How to publish my novel

I don't know about your novel. For one thing, I don't actually think it's liable to be a novel at all ; nor do I suspect either you or it of any adherence to the possessive -- it can't be yours no matter what you do or it is. I don't therefore intend to offer anything like advice.i

My novel however (which is mine notwithstanding it started life as the mis-shod retelling of the life experience of some black dude) saw the light of publication right here on Trilema, no further than... o look at that, it's been almost three whole days since the last (24th) chapter hit the feeds, meaning the first's all of two weeks old. I guess that's long enough to have some real data.ii It'd better be long enough, anyways.

First off, some basics :

> ls -l

-rw-r--r-- 1 trilema trilema 49943787728 Feb 28 22:52 trilema.com-Feb-2021

-rw-r--r-- 1 trilema trilema 22566580341 Mar 12 21:46 trilema.com-Mar-2021iii

> wc -l trilema.com-Feb-2021iv

248491171 trilema.com-Feb-2021

> wc -l trilema.com-Mar-2021

83622196 trilema.com-Mar-2021

And now on with it :

There's been a total of 5`823`760 calls for the pattern "GET /2021/the-real-pimp-chapter-"v from distinct IPsvi that then called the headervii, a behaviour I deem enough of an indication that page was actually loaded for human consumption, as opposed to programmatical.

The most widely read chapter is To Tuskegee, And Back somehow, oddly enough, called 371`875 times. The rest of the chapters order historically, from a little over 300k for the first to a little under 200k for the last. Something like two thirds of the people who started reading it also finished it, with the remainder third either momentarily too busy or lost along the way.viii

841`562 of those 5.83 mn were referred by "http://trilema.com/" (which is the special case of habitual usersix coming in to check what's new). The ordered top of referrers thence is ~nothing but Trilema itself for the next 100+ positions, various pages. The first time any external occurs, it's politico.com ; its 198 referrals don't earn it a position in the top 100, or for that matter 500. The "usual suspects" so to speakx are all present, of course, hundreds upon hundres of these great successes online which nevertheless collectively fail to amount to a spit in the rain. Mayhaps it's mere coincidence, or just an artifact of the... very wide point of viewxi ? Perhaps it's simply reflecting their utter irrelevancy, though. I mean, if anyone gave a shit about the collected web outside these here gates, it'd... show, right ? It'd actually matter, somehow. It'd move, something. Just my guess, don't mind me.

My first novel ever, published a good 15 years ago, ran if memory serves 14`000 copies (single edition)xii. I never cared to look at numbers for the intervening onesxiii, but the roughly twenty-fold implied readership of this last one isn't so bad in art-over-time termsxiv, though meaningful comparisons are indeed difficult : a printed book can be in principle re-read an infinity of times (and at some point in history some indeed were) ; on the other hand we're discussing here folk who at least specifically looked for each chapter, whereas a physical book can (and god knows often enough does) end up closer to a brick in its usage than anything.

Anyway, to bring this lengthy circumvolution to some kind of conclusion : I'm of the contrary oppinion to Paul Goma. I couldn't give less of a shit as to what or whether some dour moron "says about it". The world seen through my eyes is completely empty, absolutely devoid of life. There's no peers, anywhere. I looked, long and hard enough. I am done looking. I don't care what some subhuman thinks he thinks on this -- or any other -- topic. The only metrics of interest to me are pure consumption and actual world-shaping (which pointedly means, irrespective the "will" of the shaped) ; and therefore as far as publishing my novels goes, Trilema's by far the best outlet in existence.xv

———Really, I'm only writing this down at all because gzip -d is taking to damn long, and I get bored easily. [↩]Come to think of it, if you ever find anyone that can stand comparison... God knows the last set of hopefuls got burned pretty badly. [↩]This'd be until the 11th ; there's some shenanigans implicit in Apache log rotation handling where the "current day" is kept apart and I really didn't feel like splicing. [↩]

98.6m 608 508 D 9.2 0.0 0:14.93 wc

for fuck's sake already, this is a kickass box wtf. [↩]This approach excludes the last chapter from the tally, because whatever, I didn't think things through when I started. Fuck it, what difference does it make anyways. [↩]Not at all the same thing as "uniques", seeing how these don't reset every day. [↩]Something like

GET /wp-content/themes/trilema/images/bg_nov2017.jpg HTTP/1.1" 304 - "http://trilema.com/2021/the-real-pimp-chapter-7-blown-whoreless-and-fresh-out-of-girl/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/88.0.4324.190 Safari/537.36

[↩]This being a particularly important metric to my eyes, as you perhaps expect, given that it's rare enough an occurrence I actually manage to finish a book. [↩]That's a particularly informative, not to say amusing, reference. Fancy, quarter million months, back in 2014 (a year or two after I switched Trilema over to mostly English). The web sure has grown since then, huh. [↩]twitter, bandcamp, oup.com, evernote.com, ft.com, *.wikipedia.org, *.fb.com, ietf.org, eff.org, tmz.com, stanford.edu, newscientist.com, 4channel.org, businessinsider.com, ask.fm, gutenberg.org, genius.com, boredpanda.com, match.com, nme.com, hm.com, poynter.org, foxnews.com, various medium.com fakeouts (they supposedly run off their own domain, but...) and "url shorteners" etc etc. Even fucking stripchat's in there. Who the everloving wants to discuss Trilema while oh... I see now. Aite, enjoy. [↩]My vantage here on Trilema being anything but narrow, by grace of Trilema being by far the widest read blog, both today and ever on the web. [↩]Of which maybe 500 or so were melted in the end. Something like that. Not bad for a book I refused to get an ISBN for, anyhow. [↩]2016's Disgrace, 2017's Zuleika Dobson, 2018s Double Indemnity, 2020s Diary of a baby doll and this year's Dangerous -- excluding the Romanian-language items prior to that date and a bunch of shorter stories in between. [↩]To say nothing of how it utterly blows out of the water all conceivable classics of this, or any other, language. I mean... it sure beats Jane Austen's 44 reads, right ? [↩]At the very least, nothing ever has to go out of print ; but as a practical exercise, see how many titles with a 300k initial run you can find. It might turn out quite informative. [↩]

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Category: Meta psihoza

Saturday, 13 March, Year 13 d.Tr.