Self-publishing is a choice, yeah, a decision I made after years of careful thought. It’s political, man. Publishing houses are evil art destroying factories and agents are just heartless robots with chainsaws for arms and dollar signs for eyeballs. It has nothing to do with the fact that the book was rejected by all the agents I sent it to. IT’S A CHOICE I MADE, I TELL YOU.

Don’t let anyone tell you self-publishing isn’t great. Why would I want to share all those fat profits with some sort of agent? What do they know about getting books published anyway? It’s not like they do it for a living or anything.

Being rejected isn’t soul destroying, it’s liberating! I just get so JAZZED by the idea of self marketing.

Nothing gets my blood pumping faster than the excitement of putting myself OUT THERE. In the world. With other humans. Branding, SEO, marketing campaigns… Finally, I’ll have an excuse to drink during the day, snort coke off a hooker’s tits and eat a monkey’s brain like a real, live, Ad Exec. I cannot wait to start selling things to my friends.

This is how I imagine it going:

Me: Hey buddy! How are you? Yeah, I know we haven’t spoken in years… how are you? Yeah, whatever, listen. Hey did you know I am a writer now? Yeah man. Got a book and everything. Yeah, it’s self published… hello? I HATE MY LIFE!

It reminds of that time my best friend in school, Josh, (not his real name) convinced me to attend a “business meeting” with him that turned out to be a pyramid scheme selling soap to old ladies. Josh is now living large as a born again christian with dreadful web design skills and a disturbing penchant for World of Warcraft. Incidentally, he’s also written a self published novel. It’s horrendous.

Luckily, unlike Josh, I am the king of social media. People love reading tweets from fake authors about their amazing self published books, am I right? Hey world! Check it out, Johnnie Dillhole from Antfart, Nebraska gave me three and a half stars on Amazon! And daddy said I’d amount to nuthin. Up yers, daddy!

But twitterers aren’t fools. If there is one thing I learned from the National Film Board of Canada, it’s that persuasion is better than force. You can’t just hit them over the head with your pitch, you have to finesse it. You need to trick people into buying a book by writing a funny joke. And use many many hashtags.

Knock knock, who’s there? BUY MY SELF PUBLISHED BOOK, IT’S GREAT #seriouslyitsawesome #book #self #published #amazing

What is my book about, I hear you scream? Fine, settle down and I’ll tell ya.

It is about a man who wakes up in a near-future, post-Apocalyptic Manchester with no memory except that of a machine that prints human beings. He has to survive long enough to retrieve his memory and find the machine. A difficult task what with all the zombies… THERE AREN’T ANY FUCKING ZOMBIES IN IT, STOP ASKING ME.

Anyway, the book is the best thing since To Kill A Mockingbird and it is totally what Harper Lee would’ve written if she was still alive. Out next month.

Thanks in advance for reading it.

Your pal,

Robert

EDIT: Harper Lee IS still alive? DAMMIT.