How to publish my novel

Saturday, 13 March, Year 13 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

I don't know about your novel. For one thing, I don't actually think it's liable to be a novel at all ; nor do I suspect either you or it of any adherence to the possessive -- it can't be yours no matter what you do or it is. I don't therefore intend to offer anything like advice.i

My novel however (which is mine notwithstanding it started life as the mis-shod retelling of the life experience of some black dude) saw the light of publication right here on Trilema, no further than... o look at that, it's been almost three whole days since the last (24th) chapter hit the feeds, meaning the first's all of two weeks old. I guess that's long enough to have some real data.ii It'd better be long enough, anyways.

First off, some basics :

> ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1 trilema trilema 49943787728 Feb 28 22:52 trilema.com-Feb-2021
-rw-r--r-- 1 trilema trilema 22566580341 Mar 12 21:46 trilema.com-Mar-2021iii

> wc -l trilema.com-Feb-2021iv
248491171 trilema.com-Feb-2021

> wc -l trilema.com-Mar-2021
83622196 trilema.com-Mar-2021

And now on with it :

  • There's been a total of 5`823`760 calls for the pattern "GET /2021/the-real-pimp-chapter-"v from distinct IPsvi that then called the headervii, a behaviour I deem enough of an indication that page was actually loaded for human consumption, as opposed to programmatical.
  • The most widely read chapter is To Tuskegee, And Back somehow, oddly enough, called 371`875 times. The rest of the chapters order historically, from a little over 300k for the first to a little under 200k for the last. Something like two thirds of the people who started reading it also finished it, with the remainder third either momentarily too busy or lost along the way.viii
  • 841`562 of those 5.83 mn were referred by "http://trilema.com/" (which is the special case of habitual usersix coming in to check what's new). The ordered top of referrers thence is ~nothing but Trilema itself for the next 100+ positions, various pages. The first time any external occurs, it's politico.com ; its 198 referrals don't earn it a position in the top 100, or for that matter 500. The "usual suspects" so to speakx are all present, of course, hundreds upon hundres of these great successes online which nevertheless collectively fail to amount to a spit in the rain. Mayhaps it's mere coincidence, or just an artifact of the... very wide point of viewxi ? Perhaps it's simply reflecting their utter irrelevancy, though. I mean, if anyone gave a shit about the collected web outside these here gates, it'd... show, right ? It'd actually matter, somehow. It'd move, something. Just my guess, don't mind me.

My first novel ever, published a good 15 years ago, ran if memory serves 14`000 copies (single edition)xii. I never cared to look at numbers for the intervening onesxiii, but the roughly twenty-fold implied readership of this last one isn't so bad in art-over-time termsxiv, though meaningful comparisons are indeed difficult : a printed book can be in principle re-read an infinity of times (and at some point in history some indeed were) ; on the other hand we're discussing here folk who at least specifically looked for each chapter, whereas a physical book can (and god knows often enough does) end up closer to a brick in its usage than anything.

Anyway, to bring this lengthy circumvolution to some kind of conclusion : I'm of the contrary oppinion to Paul Goma. I couldn't give less of a shit as to what or whether some dour moron "says about it". The world seen through my eyes is completely empty, absolutely devoid of life. There's no peers, anywhere. I looked, long and hard enough. I am done looking. I don't care what some subhuman thinks he thinks on this -- or any other -- topic. The only metrics of interest to me are pure consumption and actual world-shaping (which pointedly means, irrespective the "will" of the shaped) ; and therefore as far as publishing my novels goes, Trilema's by far the best outlet in existence.xv

———
  1. Really, I'm only writing this down at all because gzip -d is taking to damn long, and I get bored easily. []
  2. Come to think of it, if you ever find anyone that can stand comparison... God knows the last set of hopefuls got burned pretty badly. []
  3. This'd be until the 11th ; there's some shenanigans implicit in Apache log rotation handling where the "current day" is kept apart and I really didn't feel like splicing. []
  4. 98.6m 608 508 D 9.2 0.0 0:14.93 wc

    for fuck's sake already, this is a kickass box wtf. []

  5. This approach excludes the last chapter from the tally, because whatever, I didn't think things through when I started. Fuck it, what difference does it make anyways. []
  6. Not at all the same thing as "uniques", seeing how these don't reset every day. []
  7. Something like
    GET /wp-content/themes/trilema/images/bg_nov2017.jpg HTTP/1.1" 304 - "http://trilema.com/2021/the-real-pimp-chapter-7-blown-whoreless-and-fresh-out-of-girl/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/88.0.4324.190 Safari/537.36

    []

  8. This being a particularly important metric to my eyes, as you perhaps expect, given that it's rare enough an occurrence I actually manage to finish a book. []
  9. That's a particularly informative, not to say amusing, reference. Fancy, quarter million months, back in 2014 (a year or two after I switched Trilema over to mostly English). The web sure has grown since then, huh. []
  10. twitter, bandcamp, oup.com, evernote.com, ft.com, *.wikipedia.org, *.fb.com, ietf.org, eff.org, tmz.com, stanford.edu, newscientist.com, 4channel.org, businessinsider.com, ask.fm, gutenberg.org, genius.com, boredpanda.com, match.com, nme.com, hm.com, poynter.org, foxnews.com, various medium.com fakeouts (they supposedly run off their own domain, but...) and "url shorteners" etc etc. Even fucking stripchat's in there. Who the everloving wants to discuss Trilema while oh... I see now. Aite, enjoy. []
  11. My vantage here on Trilema being anything but narrow, by grace of Trilema being by far the widest read blog, both today and ever on the web. []
  12. Of which maybe 500 or so were melted in the end. Something like that. Not bad for a book I refused to get an ISBN for, anyhow. []
  13. 2016's Disgrace, 2017's Zuleika Dobson, 2018s Double Indemnity, 2020s Diary of a baby doll and this year's Dangerous -- excluding the Romanian-language items prior to that date and a bunch of shorter stories in between. []
  14. To say nothing of how it utterly blows out of the water all conceivable classics of this, or any other, language. I mean... it sure beats Jane Austen's 44 reads, right ? []
  15. At the very least, nothing ever has to go out of print ; but as a practical exercise, see how many titles with a 300k initial run you can find. It might turn out quite informative. []
Category: Meta psihoza
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16 Responses

  1. Andrew Cuomo's COVID-19 book sells 11,800 copies, lands on best sellers list

    "Sells", anyway. #7. via https://archive.is/pViBh

    PS. Amazon says 80263 units per month to be #1 in their system (twice that for ebooks). The US book market is worth about US$ 500 million, down 5-15% each year, from US$ 1 billion back in 2012.

  2. Hey Master, let's go for a walk.

    Ever heard of momstrong? No? Look: https://momstronginternational.com/

    If you’re like many Christian moms today, you’ve been reading the headlines and watching the rapid-fire changes in our culture with frustration and fear.

    What the fuck, right?

    MOMSTRONG INTERNATIONAL
    A MINISTRY OF HEIDI ST. JOHN

    What the ST. FUCK, right?

    GOSSIP | COOK | KITCHEN
    AUTHOR | SPEAKER | PODCAST

    It's a kind of blog I guess. There's articles, even!

    HEIDI ST. JOHN FOR CONGRESS
    Heidi is running for Congress to represent citizens in the 3rd district of Washington state. For information, support, or to get involved see HeidiStJohnforCongress.com

    BOOKS BY HEIDI
    Heidi has been reading your mail and knows what you need! She has delighted tens of thousands of readers through her blog, her Facebook page and her books. Her transparent style and her rich sense of humor combine to draw her readers into what feels like a very personal conversation over a cup of coffee.

    It's true, too. The Washington Chronicle :

    Heidi St. John Among Republicans Challenging Herrera Beutler for 3rd District Seat

    The next election is 21 months away, but three Southwest Washington Republicans have already announced congressional campaigns to challenge embattled GOP incumbent Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler for the 3rd District seat.

    The challengers — a former staffer in Donald Trump's administration, a pro-Trump military veteran and a Christian author — appear to be positioning themselves to Herrera Beutler's right by aligning themselves with the former president.

    "I'm running to push back against the status quo, the far left and the establishment in their effort to halt the progress made by President Trump for the great working men and women of this district," said Joe Kent, a military veteran from Battle Ground who announced his campaign in a video on Feb. 18.

    "Since the 2020 election, we've seen conservatives and Trump supporters labeled as insurrectionists and terrorists by the far left and the mainstream media," Kent said.

    Heidi St. John, an author and speaker on family values — and a blogger with a Facebook following of 330,000 people — announced her campaign Sunday.

    In a media release, St. John cited the "controversial decisions" made by Herrera Beutler, adding that they "jeopardized the Republican seat and caused division within the party."

    Herrera Beutler, the six-term congresswoman from Battle Ground, drew condemnation from many in her party when she voted to impeach Trump over the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. She drew an even brighter national spotlight during the impeachment trial when she publicly described a phone conversation between Trump and GOP leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy that had revealed Trump's blase attitude toward the attack.

    She also has a shop. You could maybe buy some books (what feel like a very personal conversation over a cup of coffee). There's

    Becoming MomStrong $21.95
    Becoming MomStrong Bible Study Regular price $10.99, $9.95 Sale Out of Stock
    Prayers for the Battlefield Regular price $12.99 $11.95 Sale
    Bible Promises for Moms Regular price $2.99
    The Busy Mom's Guide to Daylight $11.95
    The Busy Mom's Guide to Romance $11.95
    Scripture Writing Challenge Booklet Regular price $9.95
    "People Get Ready" Revelation Bible Study $39.99
    Becoming MomStrong Journal Regular price $14.99 $12.95 Sale
    Becoming MomStrong, Audio Version $19.95
    Lapbooking Made Simple - eBook Regular price $7.95

    Lapbooking is not what you'd expect. It's not about booking laps at all. There's no naked old woman holding girl's head in her lap while she's fucked, old tits sagging lovingly in her face. It's... you're not ready for this.

    It's that thing you invented where slavegirls take notes and then keep the notebooks. Not kidding.

    The Missian Christionary also has other things in her heidistjohnshop: there's accessories (tote bags, bumper stickers, the usual fare), apparel (a buncha tshirts), even jewelry (no buttplugs or anything, just three-four axe-hewn pendants -- chain not included).

    Jaime Herrera Beutler collected $4,613,029 to win the 2020 election with 161,819 votes against the other woman taking in $4,187,791 to lose with 145,407 votes. (1.1015 to 1.1128 money ratio to vote ratio, $28.5 vs $28.8 dollars per vote). In 2016 it was 193,457 to 119,820, but then again some dude Jim ran. Before that 124,796 to 78,018, 177,446 to 116,438, and 152,799 to 135,654 (Denny Heck).

    The democrats never ran a woman before loser Carolyn. She's campaigning pretty hardcore on her facebook, to the peanut-y tune of "7,439 people like this 7,802 people follow this". Meanwhile the busy momstjohn apparently got booted, because her 330k page's meanwhile gone sorethumb/linkdead (this isn't facebook electoral interference however, because the fact that this one candidate's been dumb enough to link their primary chances to a facebook page which then facebook turns off at will is... them being dumb, noting else, hurr).

  3. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    3
    Mircea Popescu 
    Saturday, 13 March 2021

    @Anon Sounds about right.

    @nicoleci Ditto. I mean, I suppose it could even be mistaken for lulzy among they new enough to not know all this, but really. When exactly was a US Rep not ~a slice of pizza ?

    If anything, it's the watershed moment for Facebook. The USG may keep it afloat, artificially inflated (AI!!!) on handouts like it does Google ; but for all practical considerations its value went from the arguably 10-20mn last year to ~0 by now.

  4. Couldn't be more obscure in global terms.

  5. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    5
    Mircea Popescu 
    Saturday, 13 March 2021

    Sure, but why'd she be interested in global terms ? She's got her cottage industry & congressional district, it's good enough innit ? No shortage of them Vickies anyhow.

    I expect she'll win, too, seeing how she's the only female in the running. Once one of them seat's gone to the scar tissue it ain't ever coming back out again. I suppose it's technically possible the district flips and the exact equivalent on the "other" side wins instead, but other than that...

  6. Nicoleci's drill down is very interesting. Here's the same approach applied to 2020 Trump-Biden:

    Biden 81,268,564 votes, $1,064,613,431 dollars, $13.10 per vote. Trump 74,216,603 votes, 784,851,656 dollars, $10.57 per vote. Money ratio 1.356451787 and vote ratio 1.095018644.

    Costs 28+ dollars per vote to coax 307,226 votes out of a W 3rd district total population of 756,675 (40.602%) while ~10-15 dollars per vote draws out 155,485,167 votes of a US population of 328,239,523 (47.369%).

    One possible fitting is to say that .6% of the population would vote anyway in the congress race and 7.369% of the population would vote anyway in the presidential race (making the presidential office about a degree of magnitude more relevant in democratic terms than congress) while the rest are drawn in by the show, giving global a 2.42x efficiency margin over local (some reasoning in this vein being, I believe, very much why our very own MP is not running in Washington state, Romania or whatever other hole).

    Another possible fitting is to say that a dollar's a dollar, and therefore 42.286% of the electoral mass'd have manifested itself in the presidential contest anyhow, the remainder being dragged in for an average cost per capita of $28.64 each. That same $28.64 a head drew in the entirely of the Washington congressional race attendance. In this view the public mandate of Congress is null, and the impact of the dog-and-pony show on the presidential race is insubstantial until one looks at margins. Not that many races are decided by wider margins than 5.083% -- the 2020s ~7 million differential coming to barely under 2.15%.

    There's not much available in any other direction, due to the constraints that A. congressional races do in fact spend more money, and B. congressional races do in fact show lower turnover. Unless, of course, one is willing to both assign a negative value to campaign spending and a negative value to the intelligence of they involved in campaigning (since they don't seem to notice).

    All the while, fiscal burdens per capita average out to $10,541.08 (yearly, whereas elections work on a quadriennial cycle), whereas unfunded spending (ie money the US government found somewhere outside and dumped in) averages out to $10,480.15 per capita (also yearly), taking the overal cost of the electoral charade very close to the lulzy "one pizza a day (regular, $28.71)" every four years (deluxe, $28.64).

    An amusing amusement park, seeing how I have it on good authority that kangaroos cost $9 a day to feed and the adult kangaroo weighs a shade under a third what the adult US citizen weighs. Basically, for as long as they keep bringing in the pizza every day, the population don't care so much who "wins" or whatever.

    All demographic data as of 2019.

  7. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    7
    Mircea Popescu 
    Saturday, 13 March 2021

    Lmao. The poor kangaroos.

    Anyways, that's pretty much exactly it. For as long as the 10k a head keep flowing in the posturing may continue.

  8. Jeffrey Owens`s avatar
    8
    Jeffrey Owens 
    Sunday, 14 March 2021

    "The world seen through my eyes is completely empty, absolutely devoid of life. There's no peers, anywhere. I looked, long and hard enough. I am done looking."

    Do you mean none in human history or just among those living now? If the former, who would be a few of the stars twinklin' here and there?

    "If there were a joker up there or not, it made no difference anyhow."

    This answers a longstanding question I had been meaning to ask you! Following up on this line of thought; have you written about Christ? Kinda sorta badass how this cat made the narrative and objective worlds touch, and correspondingly reset most everyone's clock (B.C. vs A.D.), the Year of Our Lord, etcetera.

  9. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    9
    Mircea Popescu 
    Sunday, 14 March 2021

    Ah, just now. The dead are, unfortunately, dead, and have been so for a while. All in all I suppose a consummatedly Romantic attitude.

    I don't share anyone else's dim view of the particular socio-cultural construct, for I have my own, and it's dimmer than all of 'em. The dude's... whatever, just some dude. Not more (really, less) remarkable than say Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ Ἀβωνοτειχίτης and his headressed snake. There's boatloads of more important, interesting or accomplished walkers in those days, little reason to bother with some yokel from the Galilee. As for the construct itself, it's little more besides the early pantsuit call. Just like crows or boars vocalize to localize and identify each other, just so the evil mediocrity's been "christianity" -- same function, same purpose, same exact substance.

    The happenstance that everything will eventually be over-run by crows and boars doesn't mean their call's literature, or interesting to people.

  10. Tov Eugen Barbu-Burtica`s avatar
    10
    Tov Eugen Barbu-Burtica 
    Monday, 15 March 2021

    Care Goma?

  11. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    11
    Mircea Popescu 
    Monday, 15 March 2021

    Ei, un goma, nu-l stiti voi.

  12. Jeffrey Owens`s avatar
    12
    Jeffrey Owens 
    Monday, 15 March 2021

    Just started reading The Re(al) Pimp. Can't een get through Chap 1 yet because a few things are already blowing my mind. lol

    Of all the Bobbys in the world, how'd you end up giving voice to a Chicago negro Bobby? (Thank you; by the way. That is a helluva gift to give to another folk.)

    You've actually parlayed w cats like Bobby??? I'm stunned, and can't explain why.

  13. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    13
    Mircea Popescu 
    Monday, 15 March 2021

    There's actually a prior adnotated version standing for research sui generis.

    Robert Beck's part of the vernacular ; certainly no urban African-American household was without a copy of his best-known offering throughout the 70s and 80s. He practically started blackspolitation as a commodified entertainment genre.

  14. salam

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  2. [...] back up the pretense of subsidising "the population" (aka, "viermii neadormiti") to the tune of "ten thousand dollars" a year, there'd be no universal pretense to franchise &c. either. The fake abundance of [...]

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