Diary of a Self-Publisher #3

“The Soft Porn Elf Files”

So.
Today I found out we’re elf publishers — at least according to Instagram, which cropped the cover of A Stillness in the Grain so tight it looks like we run a seasonal fantasy imprint from a log cabin in Pontypridd. Cheers, Meta.

Meanwhile, The Cardiff Bay Collection is still free on Kindle, not because I’m generous, but because Apple Books listed it as free for a minute and Amazon went full snitch. Now I’ve fixed the Apple price but Kindle won’t budge. I had to write to them like some desperate glitch poet in a broken blazer:

“Hi Jeff. Can I please have my book back?”

Of course, it’s still buried under soft porn and retro nudist anthologies, because Amazon still has no idea what to do with poetry that isn’t either rhyming affirmations or erotica dressed as literature.
So we sit there, somewhere between “Spanked by the Billionaire’s Badger” and a 1970s reprint of Women Without Shame.

To top it off? We weren’t even showing up on Google until yesterday — because of a DNS-level screwup, which meant search engines couldn’t even see the site. It’s like launching a lighthouse in fog and realising the bulb’s still in its box.

Honestly, I’m exhausted.
At this point, I might just use these diary entries to warn people about the very platforms I’m selling books on.
That’s the kind of business model we’re building here:
radical transparency + righteous swearing + broken systems.

The dream?
Go full DIY store on the site, print what we like, list nowhere, and walk into bookshops like:

“Here’s our stuff. It’s dark. It’s bent. It’s yours. Or not.”

Anyway. Back to the glitch mine.

—Lloyd

Featured image: mock-up of our next horror, poetry, glitchcore book ...just kidding. I knocked it up in Adobe Photoshop to keep me sane...no AI!