For years I tried to get published by going through the traditional routes: writing query letters, sending out my work to various editors by real physical mail, etc etc. They all sent me rejection letters and told me to go fuck myself, or just didn’t respond at all. Despite the fact that I was told I could be anything I want as a kid, I have an English degree from the University of Toronto and I’m fairly confident that I’m qualified to be a decent writer, nobody with the power to put my work out there gives a shit. That’s fine, I get it: that’s life. Nobody on earth is owed anything, I completely understand. This shit is all temporary anyway, I don’t take much of this seriously. We all die at the end, thankfully.
So I adapted and became a self-published author. This used to come with a certain type of stigma that seemed to suggest that the writer in question wasn’t really that good to begin with, and that’s why they had to self-publish. But the reality is: the old world is completely dead now, and self-publishing has become the norm. The people running these publishing companies don’t really want you to know this, but that’s just how it is now: they don’t matter anymore. There are writers you’ve never even heard of making thousands of dollars a month hustling and self-publishing short stories that would never get the time of day by editors anywhere. In my early 20s I wrote erotica for middle aged women I self-published on Amazon to make side money. Think about that for a second: there are women in Nebraska rubbing one out to stuff a total nobody wrote on the other end of the planet. There were no middlemen involved in that process: that’s just how the world we live in works now.
There are benefits to this, and I used to want the validation of corporations, but I actually don’t mind it anymore. I have the freedom to write pretty much anything I want without some irrelevant boomer editor breathing down my neck about what I can and cannot say. I don’t have to worry about ever being cancelled and apologizing to people to keep my status because I never had one to begin with. As an artist, this is pretty much the best you could ask for creatively. That’s the whole point of writing a book or creating something: it should be pure! I don’t want my art to be overly edited and put through a strainer in the kitchen sink, I want to read something written by a guy who is on the verge of a mental breakdown and has been eating tuna for the last 8 years: that’s where the authenticity is. Some of the best books I’ve read in the past year were riddled with spelling errors, and I loved them anyway.
Of course I wish I could live like some of the dumb white people I went to high school with, have amazing lives, be absolutely stinking rich, and have Scandinavian call girls over to my $2500 a month condo downtown Toronto, but that all comes with the cost of censorship and the whims of corporations, etc etc. At that point you’re basically just an NPC with no original thoughts of your own, and whatever you write has no inherent value because you’re incapable of thinking critically anymore. There is no viewpoint, no concrete perspective, you’re just a predictable conditioned being and you don’t even realize it.
The only drawback as an independent artist I’ve found is that you have to be a frontman 100% of the time. There is no marketing person doing any of the work for you: the public comes straight to you, for better or worse. There are cool people, but there are also a shit ton of absolutely ridiculous time wasters out there.
Here’s a list of some of the recurring things people have said to me. I’d like to put a few of em here so whenever someone asks me in the future I can just send this link.
1. Will it be available as an audiobook?
This one is a common question. Most people listen to audiobooks now, let their minds drift off, and then 4 hours later have no clue what it is they’ve listened to, but think they just read a book. It’s lazy behaviour I don’t particularly feel like supporting.
While I understand that there are people who genuinely like audiobooks due to eyesight issues or dyslexia or whatever else, an increasing number of people are fine, they just want to put something on in the background. I feel that is disrespectful to my work, and takes away a certain level of engagement required for a book to be properly understood.
The other thing is the issue of cost. I once asked someone to record an audiobook for me thinking it would only be a couple hundred dollars. With my luck, of course I was wrong: the guy quoted me $4000. I’m an independent artist, so that is obviously a ridiculous sum I’d never be able to pay. Other people I’ve asked have quoted me similarly awful prices as well. I don’t have a large fanbase, so it makes no sense to pay so much for something that would not make back a profit.
I would record an audiobook myself, but I live with my parents unfortunately and I have very little privacy to perform in that capacity. As much as I’d love to record my work, they’re always nearby making noise or being generally annoying around me, so the only times I have to record without interruption are at night when they’re sleeping, and quite frankly I’d prefer to use the few moments of peace I have left in my life for more productive things instead of revisiting stuff I wrote at previous periods in my life. I’d honestly rather move on to the next project than sit there and record an audiobook just because modern readers are too lazy to read.
I could always take my car somewhere and sit in a parking lot and record it that way, but once again: I would rather move on to the next project than revisit past work. There’s also the issue of my work being deeply personal and kinda painful to read after I’ve written it, and I don’t always like to go back to the mind state I happened to be in when writing certain things.
2. Is this available for Kindle?
Another stupid question.
First of all: you can easily check the links I’ve provided to see what it is and isn’t available for. Use your brain and make inferences.
Secondly: the reason why certain books I’ve written are available for Kindle and not others is a matter of personal choice and experimentation as an artist. For example, one of my books (The Great North American Novel), requires the reader to go back and forth, flip pages, and sometimes turn the whole book upside down. You can’t do shit like that with a Kindle.
Third: one of the freedoms of being a self-published author and an outsider artist is that I can make the personal choice to not make a book available in certain ways. With a traditional publishing company, they’d just do shit entirely the way they want without regard for their writers because they’re running a business and want to ensure they’ll make the most profits.
Lastly: I know it’s lame to be precious about this kind of stuff in 2020, but I do feel that something is lost that you can only really get from actual physical copies of paper books. With audiobooks and Kindles, that shit can disappear any second. You have to fucking charge an iPhone and a Kindle in order to experience your book: that is some Orwellian shit. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never had to charge a paper book before, I just sit down and start reading and that’s the end of that.
There is something important to me about having real, hard copies of books. I hate this world we’re in now where people have embraced streaming and they think they own their favourite things. People have become so cucked by corporations and they don’t understand how dangerous this shit is.
I hate Spotify. I hate Netflix. That shit isn’t real to me: it’s important to own your favourite pieces of art physically, because when you depend on corporations they can disappear any day.
3. Is this available anywhere other than Amazon?
This is a big one. Some people hate Jeff Bezos, and don’t want to support his company, which is understandable. I’ve been told by a couple people they won’t buy my book because they don’t want to support Jeff Bezos. Fair enough.
However, say what you will about Bezos and Amazon, the fact of the matter is that Amazon is the best company for independent, self-published authors right now. People forget that it started as a website to sell books effectively, and at its core it still is. A complete nobody like me with zero connections to anyone in any kind of industry can publish a book and people all around the world with access to the internet can buy it. That is unprecedented in human history.
Do I think Jeff Bezos is partly responsible for ruining the planet? Yes. But at the same time, you’re not really making a difference by taking what you perceive to be some big stand against Amazon. If anything, what you’re doing is hurting creators like myself who could actually use your help.
I have put PDF copies of my work on Gumroad, but going back to what I said earlier: it’s limited to only that because Gumroad has no printing press, they’re online only.