Dumb Adventures in Pseudo-Publishing

Promoting a Book is Humiliating

Sometimes, I wish I could fall into a recliner, turn on some mindless show, and shut my brain off until I wake the next morning. Unfortunately, I don’t have a recliner in the house. Or a TV. And my brain never quits, which is why I don’t sleep.

I’m burdened with a drive to accomplish something, usually found in the realm of getting my hands dirty. Gardening. Homesteading. Animals. Collecting eggs. Cooking. Building. Breaking things. Calling other people to fix them. Most days, I require constant motion in the pursuit of some accomplishment.

Otherwise, I get a little sad. And grumpy.

Of course, there are exceptions. Teaching my kid is paramount—at least until she surpasses me in knowledge, which should happen any day now. Most mornings, I’m up at 0530, which gives me dark time to write a 328-page Neurodivergent Spaghetti Western novel that no one will ever read.

The book is a nice distraction and ideal vessel for my autistic brain to exploit. Writing is more of an exercise in expelling and cataloguing all my weird thoughts into some logical explanation. As such, I’ve essentially crafted a completely unmarketable book.

SPECTRAL VENGEANCE is a Spaghetti Western-inspired novel that features a neurodivergent, mystical woman guided by voices in 1860’s Mexico, coerced by an one-eyed, chaotic revolutionary into seeking vengeance against four trauma-soaked, unrepentant killers.

You know….just your basic cut and paste genre story.

Try turning that into a marketable query letter that changes the boring life of a Big Five literary agent.

Funny enough, no one gets my tagline of “Sergio Corbucci meets Hans Aspberger.” I guess I need to update my references. I’ll ask Grok, although Grok will just sweep my new prompt into a hundred “how do I promote my book on TikTok” Gen X naggings that I don’t understand.

In other words…I have no fucking clue how to promote a book. Or gain followers. Or make posts (they’re probably not called posts) that catch someone’s fleeting attention in .0025 seconds.

I see what other people do on TikTok. It looks pretty straightforward until I remember that I’m a 47-year-old man raised in an analog era who hates to be on camera and can’t stand talking.

So, instead, I make clever videos (at least in my mind). I’ve learned how to kind of/sort of use Canva (I gave up on Adobe), and I try to satiate my imaginary viewers with minimal effort and thought.

Naturally, my favorite TikTok was also the one that took me the longest to make. Currently, it is sitting at zero views, which I feel is either an unnecessary algorithmic taunt or a declaration of my stupidity created by gods rolling on a celestial floor laughing.

The premise is simple. I intersperse video of our mini-horse’s daily routine with a brief explanation of my book's various genres. I’ll need to confirm with Grok, but evidently, people hate horses. And weird books.

I try not to hate anything. But I hate #BookTok. It’s a shiny cesspool of incessant pseudo-marketers whose ideas only work if you’ve already mastered building an audience.

But those aren’t the worst people and/or bots on #BookTok. The rest of #BookTok’s audience consists of pathetic, no-followers-having people like me hawking a complex and overly simple book that I barely understand.

Those people are the worst.

Now, I must jump back on TikTok and fail to gain their attention.

Evidently, my Kindle book is FREE now. So, make sure you “buy” it.