Writer’s Notes #01: Jargon-rage, midlife social media, and the self-publishing money pit…

And why ‘X’ feels like a doomscroll house-party run by angry teenagers who all want me to leave

And so, after another three(ish) months of choosing font alignments and ChatGPT-ing the significance of paper thickness, my first book is finally here and ready to send out for previews.

It wasn’t easy, let me tell you.

In fact, writing it was a piece of cake by comparison, carried along as I was by a blithe sense of optimism and a steady supply of 12-strength coffee.

But instead, it transpires there’s a whole world of pain awaiting the unwary self-publishman once the manuscript is edited, peer-reviewed and ready to send out for endorsements - a world of font decisions and unaffordable marketeers and angry young men on Twitter called @RageAgainstMyEx or @BrosephStalin14 who HATE your book and HATE your posts and HATE you personally.

Anyways, let’s call this the end of phase one. Or maybe even the phase before phase one.

The end of the prephase phase if you will.

UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS

At the risk of alienating any Gen Z-ers or Gen Alphas who won’t get an obscure Donald Rumsfeld reference from early 2002 (I know, I know, Gen Alphas sound like a Hunger Games kill-clique, but they’re apparently people born from 2013 to, I guess, last week), self-publishing is a great example of a process that appears, on its surface, a relatively straightforward proposition in an age of AI and Amazon-led automation.

Well, friend, I’m here to tell you categorically that isn’t true.

Speaking as someone who didn’t manage to land an agent for this book (let me clarify - as someone who didn’t get a REPLY from an agent for this book, other than the cut/paster who claimed not to connect with my dictionary’s story), publishing via a traditional route appears, from the outside, to be a relatively collective process.

That is to say, other than building and maintaining a robust author platform (which I understand is no mean feat), there is collective experience to lean on in the fields of book design, marketing, sale and distribution.

Self-publishing on the other hand, comprises a THOUSAND QUESTIONS that you couldn’t possibly have the answer to, even after upgrading your ChatGPT account.

No? You don’t believe me?

So tell me then, smartass, what are ‘bleed settings’? Huh? What paper weight would you go for?

And what in the name of MOTHER THERESA’S XBOX is a ‘BISAC CODE’?

My point being, these are all micro-decisions that on their surface seem relatively trivial, but could doubtless materially affect the sale of the book when it launches. And so, they collectively represent a thousand tiny stress points for someone born while Mao Zedong was still alive.

And yet. As I’ve gone through this early part of the process, it has struck me time again that the very fact one person can become their own publisher (Amazon KDP and Ingram Spark), designer (Canva), and marketeer (pretty much every social media channel) is, I guess, pretty remarkable in itself.

Stepping back further still, we can see that it also starts to explain the startling explosion we’re witnessing in self-published authors. I read in a recent Guardian article that there were 2.6 MILLION self-published books in 2023 alone, and the number will surely rise exponentially once 2024’s numbers are tallied.

(Expect a separate, longer post on that phenomenon, and also what it means for the whole publishing industry.)

THIS IS WALL STREET, DR BURRY. IF YOU OFFER US FREE MONEY, WE ARE GOING TO TAKE IT (*)

(*The Big Short. Watch it if you haven’t already.)

The other notable part of this prephase phase, one in which such sobering statistics so vividly describe the likely obscurity that awaits one’s book, has been the sheer number of people who exist purely to provide services for both traditionally-published and self-published authors.

A whole universe of them in fact. And most of them, as you would expect, aren’t cheap.

If one looks, for example, at Reedsy.com - a website dedicated to authors who want their book professionally edited, designed or marketed - one can see over 1600 editors alone who are listed and approved. Add to that over 700 designers, 190 translators, 180 ghost-writers…you get my drift.

And so, once I’d discounted the HUGE number of LinkedIn-based self-publishing coaches (if I’m paying literally thousands of dollars - as one person wanted to charge for a weekly coaching call - I darn well want them to do most of the work given it’s THEIR AREA OF EXPERTISE), I compiled a list of ‘mainstream’ publicity firms or agents who’d be suitable for a humorous gift book (mainly based in New York).

And in doing so, I found that virtually all of the five I contacted came in with quotes of over $20,000 for four months’ work.

$20,000!

And what do they commit to delivering for that money? Why, they don’t commit to anything, other than trying their hardest!

Now, I don’t mean to be harsh on them. These are seasoned professionals who know their market. And when they come through, the gains are no doubt incalculable - not just in terms of sales and royalties, but in terms of building a career as an author.

But. Maybe I walked into this naively. Maybe I started fishing at the wrong end of the book publicity pond. But let’s say you write a book that might be loosely termed a ‘hit’ - not a bestseller per se, but maybe shifting 5,000 copies in the first three months after launch - then at a profit rate of approximately $4 per print copy sold, you’ve bagged a net gain of exactly $0 for your troubles.

For a hit book.

And that’s without the money spent on editing, design, etc.

All of which is to say, there’s a world of people waiting to take your money if you’re willing to spend it.

(I got a marketing guy for $269 off Reesdy by the way. A one hour consultation, then he delivered a detailed four-month plan which was sixteen pages long. Guy was a rockstar. I can give you his details.)

I AM WONDERING. WHY ARE YOU HERE?

And so onto the final key part of this prephase phase - building an author platform from scratch.

Or in other words, letting the whole of the worldwide interweb know that you and your book even exist.

Setting up a group of social media accounts from scratch when you’re a middle-aged social media hermit feels a little like making a sexually-inappropriate speech at the wrong wedding. So many posts and comments seem to just disappear into the ether without so much as a lonely question mark or a poop emoji.

But I get it. Brand-building is a long game. And one has to manage one’s expectations given that people who aren’t posting for purely utilitarian reasons (i.e. selling a book) generally comment, upload and interact 24/7, and have been doing so, without a marketeer holding a gun to their head, for all the long while that you’ve been happily anonymous.

So it was that I faithfully set up a series of shiny new accounts, both for myself, and for the book. Instagram, X/Twitter, even Reddit (where last week I managed to post a comment that went viral - something I sadly celebrated to the acute embarrassment of my entire household).

But boy, does it take work. Every follower, every like, every traffic spike, takes a combination of responding, uploading, refreshing, and so on. Every day of the week.

Is it really that hard? Let’s look at the marketing plan, shall we?

“Be sure to post 5 - 15 tweets per day.”

5 - 15…per day?

And that’s just ONE PLATFORM???

Seriously, when do you people f*cking eat? When do you do any work?

And then Twitter. Oh dear me, Twitter. (I know it’s called X, but I was making a point).

Let me be clear. Twitter can be a very angry place indeed. A.N.G.R.Y. It is also not somewhere I anticipate selling many satirical books about LinkedIn. I promoted a post for $45 over two days, and in return I picked up two subscribers, one of whom was clearly a Russian robot, and the other unsubscribed after twenty-four hours. And for my troubles, I got a notification that I’d been put onto a spam hate-list by someone calling himself @ChavDave (actually he wasn’t called Dave - the ‘chav’ part is real though. For our American friends, a ‘chav’ is a derogatory term broadly equivalent to a redneck).

And yet, I’m clearly not alone in my struggle upriver to build an organic follower base. Cast your eye across any LinkedIn discussion thread or Reddit author group, and it appears that everyone is complaining just how much harder it is to make headway on social media these days, particularly in an age of automated platforms such as Buffer and Hootsuite that can both schedule six months’ worth of posts for you AND propose a template for each one. (How I launched my business with just $500! How I got results in just three days! One habit that turned my life around!)

And this is all before they write it for you using AI.

Is this possibly a product of so many creators flooding onto the market right now? With their Temu ring-lights and their photoshopped teeth and their limited edition™ own-brand concealer?

Possibly. But more opportunity = more people = less money to go around. And in the end, it means schmucks like me are having to work twice as hard just to spam poor old @ChavDave with books that he clearly and angrily doesn’t want.

Yes friends, its seems we’ve finally arrived in a world where everyone’s striving to be a social somebody, and now they have the tools to short-cut the hard stuff. A world of AI commenting on AI-written posts, all paid for by AI-designed ads served by an AI ad platform.

The social mediapocalypse is here.

And I, for one have, already given it my credit card details.