(my short and stupid experience of trying to get published by the system like a good boy)

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today is the one year anniversary of the publication of my first novel Phantasia, and i thought it would be fun to talk about what happened between finishing it and releasing it six months later or so.

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after fifteen years of writing no fiction at all, and of having the thought give me nausea, i was as surprised as anyone that i had written a novel. but somehow it happened. and what do you do afterward, if not try to publish it. and since i was quite surprised and also proud of myself, i wanted to do it properly. that is, i wanted the proper stamps and certificates of authenticity in the system of the beast.

i had a vague idea that the chances weren’t great. i wasn’t quite dumb enough to think that i would become rich, but the idea of being published ‘properly’ appealed to my vanity, it would ‘say something’ about me as ‘an author’. it would prove the thing had some value. (my lord, it hurts to recollect). i’m pretty sure that’s more or less what i was thinking at the time, and i did not, for the life of me, see how ridiculous it was.

i was pretty sure that the whole publishing industry was quite terrible, evil really. because every industry is terrible and evil, a part of devilcorp. i knew these things, but i was a bit stupid. in my defense, i was going through a few personal problems (quite an understatement) of different varieties all at the same time, so i wasn’t exactly thinking clearly. it just seemed like the natural thing to pursue, despite me knowing perfectly well in theory that, first, it meant i would become voluntarily part of a very evil system, and second, that it was more than unlikely.

(not that doing anything now does not require being part of a very evil system. it’s all evil systems. evil systems all the way up and down and to the sides. but self publishing through print on demand services is definitely not the same as being a real ‘published author’, one of the most flatulent expressions in the english language)

so, with this stupid and evil ambition, i got to work. and it really is work. another reason why i should have seen it for the fraud that it is.

first i had to learn that to get a book published you couldn’t just submit the book to a publisher, unless it was a very small publisher, and even then. because it’s a system, and a hellish one at that, you have to jump through a bunch of hoops. this is because the devil needs you to really say yes at every stage, and the more stages you say yes to, the better. i am sorry to say i did say yes to a few. you need to perform those rites of self mutilation and contortion in order to reach your goal.

in this case, it means going through an agent. then i had to learn about agents, and the things they ask for. they ask for a lot of stupid stuff that is very unamusing and dispiriting. really, it is bureaucracy, but like a good boy i prepared those things and then set out to find an agent that would represent me (the language of it all is ridiculous and gives me an itch, but i was not done scratching at the time).

this part was even more dispiriting than the bureaucracy. at one point i was doing deeply curated searches excluding certain keywords like the alphabet soup because, one, i did not want to associate with those people, and two, my book had some details that, if they read it and understood it (which is doubtful), they would not only not want to represent me, but put me in the naughty list and get all of satan’s little helpers onto me (probably). but anyway, i kept searching and eventually found one, just one, lady agent that didn’t have all that stuff listed. she was new, inexperienced, she liked CS Lewis and especially the Space Trilogy, and i was very influenced by that. and she was catholic, so i thought maybe, just maybe.

i had the proper bureaucracy lined up and just had to tweak it a bit (they all have their own little differences in how they want you to submit things, some ask for this some for that, this many words, that many tags, whatever, so boring. i suppose it’s to give the illusion that the system is actually human), and then i clicked send.

(it’s very ironic, in retrospect, given the content of the novel, which has as one plot point the very bureaucratic workings of one part of hell, that i was going through all this nonsense to publish it. the devils were torturing me and making fun of me, in other words.)

i was very nervous for some reason. and then two months later the reply came. it was clearly copy pasted. nothing specific about the book, just a standard rejection. i’m pretty sure she didn’t even read a paragraph. and that was that. i still tried to do the incredibly convoluted searches and came up empty again except for her, so then i set my sights on small publishers.

i picked two. one was up and coming and alternative, the cool new kids on the block. i tweaked everything again to their requirements and sent. never heard back. i suppose part of the reason is, with all the shifts in the culture and politics since then, they have actually become already part of the system and were well on the way by then, so that they had a large influx of imbeciles like myself spamming their inbox.

the other one was a well established, but somewhat obscure, catholic publisher. i did ask someone i knew who was published there if he thought they would be interested in it, and how he got to be published there, and if he could make some introductions. he said they might, and to just email them, so i did. i think they didn’t even have anything specified on how to submit, which i found to be a good sign (i was slowly coming out of my stupid slumber).

the editor got back to me quite quickly, within a week or so, and said they might be interested in reading the rest and publishing it, but that he was going on vacation and would return in september. he did warn me that, even if they liked it and wanted it, i should be aware that their publication schedule was already full until 2026 (!), so i thanked him and said i would think about it and then get back to him closer to when he got back from his vacation. by then, things in my life had settled a bit for the first time in more than a year and i was thinking more clearly, and so towards the end of august i sent another email just to thank him again for the consideration, but that i didn’t feel like waiting that long.

then i had two choices, one was to pay a small fortune (for me) up front to print a bunch of copies that would then sit around in piles around the house, reminders of my vanity. i imagined people coming over (and very few people do), and me handing them a copy (or several) that they would never read. perhaps they could wipe their behinds with the pages, that would probably be the best use they would find for them. and i much prefer gifting them stuff from the garden. then there would be the whole hurdle of me having to deal with the sales and shipping. just thinking about it makes me sick. the other option was print on demand, in which i would basically waste no money and have no trouble, the thing would be there and if people wanted it they could get it and i would barely be involved. this seemed much more sensible and also more to my liking.

in a couple of weeks i put together what was missing to get it published through the print on demand service, lulu press, and i was done. (my only requirement by then was that it wasn’t amazon, and this decision, i’ve learned since then from a friend, was another bullet dodged, because even self publishing has already become in many ways a vile cartel of retards, or several, and apparently it is mostly centered on amazon sales. i really don’t understand people or their workings, or maybe i do and that’s why i’m so antisocial).

i posted it here and on twitter, and that was that. i was very satisfied with it. and if by some satanic miracle i had somehow gotten it published through the system, i probably wouldn’t be satisfied or even happy for a thousand reasons (they won’t even let you choose a cover most of the time, at least that’s what i heard, among many other restrictions and tortures).

and now it’s one year later, a handful of people have read it and liked it, some are reading it now. it feels like it has been much longer. how was it only a year ago that i published it, and a year and a half since i finished it. time is very strange lately. it seems to go by both too fast and also that more time has actually elapsed. these last two years feel like a decade at least. must be because we’re getting really close to the end of the world, all the more reason to avoid systems, since they are all breaking down anyway, but as they do, they suck you in. i thank my Lord that he saved me from this demeaning ordeal.

i also published another one in the meantime, earlier this year. but when i finished it i was already cured of the stupidity that assaulted me after i wrote the first one, so that i didn’t even remember or consider any of this at the time, and there is no story to tell there. i just wrote it, revised it, did the formatting, found a cover, and put it out there. easy (well, the formatting was a pain, but let’s forget about that, it’s still better than dealing with ‘professionals’). maybe people read it, maybe they don’t. which, in the end, is exactly the same thing that happens if you go through the system, except the process much less painful and stupid and soul damning.

it’s good to know i can still learn lessons at the ripe old age of thirty six.

system publishing would have been unworthy of the place, and the creatures from it, that gave birth to the story