Self-Publishing Was Always the Point

Plan B was always the plan.

The first time someone called me a self-published author, they meant it as a diagnosis.

This was at a dinner party, the kind where someone asks what you do and then visibly recalibrates after you answer. A woman across the table: a reader, she’d told us proudly, tilted her head in the way people do when they’re being careful. “Oh,” she said. “So you couldn’t find a publisher?”

I had three novels and no good answer, so I ate my salmon and let it go.

That was three years ago. I’ve since made a separate peace with the label, though I arrived at it the wrong way: through the back door of personal essays rather than through the literary tradition that apparently justifies it.

Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass, then reviewed it himself under a pseudonym, which is either brazen self-promotion or the nineteenth century’s version of gaming the Amazon algorithm. Montaigne wrote ninety-four essays in a tower on his family estate, paid to have them printed, and handed a copy to the King of France. Neither man waited for permission. Both understood, before the word existed, that self-publishing was the natural home of anyone unwilling to write on someone else’s schedule toward someone else’s idea of the market.

I didn’t know any of this when I published my first novel. I self-published because the traditional route had closed, firmly and repeatedly. I had a book I believed in. I had a finite number of years left to be wrong about it.

Plan B, which is what I would eventually name my publishing company, tells you something about how well I was thinking it through.

What I understand now, fifty essays later, is that I had the categories backward.

The essays clarified it. Not because they’re more literary than the novels—they’re shorter and messier—but because they stripped away the last of my attachment to official channels. You write something on a Tuesday. You publish it on Thursday. Whoever shows up, shows up. No agent, no acquisitions meeting, no distributor policy. Just the work and the reader and nothing in between.

Montaigne had his tower. I have a desk and a Substack account. Same impulse, different century, and considerably better wifi. A person retreats, writes what he actually thinks, and releases it into the world on his own authority.

I thought about the woman at the dinner party recently. She wasn’t wrong. I couldn’t find a publisher. She was wrong about what that meant, which is a different thing entirely, and one I couldn’t have explained to her then.

I can now. Though I’d probably just eat my salmon again.

Some points take fifty essays to reach.

I named my publishing company Plan B. Make of that what you will.

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Leave a comment. Tell me I'm wrong. I've been told I take criticism well, which is technically true — I just don't act on it.