Diary of a Self-Publisher

ENTRY #1: Nipples, Nudists, and Nin
From the Indie Author Diaries of Lloyd Lewis

Diary of a Self-Publisher is a bitter-sweet, slightly chaotic, and entirely honest series. It documents the daily realities of building something independent with limited means, neurological curveballs, and a sense of humour that sometimes flirts with a complete breakdown.

These aren’t marketing posts. They’re a window into the back end of the system: battling Amazon’s labyrinthine publishing machine, trying to navigate inaccessible platforms, watching AI erode everything from search results to sincerity, and still waking up each morning to print, publish, and persist.

We don’t want to work with the system. But we also know we can’t always ignore it. So we use the pipelines when we must — and build our own when we can.

This series is for the writers and artists trying to hold it together. For the disabled creators quietly doing the impossible. For anyone who’s ever asked, "How the hell is this supposed to work?"

No sob stories. No guru tips. Just dispatches from the edge.

So here’s how this whole rethink started:

We hit number four. Not in the poetry charts, mind you — because you can’t even reliably list as poetry on Amazon without doing digital gymnastics or having a meltdown in the metadata mines. No, we hit number four in a dark, seedy Amazon corner reserved for soft porn photo books, 1980s nudist clubs, and a glossy little masterpiece called European Blondes Vol. 5.

I’m not even making that up.

Imagine standing in the wreckage of your poetic dignity, clutching a book of grief and black-and-white photography, only to find it wedged between boob-jobs and a back catalogue of suntanned regret.

Welcome to the genre-agnostic chaos of Amazon’s categories, where poetry, apparently, is anything that triggers a vague emotional reaction — or an algorithmic erection.

It get's worse.

I was suddenly starring in Terry Gilliam's, Brazil.

I asked to remove the book from my Author Central page (because it’s now being reissued under my real name, not my fiction mask). Amazon replied, with the cheery tone of a 1950s civil servant handing back your form because you signed box 12b in blue ink:

“You are the author. We must maintain a complete record.”

Apparently, once you’ve published with them, your digital ghosts stay chained in their basement forever. Even if you change your name. Even if you unpublish. Even if you go full Witness Protection and write under a new identity. They're keeping your bibliography 'tidy' — whether you want them to or not.

This is the moment where I nearly lost it. But instead, I started laughing. Because really, what else do you do when you’re disabled, trying to self-publish soul-revealing poetry, and getting wedged between nudist erotica and the ghosts of your own metadata?

So here we are.

We’re using Amazon...strategically — but only as a pipeline, for now. It gets the thing out the door. But the real work? That’s on Ghost, in the streets, in zines, through Cardiff Calling, on paper touched by real hands.

We’re not trying to go viral. We’re just trying to stay real — while laughing through the Kafka loop of online publishing and hoping that Cardiff Bay Life doesn't end up alongside the 'Hoff's' latest biography.

More soon, LL

Featured image photography by Lloyd Lewis © 2025 Art of FACELESS