherently sympathetic to artists keeping control of their work, and less so when the IP owner is a large corporation. In the case of these fake books, IP law also acts as a consumer protection.
A ‘trademark’ is any sign, word, or image that is synonymous with a business in a way that is likely to convince a customer that a product with the trademark was made by that business.
By using the Warhammer 40k trademark – even if not the official logo, which would be far more obvious – the authors are ‘passing off’ these fake books as official Games Workshop products, with the potential to harm Games Workshop’s reputation and mislead a customer into buying a substandard product.
Wargamer has reached out to Games Workshop to see if they’re aware of these books or have any comment to share, and we’ll update this story with any news.
If you’ve read all the Horus Heresy Books, everything in Gaunts Ghosts, and more stories about Space Marine chapters than you could shake a force sword at, we can heartily recommend Cold Open Stories. The site hosts a huge quantity of high quality Warhammer 40k fanfiction from many authors, and it’s all free.
If you want to have a go at writing your own 40k tales, the Black Library Open Submission window is open until March 9. The editors there are looking for writing samples featuring two named characters from the same universe – we’ve got more details in this article.
Source: Wargamer
