This is the Beginning

So it has begun. After a few years of planning and fannying my book has been published. By me.

It is self-published, vanity published, print on demand and firm sale. I have no agent, no deal, no publisher, no reviews, no press interest and no firm marketing plans. So far it has cost me £910. My ambition is to one day break even.  

It feels embarrassing and anachronistic to speak of DIY and ethics and punk. It feels uncomfortable to talk about operating outside the industry and silly, to not desire its consent.  

Most people who self-publish do so out of failure to find a publisher. It is often the last resort. There are successful adverts for self-publishing, a list of names. But they are all last-resorters, settlers, convinced one day they'd find the big time, the agent the publisher, the deal they'd been so wrongly denied.  Self-publishing is a way to mentally manoeuvre around rejection.   You can easily convince yourself that as it turned out you didn't need them to be a published author, screw them, all authors get rejected, you're no different to JK Rowling and look at her, they'll be sorry when word gets round and they're fighting over you and you're signing a six-figure deal and they want you back and then finally you will be that proper author sitting at your table for the Booker Prize, standing to collect your cheque, knowing the immediate impact on sales. Another print run will be called for. Just imagine.

So there'll be none of that for me. I will try and arouse some interest in Friday Morning with Sun Saluki, I hope to sell some copies but what pleases me most is that it's not like many other books in that it wasn't written with a reader in mind, there was not a single paragraph written that I 'hoped' people would like. I am sure agents and editors would have a field day with it.  They would tear it apart, tell me to start again. At least I hope all this is true. Because then I would feel like maybe I can start something. Something new and original and perhaps lacking quality or correct structure or perfect sentences and consistent tenses. I hope that my book is something different because I have no one to answer to.  Not yet.