April Fool's double whammy - standup special (NOT SAFE FOR WORK)
April Fool's double whammy - standup special (NOT SAFE FOR WORK)
Wham bam thank you ma'am
So it’s April Fools day.
I don’t usually do event-themed things, but I’m a comedy writer and I’m not religious, so this is the closest thing I’ve got to a tradition.
I hope you all had a great Easter. I spent mine scheduling the next few sci-fi posts here.
There’s a lot.
While I’m away you will get free stories from Bookfunnel and free chapters from my work, including THE STEPHANIE GLITCH and THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE. I also formatted and sorted out freebie pages for WHO KILLED THE HUMANS and WHO BUILT THE HUMANS which are available on the upcoming FreeFictionFriday posts. Then I formatted and released the special edition eBook for WHO BUILT THE HUMANS which comes with bonus content and a bonus story from WKTH. And then I formatted a new format of WBTH so it can finally be stocked in Waterstones without them grumbling that “it must be self-published” when they can’t find it on the system after I get my mum to call them pretending to be my biggest fan, just so I can check their attitude to paperbacks put through Amazon* (I couldn’t help it, I knew how to write books at the beginning, the publishing part was a learning curve with spikes on it).
*Yes I really did that. You have to bootstrap yourself sometimes. And it’s important to me to give you the funny details of my author journey, because a lot of people just post the sales stats, and only when they look really nice, with no attention paid to the years of pressure put into getting to that place. It means that a lot of writers have a nice shiny social media presence, but they all sort of look the same.
I’m comfortable being weird and jagged.
About that.
I have already scheduled the aforementioned THE STEPHANIE GLITCH post for later on today. You can expect Free Fiction Fridays and Monday… Manuscripts? Yeah Monday Manuscripts, all the way through April while I’m away in America looking for aliens and writing about aliens.
This comedy post is a bonus one, just for April Fools.
April Fools day
Firstly, I am pulling a double bluff on my Lego followers by announcing an absolutely huge Lego build. The official Lego company seems to have had the same idea, and are pushing a giant Lego Minion (from the kid’s movie) as a fake set that will be about 6ft tall, meaning it might stand a chance on dating apps. Mine will be smaller, and real, and sci-fi themed.
THE NSFW PART
Secondly, I’ve been editing down my standup sets for tiktok and instagram. I plan to put full sets up on Patreon, but it’s nice to have something you can fire into stranger’s faces whilst they browse tiktok on the toilet.
Here’s the trimmed version of a gag about my old manager, from when I worked in retail.
Is a trigger warning needed? It’s me, so you know the joke will be dark. There’s an even darker version on tiktok, locked behind an 18+ filter because I don’t fancy having my content removed again.
Stephanie
Stephanie shares my dark sense of humour, and in about an hour you’ll get to spend some time with her. Because today is a double whammy.
Those don’t happen often.
THE STEPHANIE GLITCH is a standalone novel about a teenager who discovers her synaesthesia is the key to interdimensional clairvoyance, and thanks to this clairvoyance works out her universe is about to collapse.
Before she can really grapple with this revelation, a dimension-hopping astronaut turns up and tries to kill her, claiming it’s for her own good.
There’s a skeleton outside time, outside space, waiting to develop into a new body for Stephanie to inhabit.
Tradpub vs Selfpub
I posted polls here and on twitter, and so far everyone thinks I should go self-pub with Steph, so I probably will. Last week’s poll had 3 votes, all of which were yes. You can vote on this one here.
Here’s last week’s poll results
I know some really great agents, but I fear even if they accepted Steph that wouldn’t be enough, she would still have to get through marketing filters and find an editor and a publisher who would all look at a novel in which a teenage psychic dies and is reincarnated as a fish for a bit and think “Yeah we want that”.
Oops, spoiler.
She would have to change, probably, to fit the market, and I don’t want her to. Her weird sense of humour drives the book forward, and I am worried they might sand her edges off. I’ve heard the phrase ‘risk-averse’ a lot when talking about the industry. As a writer, I’m all about doing new things and taking risks, so I don’t know if spiritually I’ll fit in with that crowd at all.
Ultimately, I’m concerned having a publisher might not be as beneficial to me as it is to other writers. I can do my own cover design, and if I can afford a marketing company I’m pretty much sorted because I do really well in interviews and podcasts. I always get a big sales spike after an appearance. I sold 4 books during the hour I was on Adrian’s writer’s den and moved 68 (free) copies of HOLOGRAM KEBAB during the hours after my live radio interview with my friend Ruth at AllFM. I just need someone to fire me into bigger interviews so I can tell my jokes and find new people.
So whether hunting for an agent and publisher is worth it is a big question. The university-educated part of my brain still has its old programming, that tradpub still might be a special badge I can wear to prove I’m a ‘proper’ author. The inventor part of my brain (the main bit) says that the reviews I’ve got on Amazon are worth more than any mark of approval from the tradpub industry, because those are from real people.
Ultimately, I probably just need the cash to market the next few things I make. My marketing budget for WBTH was £2 a week at the start. Yes I’m serious. I got this far with that. Most of it was social media, word of mouth, that sort of thing. A lot of it was you, sharing my posts, recommending this substack, and clicking on stuff.
I think that my books, like my comedy, might have to carve their own path.
Lastly, when I’m in America, you can find my daily updates on tiktok or instagram.
