8 Months Later, I'm Finally Coming Up For Air
I know...I know...I went quiet for eight months. Not because I ran out of things to rant about, but because somewhere along the way, my own prophetic statement “build your own vault” stopped being a metaphor.
PARADIDDLE PUBLISHINGWRITING & CREATIVITYAUTHOR FIGHT CLUB
Gerard Francis & A. Intel
8/27/20269 min read
Here's fair warning before we start: this one is going to be longer than usual. It probably needs to be because the last time I properly checked in here, I had just released The Calm Amidst the Chaos, was talking cheerfully about another book in March, WTFIWWY was on the horizon, the merch was in full dev, and then, I promptly vanished off the face of the digital galaxy.
So if you’ve been wondering whether I died, became enlightened, joined a monastery or simply wandered into Bunnings looking for a screwdriver and never found the exit, I think I owe you an explanation.
📉 The Setup
Tip #01: "It'll only take a minute" is the self-publisher's "I'll just have one more".
The truth is I didn’t really disappear. More to the point, I went underground. Remember in my last blog how pissed I was at the self-publishing machine? The ridiculous and unavoidable friction associated with trying to take a finished manuscript to a saleable product. I twitch involuntarily every time I think of it.
Long story short, it all became too much and, frankly, I needed a solution quickly before I succumbed to the relentless onslaught.
So, this is what I did. I gave myself 10 days to build a simple local console to centralise all the platforms I had to manage and subscribe to into one place. And this is what I really did. I ended up spending eight months building a software company.
That sentence still feels slightly ridiculous when I read it back because eight months ago there was not even an inkling of a thought to build an elaborate and complex suite of tools to reduce the friction that I couldn't escape, let alone any resources to build it. No grand announcement, no investor funding, no development team, no road map, and certainly no pedigree lurking quietly in my back pocket to pull it all off.
There was just me, a laptop, a fairly spectacular amount of unresolved fury and the one sentence that I had written months earlier:
Stop asking for permission. Stop waiting for validation. Stop playing the game. Build your own vault. Forge your own cadence. Launch your own myth. Now, it's our turn.
At the time, that was a closing thought, but as it turns out, it was actually an instruction.
The rant that turned out to be a blueprint
If you’ve been hanging around this little corner of the internet for a while, you’ve watched me gradually become less interested in complaining about the creative industries and much more interested in understanding the machinery underneath them.
Complaining is easy and, let’s face it, I’m exceptionally well qualified.
Understanding why the same frustrations keep appearing is much harder.
Why does publishing a book suddenly require an author to become a formatter, marketer, publicist, designer, distributor, accountant, metadata wrangler, advertising buyer, social-media performer and amateur systems integrator before breakfast?
Why does every useful piece of that process seem to live in a different dashboard? Why does every dashboard want another subscription? Why does every subscription solve exactly enough of the problem to ensure you still need the other eleven?
And why, after doing all of the creative work and a frightening amount of everybody else’s work, does the author so often seem to be the last person in the chain whose income is treated as essential?
I eventually gave that little phenomenon a name: Fragmentax.
The recurring fee charged by the modern creator economy for the luxury of doing everybody else’s integration work for them.
That irritation had been building for a long time. Thirteen years in fact. I can trace it all the way back to <LINK>that one fateful day</LINK> and what can happen when somebody else owns the door between you and the thing you’ve created.
I won’t excavate the whole story again. I’ve already done enough of that, and this isn’t another chapter of Poor Gerard: The Musical.
But it happened in the orbit of one of the most recognisable names in American music history, which cured me permanently of one wonderfully naïve belief: that reaching the top of an industry somehow means integrity has risen with you.
It seems that power does not cure people of being arseholes. Sometimes it just gives them better stationery.
That experience changed the questions I started asking. I became less interested in whether a particular gatekeeper had behaved badly and much more interested in why creators keep having to hand gatekeepers so much leverage in the first place.
Who owns the audience?
Who owns the distribution?
Who owns the platform?
Who controls access?
Who gets to change the price?
Who decides whether you’re allowed through the door?
And what happens when the answer to all of them is:
Somebody else.
That is where “build your own vault” came from. I just hadn’t yet realised how far down that particular rabbit hole I was about to fall.
🕳 The Sinkhole
Tip #02: Scope creep is only madness until it ships.
For the vast majority of the last eight months, my life has looked roughly like this:
Ten-hour days, five days a week, no income from the thing I was building.
I had very little programming background, no development team and no particularly compelling evidence that any sane person would have chosen this route voluntarily.
I started with a fairly modest problem. I wanted a better way to manage the chaos around writing and preparing a manuscript. That was all, nothing more. So I built a local console as my 'single source of truth'. A place to manage the 27 tools I had subscribed to in order to publish The Calm Amidst the Chaos.
When that was done, I began to get swamped by the other possibilities. Other aspects of the machine that could be incorporated to remove them from the 'self-publishing' pipeline and reduce the friction some more.
First came the timers, then the session tracking, then the split between admin work (the shit work) and creative work (the dope work), then the emotional tracking versus each work type.
I was on a roll.
"Wait! I know! It takes me four and a half hours and eleven fucking platforms to create a social media post image and decide on the caption and the hashtags. I'll just build a Social Media Post Engine. Fuck it, and while I'm at it, I'll build in A.I. assistance."
Anyone watching would have reached for a straitjacket at this point, but I, without actually realising it, was all in!
Then I built a manuscript editor. Yep! You read correctly. No longer would I have to leave my 'single source of truth' to do the actual writing.
And if that wasn't enough, I remembered with disdain dripping from my chin the torment associated with formatting compliance, so I built in proper formatting controls.
"But wait, not all formatting properties are considered industry compliant, right?! Remember the HELL you suffered trying to upload your manuscript to IngramSpark?"
Then let's build in format intelligence.
As I recall these moments, the image of a maniacal evil scientist with a lab coat and a frightening yet unwavering stare comes to mind. Truthfully, I think that's how I really looked to any fly on the wall. It was too late...
Then came front matter management, then ISBN handling, then manuscript structure, then editorial tools, a publishing console, community architecture, file sharing, learning spaces, AI-assisted editorial capability. The list goes on.
And if that wasn't enough, I somehow found time to be pissed at subscription pricing, and decided to write a 12-page whitepaper outlining the complex maths behind 'Regression Pricing Theory' that was going to disrupt the extraction economy and bring peace and harmony to the world.
This is the point at which somebody really should have taken my laptop away.
But nobody did so I kept going.
The result from that eight-month madman's cruise is Author Fight Club.
🫁 Breathe with me, for just a minute.
Now, I want to be careful here. There is a vast graveyard full of founder updates that begin with I’ve built something incredible and end three paragraphs later with a waiting list for a product that currently exists only in Figma and optimism.
That is not what I mean.
Author Fight Club exists.
It works.
People can use it.
Sure, there are things I'm still testing, things still being refined, and things I want to build later, but the platform itself is no longer an idea waiting for permission to become real.
That distinction is probably the most important thing I can tell you right now.
🔎 The Learning
Tip #03: A promise that depends on your mood is just a weather forecast.
I learned more than my puny little red-lining brain could handle in that time. Some epiphanic moments, and some downright dangerously damaging ones. But the biggest one came somewhere around month six.
I finally hung up the lab coat for five minutes and looked at what was sitting on the bench.
It wasn't a console anymore. It was the Fight Engine, the working room I'd wanted from the very start. The platform I wish I'd had when I set out on my literary journey: writing, formatting, editorial feedback, marketing and community all under one roof, arranged around the author instead of around somebody's pricing tiers. Not another tool. More like fewer reasons to leave the room.
It looked impressive. That's precisely what worried me.
You see, the oldest trick in tech is quietly swapping tenses. Will becomes does, an ambition becomes a feature, and a waiting list gets dressed up as a product. That's a big part of why I went silent. I didn't want to promise anything, and I simply wasn't prepared to tell anybody about something that didn't exist yet.
But the real learning was when I turned my attention to pricing. And as I did, my blood pressure followed.
Every subscription business enjoys the same little miracle. More customers arrive, costs spread thinner, the business grows stronger. And how are the customers rewarded? With an email about an "important update to your plan".
Economies of scale, apparently, are a private party.
That's what gave birth to Regression Pricing Theory. One almost offensively simple idea: as more subscribers share the load, the price should fall. Not on Black Friday. Not when I'm feeling benevolent. When the formula says it must.
And that's where the real lesson landed.
Any founder can promise to be one of the good guys. But if my pricing ultimately boils down to trust me, I'm a decent bloke, it's worth exactly nothing the first time the business hits a rough patch.
A promise is only as strong as whatever enforces it.
So the formula gets attacked before anybody is bound to it. Up to fifteen Forge members will test the platform and break things. And up to eighty-five Vanguard members, at US$17 a month, put the first real weight on the pricing curve. Then, together, we test this damn thing with real-world user data to see whether that straitjacket is actually required.
A theory that only argues with itself is not good enough. That's nothing more than a spreadsheet with delusions of grandeur.
💭The Closing Thought
Tip #04: Going dark is fine, but come back with more than an apology.
So, that's where I've been.
Not dead. Not enlightened. Not lost somewhere between aisles 14 and 15 at Bunnings.
Just underground, building the thing I wished I'd had when I published my first book.
And yes, the irony isn't lost on me. The Calm Amidst the Chaos sold next to nothing this year. Not because it's a bad book, but because I stopped doing the things that sell books in order to reduce the friction associated with producing them.
I had zero ad spend and near zero traction.
But there was an upside. There was no shouting at strangers. No turning myself into a full-time promotional department with an inconvenient writing habit. I left a book I love sitting on the shelf while I built the machine it should have had.
But The Focus Amidst the Frenzy won't get that treatment. Its third draft will be the very first manuscript processed through Author Fight Club from start to finish. My book, my machinery, my own cooking. In public.
What could possibly go wrong?
But I'm not out of the woods yet, and neither is Author Fight Club. And here's the bit that genuinely gets under my skin and makes me want to spit every time I think about what's next for me.
I spent eight months building a way out of dancing for the algorithm, and now I have to dance for the algorithm to tell everybody the exit exists. Staying silent might feel principled, but it would also be an extraordinarily elaborate way of making sure nobody ever finds Author Fight Club. So a certain nocturnal bastard called Vox Noctis is climbing back into your feed. Not their way. Mine.
Yes, the WTFIWWY podcast and the merch are still shelved, but they're not dead, just outranked. Because the one thing this year taught me, a touch late for a bloke of my vintage, is that seventeen ideas do not come with seventeen versions of me.
I wish I could chalk that up to a manufacturing defect, but it's simply reality.
Eight months ago, I wrote Now, it's our turn.
Turns out it was my turn first.
For eight months there was just me, a laptop, and a list that refused to get shorter.
That changes now.
Author Fight Club is live. Come and see how to join the fight at www.authorfc.com.
Request platform access or jump into the public chat and ask me any uncomfortable question to my face.
Let me be clear about one thing. I'm not looking for permission and I don't want applause.
What I do want is to know whether anyone else out there has the cojones to come and lean on the walls.
Buckle up, amigo. 🥊
Spitefrastructure (n.)
Infrastructure built because being told “that’s just how the industry works” became more offensive than the effort required to replace it.
Common symptoms include disappearing for eight months, learning skills you had absolutely no business learning, and returning with a functioning alternative held together by caffeine, profanity and an increasingly personal vendetta against bad systems.
See also: Author Fight Club