One of the local cafes where I hang out for my morning writing sesh is solid at promoting artists from the neighbourhood.
I was ordering my tea and standing beside the cash register were a couple stacks of self-published books for sale, local poets mostly from what I could tell, who had hung out their work with a little sign and a price tag and basically said, hey, “I wrote this… and I live in your community.”
Maybe that’s my next step, but I will say that it inspired me to do something similar: set up a book stand on my website and offer these words for sale.
I know I’m going to come across like a bit of self-promotion here, but I think it’s more than that: I’ve been writing away in obscurity for literal decades while simultaneously fearing the big dangling blade of traditional publishing.
The internet, for all as much as it has sunk into a kind of slop warehouse of inane content, is still filled with more great indie content than I will ever be able to consume in my life. It’s much harder to find in 2026, but it’s there. I’m certain of it.
My effort at the cafe book drop then comes in the form of code: I whipped up some custom software to convert all these hundreds of posts into something that very much resembles an ebook—and then I dropped it into a page where people might see it there and buy a copy as they are passing through, as much as me saying, hey I wrote this… and I live in your internet community.
I know it takes guts to put words into something quasi-permanent and then ask someone to pay you for them. I know, because I have spent a long time not having such guts.
But maybe as I get older and give a few less fucks about the people distracted by fashion reels and shiny influencer slop, those guts are a bit easier to come by.
Terms FROm this POSt
- cafe
- Chances are the words you are reading were written in a small local cafe on a quiet morning with a hot cup of tea at my side. The places we work and create have a huge influence on what emerges.
- community
- It comes in many forms, but I like to think of community as something deeper than just social connection: in the artistic sense, those people are around you to support, inspire, and honestly critique.
- indie
- Shorthand for independent with a slightly more specific meaning, it usually refers to artistic expression that comes from emerging artists or artists who are decoupled from corporate ownership. It has nothing to do with scale or popularity, but rather maybe more a bit of the purpose behind the work.
- influencer
- I think people assume because I post online so much that I’m trying to become an influencer, by which I mean the type of person who creates waves of content with the intentionality of making a living from being a kind of quasi advertising personality. I’m not that. I create because I enjoy it, crave it, live for it… and if people happen to read it, cool.
- slop
- Maybe I’m just leaning into it, but it seems like this has become the de facto term to describe anything generated by an algorithm coupled with the soulless pursuit of creating for-profit content. Artificial intelligence is a complex technology with many positive uses, but making inhuman replacements for human expression is not one of those.
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