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.