What does 'making it' mean as an indie author?

clout vs. sales as a marker of success

Yours truly

I’ve been meaning to write something about some of the book reviews I’ve been fortunate enough to receive as of late, but instead of writing individual response pieces as I’ve done before, I think it’s more useful to combine these thoughts into a single, somewhat discursive piece about the experience of being a self-published author of literary fiction.

The reviews—which I would absolutely encourage all of you to check out—are as follows:

• Alan Schmidt’s review from February 25th, 2024.

• Neoliberal Feudalism’s review from April 2nd, 2024.

• Ross Barkan’s review in Mars Review of Books from April 17th, 2024 (which was also cross-posted to his excellent SubStack, as well).

Lately, I’ve been asking myself—what does success look like for the indie literary author?

It’s a difficult question to answer, since (a) so few people read literary fiction, meaning it is virtually impossible to get readers, and (b) even fewer people read self-published literary fiction, the latter of which is almost never taken seriously due to reasons of quality control.

For the self-published genre-writer, the answer is simpler: success takes the shape of a power-law style distribution: something like Colleen Hoover, of which AMAZORG’s industrial machine produces aplenty. This, of course, is not the sport in which I am competing (although I would, admittedly, like the dump-truck of money that it comes with). I have my own personal theory about supremely successful authors like Colleen Hoover or Dan Brown or Nicholas Sparks or Brandon Sanderson: these people are brilliant in a way that is sort-of translucent; that is to say, they are midwit savants.

What is a midwit savant in the literary sense? It’s someone whose commercial outperformance far exceeds their apparent verbal IQ by many orders of magnitude and is frequently derogated by smarmy culturati pricks like me.

Look at someone like Dan Brown, who has sold many millions of books. Although his prose and characterization lacks any degree of meaningful sophistication, the metastructure of his stories—his ability to construct forward narrative momentum and to create narrative immersion—is low-key exceptional and produces an enormous degree of cognitive resonance in the 100 to 110 IQ population-range, which also happens to be the biggest possible market of consumers. And as much as my authorial pride wants to diminish this monumental achievement, I cannot. If it were anything less than an act of intuitive, paradoxically non-verbal genius, I would already have replicated it and optioned off my film rights instead of being a broke expat living in a middle-income East-Asian country.

Of course, I don’t substantively care about Dan Brown, nor does he care about me. And while I would absolutely love for my novel to incrementally growth-hack its way to a cult-like readership and become the next Chuck Palahniuk-style Fight-Club-tier-success, it’s too complicated and dense of a work to achieve that kind of mainstream penetration.

So that returns me to the question—what does success look like for me?

One way to think about writing is as a kind of striving: you want something to exist in the world, you want it to be created, and then you struggle to make it so. Beyond that, you strive for sales and recognition: to achieve a psychic impact in a population of readers, and to be regarded well for doing so.

One way to think about suffering is also a kind of striving—as a desire. The gap between your expectations and reality is the engine that moves you forward: forward into the act of publishing, and forward into the act of shilling. I am not too proud to shill my book, which I do constantly, and whenever I see a sale on my AMAZORG sales chart, I receive a nice little hit of dopamine.

I released my novel in July of last year, and since then, it has sold 300 copies. I had hoped, somewhat arbitrarily, to have sold many more, but this apparently puts me at a comfortably average level of sales within my first publication-year. I would indeed like to sell many more in the future, but I cannot complain about this current figure (and yes, we’re just going to ignore the fact that ~80-100 of them were not technically sold but downloaded for free during a 2-day promotional event I ran in the fall, lol). I would describe this as mildly to moderately disappointing, although I have just received a surprise request for someone to stock my book in their independent bookstore, which I am currently trying to fulfill. I have not worked on any fiction since publishing my debut in the summer of 2023, partly because I am burned out of fiction right now, but also because I don’t feel particularly motivated to keep writing in the wake of what does, on some level, feel like a mild to moderate failure to garner an audience.

But lately, this feeling has been changing.

What has been an enormous surprise is the degree to which I’ve been able to garner attention (and very thoughtful) reviews from sophisticated and considerate readers like Neoliberal Feudalism. The culmination of this reception has effectively been a dream-come-true: Ross Barkan, a very well regarded journalist and novelist, has reviewed my novel (along with Rienspect’s Mixtape Hyperborea) in Mars Review of Books.

This latter experience has been very surreal. Years ago I came across Christian Lorentzen’s review of Selfie, Suicide, in the Mars Review, and thought to myself—“wouldn’t it be incredible to get reviewed here?”

And now, I’m living it!

The mag that Noah Kumin is putting out is, along with NYC-alt-lit staples like Expat Press, among the best and most avant-garde work in the entire literary sphere. To me, it’s much more compelling than the recycled tote-bag-slop I frequently come across in prestige publications which typically remain tightly aesthetically constrained. That is not to say that there’s “nothing good” in other well-established, highbrow literary publications, only that the energy is no longer there.

As an artist, you always want to bet on energy.

So—I find myself, somewhat strangely, being taken seriously by serious people in serious spaces: by the real avant-garde-as-such. This has been a deeply meaningful experience for which I am very grateful.

(to get a sense of where my head was originally at post-publication, read my piece about marketing my novel on 4chan here).

And at the same time, I’ve sold a rather small number of copies.

Others have argued that my novel has a good shot at developing a “long tail” of sales, and I am increasingly optimistic that this could be the case.

But even if that doesn’t happen, I have maybe already done the thing that I set out to do: to get my book read, and to be read—and understood—by the right people.

You can’t get everything you want in life, and I have decided that, for me, this alone will suffice.

Thoughts on my thoughtful reviewers

Alan Schmidt commented on my prose, which I had a lot of fun writing:

As hard as the themes of this book, a valid question to ask is whether you should read it. I personally enjoyed it, with excellent prose that got the reader into the ideas of Anon, as unpleasant a place as that is. Before reading, I recommend reading the first ten pages, as this gives a good feel of the book and what the author tried to capture. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s fine.

One of the great joys I had in writing this novel was re-working and polishing the prose over and over again. The stylistic execution of the book was a source of great joy (and sometimes frustration), and I found myself dialing up the psychic hyperbole to the maximum possible extent with each successive draft of the novel.

My hypothesis remains that a big part of the psychology of inceldom comes down to over-integrating computational metaphors into the lived experience of day-to-day life, and I had a lot of fun thinking up different ways to merge that with elements of black comedy. For a more serious example of how computer science language and terminology can be applied to human psychology and social dynamics, you can read Nick Land or land-adjacent sci-fi writers like Zero HP Lovecraft.

Neoliberal Feudalism felt similarly:

As mentioned, the writing in the book is superb throughout. The words grabbed me and I felt compelled to read it through. With many books I read as long as I am deriving value from it; even if the writing is poor and is a slog to get through I will power through it so long as the benefits of the accruing knowledge outweigh the pain of getting through it (The Gulag Archipelago was one such painful exercise).

Samuel Chapman makes a similar point here. Incel was a pleasure to read and I could tell that a lot of thought and effort went into it.

The most interesting comment I’ve seen in a critique thus far is his elaboration of the racial angle:

Han made the main character anon twenty-two years old and white, but his intellectual knowledge both seemed greater than a twenty-two year old and he seemed very Asian to me, or at least half-Asian (ARX has stated that he himself is a Chinese-American). Perhaps ARX intended the novel to be aimed at deradicalizing white incels specifically but from that perspective I don’t think he nailed the tone of that ethnic group. Rather, anon seemed to at least be a hapa (half Asian half white) — and it seems that hapa males with white fathers and Asian mothers mentally struggle a great deal in Western society compared to other groups (this dynamic does not really apply to hapa males with white mothers and Asian fathers, but those are much rarer). Furthermore, I don’t think anon’s parents were mentioned at all - his sister features prominently, but it’s interesting why the parents would have been left out along with other family members (unless there was something I missed).

SPOILERS BEGIN:

I think this is quite an incisive analysis in that few reviewers have picked up on the more latent racial psychology of the protagonist.

In brief, there are actually two potential racial interpretations of the protagonist:

1. Anon is a white male (the canonical interpretation).

2. Anon is a hapa male suffering from extreme racial dissociation in a form of racial psychosis (a latent/symbolic interpretation).

I touched upon this in an earlier post I wrote about Arbogast’s review in The Carousel:

There is one reading of the text that most have not yet discerned. The novel hints that anon and Jason are the same person—even though they are canonically written as literally separate. The moment where Jason sides with anon, a white male, over the half-Asian bully who is tormenting him, leads to a decisive conclusion: anon crushes the jaw of his half-Asian nemesis. It is a symoblic act—shattering a “racial fulcrum” of the hapa—a psychic schism between Eastern and Western identitarian modes of thinking. The underlying thrust is one of a kind of “racial dissociation” or “racial psychosis” experienced by the Asian male in Western society. This is what I mean by anon’s universality, which could apply to any male of any race in modern American society.

In the latest published version, I leaned into the hapa symbolism a little bit more by renaming anon’s traumatic adolescent bully as Elliot—a kind of alternate-universe Elliot Rodger where his psychopathy grew into a more physically imposing frame.

One of the least-discussed aspects of Rodger was the deep racial symbolism of the initial act of his rampage, in which he stabbed his Asian male roommates to death in their own beds (the reason you almost never see this discussed is because an Asian man’s life in America is worth approximately zero).

It’s an act which receives very little discussion in the psychological autopsy of his self-written manifesto—a racial self-hatred that was so deep and automatized that it required almost zero internal psychological justification and proceeded as a matter of due course.

SPOILERS END:

Ross Barkan, like Capitalisimo of Tooky's Mag, has also picked up on Bret Easton Ellis as one of my chief stylistic influences:

ARX-Han, in particular, is a formidable talent, as if Bret Easton Ellis decided to make a deep study of Reddit and the byzantine off-roads of evolutionary psychology. INCEL is, as its title suggests, the story of an incel. It is remarkably ambitious, plenty unsettling, and mordantly funny.

More expansively, he situates the book in a context defined by the relative absence of unvarnished representations male interiority, i.e. modern, establishment literary publishing:

The louche or unabashedly noxious young man has mostly vanished from contemporary American fiction. He is neither author nor subject; there are few, if any, male equivalents of Ottessa Moshfegh or Lexi Freiman, nor of their scatological, misanthropic protagonists. (Only Teddy Wayne, of the leading male novelists under 50, seems interested in such disreputable males.) One can argue this is progress or something else entirely, but it is a trend that is hard to deny. Male lust and male rage is for the internet now. On the physical terrain, in the realm of literature, it is mostly excised.

In this respect, he and I have very much converged on a similar conclusion: there’s a real deficit in young male novelists who are able to examine the substance of male interiority. This is unfortunate, but also represents an opportunity for a new wave of writers to create parallel paths to success outside of mainstream institutional publishing, which will also serve to populate a more decentralized and energetic literary culture anyway.

To all these writers who have read and reviewed my novel—thank you!—and to all those who have yet to read it yourself, you can order it here.