talkin' shop for two seconds

a meta post about my year as a self publisher and Substack money-maker

This started off as a Note I was writing—but c’mon Clancy, sometimes you gotta publish ‘articles’, am I right? Apologies for talkin’ shop for two seconds. Skip if that ain’t for you.

I know no one cares.

So I just did my taxes to report my earnings from my book publish/paid subscriber income from Substack and, uh…bad news. I didn’t quite make the money I thought. I forgot how income actually works. I’m a writer, not a businessman.

I have negative income, actually. Quite a bit of it. I believe this is called, loss.

Good thing I got that dishwasher though, well worth it. If you take what I made from just Substack paid subscribers over the past couple years, I did technically make enough to afford it, but the expenses from self-publishing the big T make it not just a wash, but a wash out [pun].¹

This won’t be news to anyone: It’s tough out there for self publishers.

Or maybe just for me. I kind of went my own way and did things through a backwards, Substack-first model and didn’t follow the traditional self-publish channels and paradigms, which probably bit me as I handled all shipping, Stripe payments, etc. myself. I used a local book publisher for the actual printing rather than go through Amazon/KDP or otherwise. There was no e-book version.

I always have be annoyingly different, as you all know.

International shipping in particular killed me. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise:

I took this route because I wanted the book to be siloed within the Persona Non Propria ecosystem. In this regard it was a success. It was, in all ways, a Substack novel, for better or worse. It was meant as a gift to my subscribers and a way to integrate the Substack with a physical, real-world addendum. Paid subscribers could receive the book, along with all the bonus Author Notes and Book Club Questions for each paywalled chapter on Substack.

Also note, I went without an editor and had just a few free beta readers—other costs I deliberately avoided to budget elsewhere. I would have taken an even greater loss had I paid for either. This might have hurt the quality of the novel overall, but none of my short stories posted here have editors, either: once again, a Substack novel for Persona Non Propria subscribers.

Despite this segmentation of my potential readers, I sold nearly a hundred copies, which I guess for your first self publish is pretty good. And I got to see my book in the wild, and hear your many beautiful, lucid thoughts on it, of which I hope there are many more.²

This alone makes it a great success!

Let’s just say that otherwise—financially—it was a big loss, and I’m lucky to be able to take such a loss. How many other aspiring authors out there could take such a hit? How privileged am I to have been able to do this without bankrupting myself? Very.

(Although, uh, I couldn’t do it again…)

I was going to do a more in-depth post on this and the entire process for the big T, but I think I’m too embarrassed about the numbers and some of my choices. If you have any questions about the process of publishing the big T, send me a DM, I’d be happy to let you know all about the financial disaster it was and tell you how to not publish a book.

Anyways, if you want to buy the thing still, it’s here. There are only a few copies left, so first come first serve—I’ll have to give priority to domestic USA subscribers. Given the aforementioned, I won’t be ordering more, although I might put it out as an e-book someday.

I’m already working on a novella, castler! and the five holders of the phallus, as well as re-writing a different novel I finished some time ago called the vhs tapes. My life is about to change enormously, so it’s hard to say how much I’ll get done with either, but those are the projects on my priorities list.

And I’ll always have the big T and all of your kind words and reviews, each one of which I am supremely grateful for. That the community has taken this thing as seriously as I have within the context of Substack fiction is enormously encouraging not just for me, but everyone else who wants to be read as well.

That’s all, in the end: I was read, and it was wonderful.

Safe to say, though, next time I’ll try to go the more traditional route: e-book, KDP, pre-orders, pre-arranged ARCs and reviews, and most importantly, hire an editor. Or at least research the more conventional approaches to self-publishing.

Or who knows. Maybe I’ll query the next one…

P.S. — I’d be remiss not to mention that Barış Şehri was worth every penny for cover design.

1. Believe it or not, I do believe dishwasher utilization has led to more writing time though.

2. And I didn’t need to worry about anyone posting to this “Goodreads” thing everyone keeps talking about!