If it Quacks Like Bullshit... and it Smells Like Bullshit...

RETROSPECTIVE: FEBRUARY 2026. Written in September 2026, filling in the chapter I was far too busy treading water to write at the time.

So there I was, at the end of last year, grinning like an idiot. The Calm Amidst the Chaos was finished.

My first book. My labour of love. My stubborn little 250-page pearl, rewritten again and again, doubted, deleted, resurrected, polished, and occasionally teetering precariously on the rim of my office rubbish bin.

But it was done. The manuscript was finished and effectively 'signed off' by the boss (me wearing a fedora with a handwritten scrap labelled The Boss stuffed into the band). All I had to do now was publish it.

Simple, right?

Yeah. About that...

📉 The Setup

Tip #01: Writing a book is merely the entry fee to the extraction circus. Stop kidding yourself.

Nobody tells you there is a goddamn canyon between I have finished my manuscript and a reader can actually buy my book. I was not at all ready for this and it's something I learned the hard way. I kept hitting barrier after barrier and eventually I realised the only way through was with stubborn brute force.

So I started learning.

To say I wasn't ready for the avalanche of learning and the Mandelbrot set of gates I was about to encounter would be the understatement of the century. First typesetting, then proofreading - not rereading my work real proofreading to expose the tiny intricacies that exposed me as a kindergarten novelist to a professional. Then came print specifications, trim sizes, margins, bleeds, cover dimensions, file formats and distribution requirements. And that's only the top ten.

I was no longer obsessing about my next work with eager anticipation; I was drowning in confusion and regret as I negotiated with artists for cover artwork, subscribed to a dozen different platforms to get to the next gate, and watched on as every quote removed another small organ from my bank account.

Then somebody online wrote about ISBNs.

ISB...what's?

Right. ISBNs. Yet another system in the machine. Yet another account. Yet another expense, and yet another thing to understand before I could break through and see if this was the last bloody gate in my way.

Now, somewhere in all this, a thought began quietly forming in the back of my head. Why the hell does an author need to understand all of this just to get a book from a laptop into somebody else's hands?

I tried to ignore that thought while I untangled my ankles from the wires of the previous gate and tried to get up the courage to look up and see if the labyrinth of gates was finally over.

🕳 The Sinkhole

Tip #02: I hope you love the concept of Swiss Army knives - a self-published author needs to be one.

When the cover was finally finished, the manuscript completed, and a faintest whiff of optimism still inexplicably percolating under the surface, I marched off to upload the book to IngramSpark.

And that's when I realised that my headache was actually caused by the vice of the machine slowly compressing my head. It was like taking a bath in a pot on the stove, only now, the heat had risen so much I couldn't help but feel its effects.

The files were continually rejected. Hours later, I boiled the problem down to the resolution of the images. What the fuck is resolution?

Is any of this ringing in your ears yet? Hold that thought.

If the resolution is wrong, or the dimensions are wrong, or you looked sideways while uploading, or something else is wrong, you have to stop, fix the one thing that's blocking the process, then upload again.

And then wait...

Oh, come on! Rejected again. What now?

Then, it's go through the process once more, fix one more thing, upload again, then wait....again.

At one point the cover artwork needed so much work, my research led me to Photoshop.

Wait a cotton-pickin' minute! I'm an author, not a bloody graphic artist!

Needless to say, I was swallowed into that sinkhole, looking for alternatives, evaluating more software, opening more accounts, familiarising myself with more interfaces, going blind on more learning.

So many hours disappeared into that sinkhole that it makes me angry just thinking about it. So much time invested in things that I had not even the slightest inclination to ever become competent in.

One thing led to another, and eventually I started experimenting with AI image generation. Great! More learning and yet more subscriptions.

Then that led to video generation for promotion, and more subscriptions. Then more tools that did one tiny thing better than the first tool and still more new subscriptions.

At some point, the entire process began to feel less like publishing a book and more like being mugged by a vending machine that only accepted monthly recurring payments. I found myself contemplating a small personal loan to fund this shit fight.

Still, onward I pressed. Then the next gates came on the horizon. Amazon, Amazon KDP, author profiles. Upload this. Confirm that. Agree to this. Read this. Click here. Don't click there. Remember this password.

And then, finally... someone bought the book ... eureka? And how did I know? I received an email from someone saying "I tried to leave a review but it wouldn't go through".

It turns out they were blocked because...and get this...my account was too new, therefore treated as suspicious.

Apparently being new and being suspicious are the same thing these days. For the love of God, give me a break.

So more research, more trial and error and more new accounts, usernames, and password number twenty-seven I had to juggle with the rest of the shit that I was wading in up to my nostrils.

Or was it thirty-seven? Fuck knows. I had stopped counting.

🕳 The Sinkhole (part two)

Tip #03: If part one is the frying pan, part two is most definitely the marketing fire.

In case it's not yet obvious, writing a book, editing a book, designing a book, funding a book, formatting a book, publishing a book and distributing a book are only the warm-up act.

Now you have to sell the bastard.

Enter Meta Business Suite. Facebook, Business Facebook, Instagram, MBS management console, marketplaces, Facebook groups, paid advertising, analytics, insights, and that's just Meta.

You mean I have to go through this again with all the other social media platforms? That's it - I quit!

It was at about this time that I seriously thought about throwing in the towel for the very first time. And here's the irony. It wasn't writing the book that caused my disillusionment, it was everything that came after that. I was lost in a kaleidoscope of accounts linked to other accounts linked to pages linked to profiles linked to things I apparently owned that I had no goddamn idea where they lived.

I lost entire afternoons trying to work out how to publish a single goddamn social media post.

Just the posting alone was a full-time job. And then my research turned up a new tool. “Use this, and schedule all your social media posts so they automatically get posted strategically across all platforms. Just sign up here pay the subscription fee, read the documentation and we'll post you out your degree in four years!"

It was déjà vu cloaked in a Halloween costume and dripping with regret over the lost weeks and months. It was yet another company solving one tiny piece of the problem while handing the remaining pieces straight back to me. Somewhere in the middle of all that bullshit I looked up and realised I hadn't written anything in weeks. Not a chapter. Not a page. Not a paragraph. Not one creative fucking word.

For weeks!

But that wasn't the worst part. Now, I didn't want to write. All motivation and enthusiasm for my craft and my purpose had been bludgeoned to death by the machine.

I had somehow gone from author to unpaid IT department, production manager, graphic designer, proofreader, metadata clerk, distributor, marketer, customer service desk, accounts department and social media intern.

For my own book.

That, eventually, was the part that got under my skin. Because none of these systems were necessarily impossible on their own. That wasn't the real problem. The problem was that none of them belonged together.

The printer had a system. The distributor had a system. Amazon had a system. Meta had a system. Goodreads had a system. The marketing tools had systems. The payment providers had systems.

Everybody had a beautifully self-contained little kingdom built around their slice of the author. And who carried the joins between all those kingdoms? The author.

Every company owned a fragment of the process. I owned the fucking fragmentation.

And I began to wonder whether anybody had ever stopped to ask what all of this looked like from our side of the screen.

🔎 The Learning

Tip #04: Sometimes the breaking point is where the mending blueprint begins.  

Eventually the whole thing stopped feeling difficult and started feeling absurd. I remember sitting there one day staring at a confronting combination of tabs, dashboards, passwords, invoices and promotional crap and thinking:

"This is bullshit!"

I simply couldn't keep up. I couldn't control all the platforms. I couldn't keep buying subscriptions for tools that solve one problem by creating another. And worst of all, I couldn't get any traction promoting my damn book. Somewhere along the way, I had completely lost sight of why I started doing this in the first place.

That was the moment something changed. Not because I suddenly knew how to fix publishing. That couldn't be further from the truth. I just wanted the noise to stop.

The thought was ridiculously simple. Dangerously simple. Something very close to:

"It's too late to quit now. I've invested too much. And I'm a stubborn son of a bitch anyway - it's in my DNA. I'm going to dedicate ten days and build myself a little local console. One place where I can reach all these bloody tools without having to remember where everything lives. Then I'll get back to promoting the book."

Ten days. That was the plan. A tiny little personal console that would at the very least save me 17 minutes looking for the password to the thing I subscribed to three weeks ago.

I don't want anything clever, nothing commercial, nothing ambitious. Just one place where I can see what I'm doing. One place where the pieces belong together. One place where the author, for once, sits in the middle of the system instead of being dragged between its edges.

And with any luck, I'll be writing again by the end of the month.

💭The Closing Thought

Tip #05: When every gate belongs to somebody else, build your own door.

So, there it is, my latest rant. Looking back across the history of this blog, I can see the tone getting darker as the year wore on. I'm not ashamed of that, and I'm not going to apologise for it.

The optimism didn't disappear because I suddenly became a miserable bastard. It collided, repeatedly, with a machine demanding more money, more time, more learning, and eventually more of the part of me that actually wanted to write.

Maybe that's negativity. Or maybe it's what happens when you finally stop mistaking structural friction for personal failure.

Either way, I learned something.

When we're forced into a corner, we can surrender, walk away from the thing we care about, or stand up and fight back.

I chose the latter.

At the time, my ambition was embarrassingly small.

Build a simple local console. Remove some of this ridiculous friction. Get back to promoting the book, then get back on the creative hobby-horse. And if it worked, I'd gladly share it with anyone else who had been chewed up by the same machine.

Ten days.

Then back to writing.

That was the plan.

I had no idea what I'd just started.

Fragmentax (n.)

A recurring fee charged by the modern creator economy for the luxury of doing everybody else’s integration work for them.

Symptoms include twelve dashboards, thirty-seven passwords, nine monthly subscriptions, lost hours, creative work that never gets made, and the creeping suspicion that the only person not being paid in your publishing business is you.

Platforms own the fragments.

You pay for the joins.

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