It’s a fine line
There seems to be a fine line between giving a project your all, and backing into a mental breakdown.
When I first started down the path of indie publishing, I never realised quite how involved it was going to be. Nor how close I’d come, multiple times, to putting videos of myself up on social media.
It may still happen.
But if it does, I might need an intervention.
One of my proof of concepts even involved a squirrel costume —seriously.
This is why, in my marketing videos, my book itself has become my replacement.
Which I’m kind of okay with.
People can be mean to a book.
They can judge it by its cover, way before they’ve ever read it.
They shouldn’t, but they can…
And whilst a book doesn’t have feelings, limbs or a mortgage, it can —surprisingly— be quite emotive. It just depends on the shot, the editing and the music.
At least that’s what I’ve found.
But then, as we’ve already stated, I’ve completely lost it.
Finding it
I’m not going to say that I’ve been working on this book for a while. That phrase, I’ve since found out, has become a cliché in the indie publishing world. Bandied about by people who’ve spent six months typing furiously into typewriter on steroids, or those who’ve ended up lost in the very imaginative weeds of their own world-building; or even minor celebrities who have landed trad. publishing contracts before even writing 10% of the book.
I just have been. I can’t lie. I can’t say I wrote this in six months. I can’t claim to have found writing it easy. I can claim to have found it immensely fun and rewarding, and I can claim to have “put the effort in” —1000%.
And as the book became more and more important to me, so did the need to send it off with the right kind of ‘bang’.
This meant getting into marketing. Or, at least, whatever has been classified as such by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, these days.
And despite working for a number of years in advertising (albeit over a decade ago), I was surprised to find out exactly what was involved in marketing your book, today. The costs to both your wallet, and to your carefully balanced mental health.
Tookbok?
This is a place where readers are forged in the iron jaws of their ever expanding TBR piles. (Ed: Err what?) and authors are sometimes treated carefully, or othertimes (to use that frequent Americanism) carefully treated to vitriol, venom and vanilla. (Ed: Err… are you sure you don’t want to go and lie down?).
No, I’m fine thank you. But it is a world I’ve been made increasingly aware of, and increasingly scared of. More so, weirdly, than YouTube. The question is, is it a world that I’ll have to deal with if I want my book to do the good thing, and make like a leaf?(Ed: I really wish you wouldn’t send me these things to edit without prior warning).
It’s all good.
Perhaps I’ll be able to get my book noticed, when I finally release it to the world in February 2026.
Perhaps my plan of whimsical and down right silly YouTube shorts will be enough to get me noticed.
Perhaps my idea of sending an advanced copy of my book to smaller book-related content makers that I’ve been following, and appreciate, will be enough?
Perhaps I won’t have to resort to outlandizing myself on the digital airwaves?
…
Or, perhaps come March you’ll be seeing me in a squirrel costume.
…
I mean, anything for the story.
After all, writing a book is just splitting yourself into pieces and viewing each part through various prisms of thought that someone thoughtfully left hanging by the exit.
