I start off with a bashful admission - in part I self-published my latest book because I’ve seen the sales numbers from my book with Imperium Press. Not great. I know the work Mike puts into running Imperium Press and it provides for his family - and I now know that poetry books aren’t really contributing much to that. Combine this with myself a reticent self promoted who won’t do Podcasts for persec reasons and it’s an uphill battle. One that I felt like fighting myself this time.
Boy did I learn a lot.
Format woes and wins
Let’s get started by acknowledging the magic of Amazon’s Kindle Publishing platform and yet that magic does not prevent the need for the tedious effort of formatting. My book was short and simple - I still spent some hours swearing at software as I tried to force it to behave as I wanted. In the end I gave up on using OpenOffice and Calibre and Amazon’s free Kindle editing software and uploaded to GoogleDrive to then redownload.
Who knew that forcing line breaks for new pages was so damn difficult.
That being said I am impressed at the ease of use of the Kindle platform - it really is very straight forward. This is the golden promised land of technology and logistics. I can publish my book in paperback for cheap (2.30$ print costs) and for free on Kindle. I can do this from anywhere and that is a kind of miracle.
Lesson: There is no better time than now to self publish and have a book printed thanks to technology and current costs.
The only other amusing note I have on the format and use of Amazon is that my Kindle edition was approved easily and seamlessly. My paperback though, which was identical bar some slight header changes, however generated an automated email that told me I was trying to publish a book in the public domain! This was perplexing and I replied simply that this was wrong - expecting to get dragged into some nightmare attempt to prove I was the author. My fears though were unfounded - but 25 minutes later a real person told me all was good - so whatever AI/LLM Amazon are using behind the scenes for this automation is not all that bright…
Cover art and Costs
I had in mind what I wanted for cover art and set out to find OUR GUY artists. Luckily from past engagements I contacted Matthew The Stoat. He informed me he did not do cover art but sent me on to Theodoric S Taylor. Working with him was easy and straightforward over Telegram. This was a good experience and speaks to a growing professionalism in this sphere. Theodoric was also set with his pricing which I appreciated, I knew upfront what I needed to pay for his services. He also offered option to pay in installments but I opted to pay up front.
That cost was in my mind reasonable but it means using an artist I am of course behind the curve in raw investment. My own time and poems are ‘free’ to me at any rate. Now I have spent money to publish.
To recoup my investment and make a single dollar of profit I needed to sell 76 copies of my book.
As of publication of this substack I have sold: 98.
At the end of my first day I had sold like 10 so I wasn’t feeling super positive.
I have leveraged everyone I know with more reach than me, not quite begged but I have hammered X for the last week and Telegram and private chats. It has felt an uphill battle and I feel grubby doing it.
The book is priced at 5.99$ for Kindle and 12.99$ for Paperback, this roughly gives me the same profit on each sale. I’m making around 5$ a copy.
The reality is I could have spent more of my time and used free or low cost AI tools to generate cover art. People who begrudge writers and poets for doing this need to understand if everyone wants to eat people have to purchase things. Writing blog posts or Telegram posts railing against AI is all well and good but people who are having a go at generating some income by creating art for our people need others to actually buy the output.
Lesson: Shilling is hard, recouping investment is hard, making any reasonable profit off niche books is hard. People are used to getting stuff for free
Let me be clear, I regret nothing - I love the cover art and I love that I am in a position to pay and take a hit/very slowly recoup investment. BUT at the same time if people want to see our guys create art and reclaim culture they need to start buying what we are selling.
Networking
In an attempt to sell my book I have leveraged the networks I have. I’ve gotten RTs on Twitter from huge accounts who are friends with me. In most cases I’ve done something pro-bono for them - written articles for Man’s World, judged Passage Prize, reviewed and promoted their books. Nothing comes for free and creating a network requires time investment at the very least.
I’ve also had some very generous responses. Pox Populi who has written about the need for art responded positively when I requested him out of the blue to review my book and got it published on his Substack and on Counter-Currents.
Mike of Imperium Press has been generous in the extreme with his Telegram shilling on my behalf, as have others.
But a problem remains.
There are many I’d love to get in touch with, to even send a physical review copy to. I don’t have a good way to get in touch with some of these people.
Lesson: In attempting to get reviews and coverage I realize that we are as a wider movement still quite bad at networking.
We have to get better - my email is available through my website and whilst I might take time I generally reply. Other people, who are actually popular, I understand might get overwhelmed but this is the reason for networks. Behind the scenes networks of publishers, artists, creatives. The infrastructure loosely exists but I don’t think many of us are using it well or effectively.
Concluding thoughts.
Ultimately this has been an eye opening experience. We’re small fish in a big pond. Rupi Kaur is a millionaire with her dogshit poetry but I’ll be lucky if I even make 500$ of profit on this book.
That’s ok. I’m not here for the money, you don’t run a passion project about poetry for the right wing in the hopes to make money. I’m grateful this book will help cover hosting costs of the journal this year at the least.
One of the biggest problems this has me reflect on is that because we are so marginalized we produce so much more for free. The traditional routes to making money from advertising are not open to many of us - as our numbers grow the internal eco-system grows and we do our own advertising but we are truly at the beginning. It is only recently that pay-walls have spread across the internet and there are many substacks to pick from. We don’t have a centralization quite yet and so for most of us what we are interested in does come for free.
The online virtual world has been free for so long many of us have grown up with it. The things is if we want to succeed at some point this whole thing does have to come a bit about money and success. I want you all to be successful enough that the 6$ Kindle or 13$ paperback is an easy decision versus a hard sell! A rising tide lifts all ships.
I close with a poem from my book. Buy it here
The Real America
Endless plains stretch to an eternal sky
Folks doing 70 still wave as they pass by
Cars unknown greeted just the same
Passing through you feel a hidden pain
Dilapidated beauty aged like a past Prom Queen
Small town squares somehow kept clean
Rusting playgrounds where loss Trump’s ‘Hope’
The rare poor boomer struggling to cope
Home of once was a normal place
Now lucky to glimpse a face