OPENAI Oakland's Seat at the Table - Self Published Rose to #13

OAKLAND, Calif. - June 5, 2026 - PRLog -- Bay Area Self‑Published Author Surges to Amazon's #13 — Outpacing St. Martin's Press and Other Major Publishers

Oakland, California — In a rare upset in the publishing world, Bay Area author Carol Denise Mitchell has risen to #13 in Amazon's Media & Law category, surpassing titles from major traditional publishers including St. Martin's Press. Her book, OPENAI: Oakland's Seat at the Table, has become an unexpected standout in the national conversation about artificial intelligence, ethics, and the future of technology.

Mitchell is no outsider to the news cycle. A former reporter for Oakland's Channel 37, where she worked alongside the late journalist Chauncey Bailey, Mitchell brings a seasoned eye to the Musk v. OpenAI trial — a case she witnessed from just four blocks away from her home near the Oakland Federal Building.

What makes Mitchell's rise remarkable is not just her proximity to the trial, but her perspective. A longtime admirer of Elon Musk, Mitchell does not spare him in her analysis. "You won't be able to tell I'm a fan of Musk in this book," she says. Her reporting is sharp, unsentimental, and unflinching — documenting what she describes as "Musk's eye‑popping loss" and the broader implications for AI governance, Anthropic, and the accelerating power struggle inside Silicon Valley.

OPENAI: Oakland's Seat at the Table is an anomaly in today's publishing landscape: a self‑published book outperforming corporate houses, written by a local reporter who found herself at the center of a global story.

As AI companies call for development pauses, as Anthropic warns of frontier‑model risks, and as Google and Nvidia push the boundaries of machine intelligence, Mitchell's book offers something rare — a ground‑level account from someone who was actually in the room where history unfolded.

The book is available now on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H27CF9S4

For media inquiries, interviews, or review copies, contact: Carol Denise Mitchell, Author Oakland, California