Hideous Book Covers are a Fucking Epidemic

As writers, we need to walk our own paths

I know where yer at

Yer sitting there watching YouTube, and some attention-deficient twenty-year-old called Marvin is telling you how to self-publish yer book about bisexual trans cis werewolfs on Amazon while he sends you links to his free course on marketing.

It’s fine. I get it. You want to be a famous author like that bellend Stephen King, so you can go for forty-minute creative walks each day on a busy road and get hit by an ice cream van. You want to live in a fancy chocolate biscuit mansion where you reside for forty-four days a year between travelling round and getting sucked off by writing groupies at fancy book launches with pistachio croissants and champagne in mystical foreign cities.

And this fucking kid here, who probably uses Chat GBH to write their stuff, is telling you that your cover needs to look a particular way that you couldn’t possibly design yourself, so you need to employ Bakti in Bangladesh (A certified book cover designer) to create it for you.

Look, I don’t want to piss in your teapot, but despite your dreams, the chances of you selling a lot of books are incredibly fucking slim.

So why not create something beautiful instead of doing whatever horseshit will apparently sell books?

But Frank, I’m going to be a famous author and sell millions

No, you’re not.

And don’t take that personally. But you need to grow up and start taking your writing seriously.

You need to understand that 96.2% of the great authors died broke and alone, drunk, and with syphilis. And you need to start making that your goal as an author.

Because if you are writing to become ‘big’, you aren’t writing authentically, and you will continue to produce rhinoserous turd. And even if you do become big and start pumping out best sellers like one of the other turd factories, it doesn’t mean you are a good, authentic writer. You’re just another corporate faggot in this lost world.

Think about it. If you can’t stand the idea of writing without trying to become ‘big’, you have a real problem, and you should probably just go and stick a camera on your head and feed a half-dead tramp for views or beat up and starve a cat and ‘rehabilitate’ it.

Writing to become famous is fucking empty. And it’s pathetic. And your book cover says a lot about who you are. Never forget that.

Don’t Be a Pussy

People sometimes ask me for writing advice

N yeah, this is the bit where I’m supposed to act all humble and say, what, me? But I’m only…

That humility crap is another epidemic.

I’ve written four full-length books and hundreds of articles. And sure, it might not be as many as Terry Daniels, who is working on his 144th book in the Jack Flashcock series. Still, I can guarantee you I wrote every one of my books without considering the advice of fucking anybody in the writing world or the publishing world. I didn’t follow any rules. And believe me, publishing a book is much easier if you fuck off all the rules.

My advice to those people who ask me is this:

Find the stuff in your mind that you never want anybody to know about—those filthy secrets that you are so afraid of being judged for. Now write about them without fear and without wondering if they will ‘sell’.

Because writing is a cathartic process. The more you take that fear and self-loathing and piss it all over the page for the public to read, the more you will become comfortable in your own skin. It’s like therapy.

I mean, that doesn’t mean you have to write about spying on your sister in the bath or catching herpes from a six-foot hooker in Darwin, like me. It should only be that extreme if that’s what comes out.

I just mean that you shouldn’t censor yourself based on a fear of being judged by your non-existent readers. Reader expectations are a great source of writer’s block. Writing yourself into a niche can be a fucking nightmare, even if that niche is obscure and you never meant to end up there.

What About Titles?

What about fucking titles, you muppet?

What’s that?

You downloaded a fourteen-dollar title generator from the App Store, and you’re asking it to read your book and come up with a title?

You’re asking a machine to come up with a title for your book, and you have the shame to call yourself a writer?

Get a fucking grip.

As a response to the world of writing influence and their insistence on horseshit titles that ‘sell’ books, I called my first book ‘Ballbag’, and in response to the cover bullshit, I took a picture of the public toilet wall where I was having a piss. It came out quite beautifully, I think.

Is that book a bestseller? No, it fucking isn’t, and that’s probably for many reasons. First of all, my marketing efforts have been basically zero since I decided that marketing is a dead man’s sport. But it’s mainly because selling books is hard. And it’s because not many people buy books. The ones that do are buying mainstream fucking fiction, the literary equivalent of watching ‘real’ housewives with medicine ball tits and lifeboat lips get drunk and bitch about each other. It’s all so fucking fake.

It’s also because humans are simple creatures. We think we are the pinnacle of intelligence in the universe, but in reality, we are being manipulated very easily now. Go out to your local shopping centre and watch everyone with their stooped necks glaring at their phones, and you will see why you can’t sell books by being authentic.

Besides, even if you do write truly mainstream fiction about a man trying to solve the mystery of why his wife only wears green panties on a Thursday, the chances of you ‘making it’ are 460,000,000,000 to 1. No joke.

So give it all up. Give up trying to get the fancy life. Get comfortable among the pigs and the nettles and aim to be famous a hundred years after you die.

Find someone with syphilis who can load you up. Then retire to an isolated place among the wasps and write about the time you got molested by Uncle Paul in the garage after snooker practice in 1993.

But What About the Craft?

Don’t get me wrong. Through all of this, you still have to learn the craft of writing. Because, without being cliché, you can’t just build a house according to your whim. There are rules to follow, or it just doesn’t fucking work. So do yourself a favour and do a reputable writing course (at least one). Learn about sentence structure, grammar and story structure. You don’t have to be perfect. But it’s better if poor foundations don’t kill your interesting writing.

At the same time, don’t get caught up in what you have learned. To use another phat dicked cliché, learn it, then forget it.

In my book, The Edge of the Sun, I started with a tremendous structure with plot points and a mid-point and an inciting incident and all that crap. But when I started writing it, it just didn’t happen like that. As one reader/editor said, nothing happened for the first 75% of the book.

It’s true. It’s like a barrier that only allows the worthy to break through and understand what the book is about.

And sometimes that’s just how it is. It’s how it comes out.

But it’s good to know the rules so you can break them. And here, I’m referring to the rules of storytelling and communication, not the arbitrary rules imposed by the literati and their twenty-year-old influencer sycophants.

The main point I’m getting to here is that not one single decision you make about your book should be in service of selling books or getting signed by a publisher or literary agent. Every single decision should be in service of creating a beautiful piece of art that you are proud of.

Assume from the very beginning that no one will ever buy any of your books. Create it like you might decorate your lounge room—for your own pleasure and the pleasure of the odd guest that might drop in from time to time.

And that way, we can stop filling the world with the literary equivalent of horse gonads and start creating stuff that will nourish the mind of those few, in the future, who might, God bless them, choose to read rather than scroll.

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