It is National Independent Bookshop Day here in the UK, and I felt it a good time to look back on Halfplanet Press and celebrate what I’ve been up to.
I founded Halfplanet Press properly in 2019, though it had existed since 2014 in numerous forms. I opened the press because, after studying writing for four years at university, I had came to the conclusion that ‘self publishing’ was right for me. I had researched THE MARTIAN and other books by self-pub authors, and boldly predicted in that classroom in 2015 that
“In about ten years, self-publishing will take over from traditional publishing, because it will offer readers bold, new stories outside the mainstream.”
I was right.
But really, there is no such thing as self-publishing. I’ve worked with editors, marketers, and you, to get where I am today.
I designed this cover myself.
I still think this is the best cover, even though the newer experiments work with 3D glasses (another self-taught skill, thanks to people on Youtube).
Who keeps me going?
For all of this I have you to thank, because you’re someone who reads my stuff. Even if you’re not buying it, you’re encouraging me to keep going by looking at the free bits here.
(I feel obliged to note the paid bits are better).
If you knew me in 2019, you might have seen the pre-orders for my first book which were hosted on Etsy. You may have joined the livestreams where I wrote WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? on the floor, using a £5 Ikea coffee table as a computer desk, because I felt a chair was an needless expense.
You might have seen the meandering social media pages, as I wrestled the algorithms. Turns out, to be multidisciplinary, you need a social media for each niche.
Contracts
Publishers are hard to find. In late 2015 I queried the first parts of THE STEPHANIE GLITCH to a big press, and never heard back (they had open submissions, I wasn’t being stupid). Years later I see books with similar premises turning up, so I was way ahead of my time with it. This pattern was familiar. I had pitched the book some weeks earlier at a pitching event (sort of like speed dating but for agents and authors) and was told “I can’t imagine where a publisher would put it on a bookshelf. It has poetry, and sci-fi, it might be confusing.”
I mimed picking the hardback up (interestingly the gap between my thumb and fingers was so exact in this mime that today, ten years on, I know the book has in fact become that thick) and placing the purple, glistening book onto a bookshelf between sci-fi and poetry.
She did not find this funny.
I did.
I left with a note she had written during our interview.
“Has a ‘Nothing is sacred’ attitude to comedy and writing.”
That was prescient. As of this week I signed up to almost every political email in the UK and have come to the conclusion that I will be voting for that sausage-shaped asteroid that keeps threatening us instead.
Anyway. There are other means of publication.
At uni, I encountered one small poetry press which would allegedly give you a contract provided you attended the owner’s house parties and lied positively about his homemade cheese fondue. I never did go, so I will never know if this is true. But on the bright side, I never have to lie weeping in someone else’s bathtub because their experimental postmodern cheeses have made my body attack itself.
Still, it would have been nice for someone at some big newspaper to pretend they’d read my book. I’d pay a struggling actor, but it’s just not the same. They would not be able to act so fusty, so disinterested. Their personality (however subdued) would shine through and ruin the illusion.
Later, I would find my home at WrongSpeak Publishing and Cinnabar Moth, a non-fiction and fiction publisher respectively. My comedy and surreal storytelling started to find its place.
Thank you WrongSpeak and Cinnabar!
Sales sales sales
Unfortunately something awful happened after I wrote my first few books: I realised I needed to sell them to buy food and other important things like 21 kilograms of Lego technic Bionicle pieces.
This came as a surprise, and I am still recovering from the shock.
The Bionicles look pretty cool, though.
What’s interesting is that it is not my main book (Who Built The Humans?) which is in my top 3, but the two prompt books, and a silly dark comedy (which I made free for a while, resulting in some 3 star reviews from people who did not find it funny at all).
I wonder perhaps if I still have people following me from uni, who in turn have instructed the algorithm to show my work to aspiring writers, more than readers. The 52WO series is doing very well, and I am currently reformatting both books and finishing the third. These will become part of a future writing course.
Looking deeper into my ‘sales’ I can see I am about £478 down on Amazon ads. That was built up in 2021 and 2022, and has yet to be balanced out (not least because they overcharged me a few weeks ago, which is why I have cancelled all advertising there forever).
On Draft2Digital things are marginally better. As I upgrade my reach and put more books here, more people buy them outside Amazon, and the royalties are much better. That said, most of this money has already been spent months ago on promos, on subscriptions to linktree, bookfunnel, and various other things.
So why bother?
Simply put, it’s the reviews.
I know people like my books. I don’t get many reviews (which prevents me from getting certain marketing contracts sadly) but the reviews I do get are very nice. I even get messages online sometimes about how weird and fun my books are. On two occasions I have gotten fan art also!
If you’ve not dropped me a review for a book you’ve enjoyed, now is a good time. Reviews move books far better than expensive advertising campaigns.
(there will be another link later)
Making eBooks free means that people who won’t like them will also download them, so you’ll see a definite drop in ratings across the books I put up for free. One sad casualty is the cosmic comedy collection. I think one or two of us also annoyed someone on twitter around the publication date.
Oh well.
All complications aside, I enjoy writing, and publishing is just a thing I have to do in order to present the stories in the best way that you can read them. Some of my stories are jokes, so I go outside to say them at cocktail bars. Some of my stories are books, so I print them. Some of my stories are drawings or mechanisms or paintings or Minecraft builds. It’s that simple.
Writing is also a lot of clever work, so you’d hope you would be compensated for it because when you are writing, you can’t operate forklifts. Both forklifts and writing require you to think, so it’s best not to mix the two. You can get paid quite easily for forklifting also.
My point being, writing is a job, even if the pay hard to find in the beginning.
But it’s getting better, and there’s a synergistic effect when you have multiple books whereby people see you as a success without even reading the books. I have put out more than one, therefore the first one must have been really good.
It is good, but I’d prefer people to buy it before they figure that out ;)
I think that being a comedian as well as an author and poet makes life a lot easier. I know I am unusual, and as such my ideas and my books will be ‘hard sells’. This means pursuing agents is mostly a waste of time, as many of them are restricted by a need to find something more mainstream so as to impress publishers (or in fact limited by their own very narrow scope for what they want to read). But I don’t think this is how you write good stories. I think you write good stories by writing what you are passionate about. I’ve seen jokes about mathematical constructs done by people who are not comedians, but mathematicians, and these jokes were funnier than some comedy I’ve watched.
Your passion is the key to any art.
A support network
As I said above, you are never truly alone as a self-pub author. If you do it properly to any extent, you’ll have to speak to at least one other human.
Most humans are very helpful, but not all of them.
I met someone in a small press last year, who told me about a small book market in a small church in a small town. I learned after asking about it that it was also for small-minded people, as I was told “Oh, it’s really for small press only.” When I explained what Halfplanet was about, she frowned in something like disgust. I was told that I am not in fact a small press, despite satisfying every criteria thrown at me.
It seems that, even for indie bookshops, other indie bookshops can be just as hostile as the entire rest of the world. It is a shame there are people like this in the industry, and at the start they feel big and powerful, but as you grow your network you discover just how insignificant they are to your journey - that they are outnumbered by decent people. The same happens in comedy, and indeed in any Arts industry.
I had a few more weird experiences like this until I gave up on book fairs. Then I discovered Geek Fayre, which isn’t really about books at all, and I found my audience. Many of you met me at various Geek Fayres.
Hello!
My point being, sometimes your crowd is somewhere unexpected. I find I have more in common with these wonderful geeks than many of the writing world gatekeepers who still see me as some sort of literary goblin leaping around in their peripheral vision.
ANYONE WANT A SCI-FI BOOK WITH POEMS IN? WHAT ABOUT ONE WITH POEMS AND A TIME TRAVELLING CRAB AND ALSO THERE’S A MAGIC HORSE AND ALSO THERE’S THIS OTHER BIT WHICH INTERLOCKS DIAGONALLY WITH ANOTHER BOOK I HAVEN’T EVEN ANNOUNCED AND ALSO I HIRED MYSELF AS A LEGO ARTIST TO MAKE THE SPACESHIPS ON THE COVER AND ALSO I MEOW DURING THE AUDIOBOOK TO MAKE SURE MY LISTENERS ARE STILL AWAKE FOR THE LONG BITS.
I don’t know about you, but if I saw a goblin yelling stuff like that from the fringes of a book fair, I would drop the literary critic mask and use it to frisbee someone in my way in the back of the head, opening a direct path to this literary lunatic so I could befriend them.
I write what I want to write because I know you are here to read it when you want to read it.
Thank you.
Conclusion
I could not have done whatever all this is, without you.
Special mention:
Ruth O’Reilly, for getting me into radio presenting and supporting me as I write a very weird, difficult sci-fi series I’ve not even told you about properly yet (you’re going to love it)
Patrick Abbott, for a piercing interview that rewrote how I see myself as an artist, cutting through the bravado
Tuesday Tony, for his unrelenting support of my live comedy and compassion in the face of a changing, often confusing industry
John Coon, for forgiving me about that time I sold him to aliens
Rod Grasper, for being a receptacle for all my evil thoughts
Stephen Armstrong, for all the late night radio laughs
Meryl, for supporting my comedy writing from my weird ‘I’m more of a comedy poet’ phase until today, where I am possibly a comedian because I did a comedy show that one time, but I’m still not sure but she’s supportive anyway through all the existential crises
Mark, for my favourite review of WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? and for being a good friend through the ups and downs and diagonals of whatever it is I am doing here
Hannah, for her continued enthusiasm about the entire WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? series, telling people to buy it, and asking me once every month when she can read the next one
My two internet-shy fan art providers
Everyone at Geek Fayre
Lots of other people for lots of other things
You, for reading these posts and giving them reason to exist
My next post will be an excerpt from something.
If you have read any of my books (most importantly, WHO BUILT THE HUMANS and THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE) please do consider reviewing them. Even something as short as “this is proper good” would boost me so far in the amazon algorithm that I might never need to grovel again.
I will be looking for advance readers for ALL my future books soon. So keep an eyeball floating out in space if that’s of any interest to you.
Happy Independent Bookshop Day Phil. Thanks so much for your mention that was a nice suprise and really means a lot! It's been fun watching how your creativity has evolved since our first interview😊
It took a while to buy back my freedom from those aliens, but I made it home after stealing their spaceship and ejecting them into deep space. I want to say I am a wiser human now, not prone to empty promises of fame and fortune used to lure me into a spaceship disguised as a bookstore.