Nobody's Stopping You

Maybe you already know that, but it never hurts to say.

Jun 06, 2025

If you’re a writer or an artist, what are you trying to do?

Carry the carnival and expedition further from nonexistence? Inflict lasting damage upon the never-happened that goes on never happening all around us, swallowing boundless bizarre joys? Is it to defy the world, and to bring loved ones - alive and dead - along for the ride?

I just want to say that nobody’s stopping you.

There are many reasons to think otherwise. The world seems a certain way. But how things seem is a matter of debate in the court of your mind. And you’re the supreme judge and boss of your own mind. So I just want to be sure you know that no one is stopping you.

When it comes to recognition, money and applause, many people may be stopping you. There may be something inherent in the nature of human beings that will stop all of that. If you want to be something like a popular writer or a famous artist or a respected thinker, then go chug some briny advice elsewhere. But if you want to do those things, nobody’s stopping you.

Heaven Unbuilt

The other day, I self-published a three-pound book of poetry, with around six hundred poems and a hand-drawn cover. Maybe it’s strange, or megalomaniacal, or embarrassing or a poor use of time that could’ve been spent getting money. But nobody stopped me.

Poetry doesn’t sell. I learned this more than twenty years ago. Back then, it was harder. I had to do a print run of 500 to 1,000 copies and pay for shipping. Then I had to go around with boxes of books selling them hand-to-hand, or pay a distributor. I had friends to do it with then, starting with Danny Jock, a friend and illustrator I met at the New School back in the twentieth century.

Permission and forgery

The two of us were young, proud and often drunk. Was that enough permission? Almost. This was 2001. We set up something called Medium Rare Publishing, an imprint with an imaginary back catalogue including never-published titles like The Smartass & the Dumbass, and Pig’s Big Win.

The cover image for The Last Man on the Moon, and the first logo for Medium Rare Publishing, Danny Jock, 2001

At the time, it was a forged certificate of authenticity, as many colophons are. When people asked who published the book, we’d say Medium Rare Publishing, and if pressed by a seemingly hostile questioner on what that was, we could say a small, independent press in New York City. It was a thin veneer, and one we’d dispense with entirely in friendly circumstances. I don’t think it did much for us. We played to empty rooms, sold few books, lost money.

With a rotating cast of partners, we’d publish five other books and a CD, throw a dozen or so events, have a college intern, and even begin the process of becoming a 501c3. The big-picture plan was to publish a bunch of authors and wheedle our way into the favor-trading ecosystem of publishing, and thus to have careers. That was the plan, at least.

Air cover

Going out in public with your work is scary. “It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt,” as someone paraphrased the Proverb. But there you go, opening your mouth when no one asked you.

A publisher is one form of protection. In the days of Medium Rare Publishing, one of our authors appeared on the morning show of an NBC affiliate in Orange County, California, where the coiffed host of the show declared that the book was one of the most disturbing and disgusting things he had ever read. Our author was quick to deflect the criticism toward Medium Rare Publishing, and his editor by name. As the publisher and editor, I didn’t love being hung out to dry like that, but I understood that was part of the deal.

Medium Rare Publishing logo, circa 2003, Ben Gibson

Fiction & fraud

The last book Medium Rare Publishing considered doing was a novel of mine, The Last Bad Job. A profane, apocalyptic romp, I believed in its commercial prospects. When Norman Mailer read it and shared some kind words, I thought I was really on to something. I got an agent for the book, who I later discovered died about two weeks after we signed an agreement. At the time, all I knew was that the guy stopped answering emails and disconnected his phone.

So, I decided to publish the thing myself. But I’d made some bad financial decisions involving the Divisional round of the NFL playoffs, and taken a lower-paying job. The last book we’d done had cost around $3,200 in printing, shipping and warehousing. And I had no money.

One friend of mine, who was always flush with cash, recommended I apply for a credit card, but change one digit of my Social Security Number. The same trick had served him well over the years. I figured I could pull the same stunt and pay back the credit cards with the towering profits of my novel. By then, though, the lenders were wising up, and I never got the credit I needed.

Instead, I got a Capital One card with a $200 limit that charged me $90 every time I went a dollar over. It could’ve been worse. My buddy with the clever trick wasn’t allowed to have a bank account for a few years.

A bad fact

Medium Rare Publishing faded away in 2007, with some hurt feelings and a handful of regrets. It could’ve been worse. We were ambitious young men, fighting over nonexistent laurels and gold, losing money and going nowhere. The experience made me not want to be a publisher, even in name only.

We all live in the shadow of the terrible truth that it’s hard as hell to get anyone to give you their money. Publishers live with the truth that it’s possibly even harder to get someone to give you their money in exchange for a book. So hard. When you meet someone in publishing and mention that you’re a writer, that immense difficulty is one reason for the wince in their smile, and for the tiny step they take back.

I wanted to relegate that second fact to the professionals. So I wrote more novels, scripts and so forth, and pursued literary agents, with little luck. There was other luck, though. I got married in 2010.

POD days

In 2011, I learned how self-publishing worked on Amazon - no money down, print-on-demand, big margins on e-books, wide distribution through a trusted and familiar retailer. A way better deal than before. And by then, I was at the end of my tether with query letters, partial manuscripts and form rejections. I had a book I felt strongly about. I had to go out and face the music again. After all, no one was stopping me.

Those years of ebook self-publishing were a bit like Substack is now - a few dozen people making really big money, one or two outsiders breaking through, a bunch of opportunists selling bogus advice, thousands of writers not making really any money, and a swelling shadow economy of chicanery and fraud.

A flicker of pulp

Starting in the summer of 2011, I self-published the novel I felt strongly belonged in the world, Another Broken Wizard, followed by the one I’d written before it.

The next year, I published The Last Bad Job under the banner of Royal Pulp - a new imprint I created. The aim was for it to be a fig-leaf for the profane, apocalyptic romp - something along the lines of, see, it may be crazy, but someone published it. I talked a friend of mine into publishing his zombie-detective novel alongside it to give the roster more heft, and held out hope that someone else would join our ranks. No one ever did, and I no longer had the energy to say Royal Pulp was, a small independent press in New York City, except to lie on grant applications.

Royal Pulp had a cool logo by the standards of 2012, though axes have since become de rigueur. Royal Pulp also had fictional publicist Marvin Biedecker working on our behalf from an imposing gmail account.

Royal Pulp Logo, Silas Reeves, 2012

Note of caution

Maybe you can do whatever you want. But you can’t also expect people to say thanks. Here lies the pain and absurdity of the book tour, which can feel like a campaign to exact gratitude from an unsuspecting public.

Having a book deal at least camouflages it as someone else’s commercial venture. And while being a commercial emissary on behalf of Robot Nipple Press is totally fine, while putting yourself on the line all by yourself for an artistic work you alone deeply believe in, on the other hand, is highly suspect.

Shyness

If things didn’t work out great, it wasn’t because I was a shrinking violet. Like a fat guy at a carnival High Striker, I never shied from grabbing the mallet, ignoring the cost, and finding out if I might not just be the right person at the right moment to take a real whack at the meaning of life.

When I was nineteen, washing dishes on a late shift at a diner in Worcester, a drunk psychology professor from Clark University once said to me, you probably think you have some kind of inside track on reality. And he was right, I did.

Analyses & accusations

When I read essays by authors now, I see men and women pressed to the limits of their morality, sympathy and imagination to understand why things have worked out so poorly for them, and often failing.

Every failure is unique, like a fingerprint. Watching a video of my younger self, it seems obvious now what went wrong. Everyone said the same thing to me - professors, pizza guys and cops - take it easy, they said.

Who even does this?

Once in a while, I’ll read a really good novel. But a lot of what I pick up is time-wasting, trend-spotting, scenery-chewing, fake-scandalizing, research-boasting noise.

Then again, what can you expect from anyone who would choose to be a novelist? What tremendous insight might such a cultural dead-ender possess? This is the real problem with fiction in the world, or the real problem with the world, or both.

For the non-novelists out there, imagine sitting down and writing about someone who never lived. The odds of anyone reading it, then enjoying it, then paying you for it have always been vanishingly small, and have only shrunk over the last 25 years. In an age where great fortunes are built on less outrageous - but quite different - fabrications, this isn’t a smart way to get money or power or esteem.

This rather common perception is one reason that nobody’s stopping you.

Rewards

The problem with writing, as I see it, is not that there are too few rewards, but the few rewards that remain. The fewer they become, the more they distort the entire endeavor.

Back when I was a poet, I remember the climbers in those scenes, and they always gave me the creeps. The slick dudes and the pretty girls, manipulating people into praising their work. What’s the value of the praise if you know you’re manipulating them?

Fiction’s not so different. We blurb each other's books. Tell me again how great my book was, but don't worry, you're next. As if the praise will fool enough readers to pay a single phone bill. Nearly every single writer has a day job or a trust fund or a hardworking spouse. It's like cosplay, but instead of pretending you're a wizard or a Wookiee, you pretend you're a participant in a functioning civilization.

Who’s really stopping you

In some circles, I’ve become a minor expert on the mechanics and processes of self-publishing. I made money from this once upon a time, and I’d hear from writers and would-be writers.

One writer, a middle-aged professional in the suburbs of a major city, called to see what it would take to make his nonfiction book a published reality - the editing, cover design, printing and publicity. Would twenty thousand be enough?

I asked if he thought the book was something he’d want out in the world with his name on it. We agreed to talk again at some point in the future, and never did.

Striking the rock

I’ve had a good decade or two in terms of inspiration, focus and follow-through. But it doesn’t come easy, exactly. I get between projects, and I get moody. I had one of these prolonged periods over the winter. I was restless to start on another project. It was weighing on me. I was hesitating, wondering if I had the right idea or not.

One night, I read my kids a few stories from this book of bible stories for kids, and it mentioned Moses - how he had to strike a rock to get water to flow from it. What a strange anecdote. And there it was. I had to strike. Once I did, nobody was stopping me.

How it looks

When you have a big book deal and a big publisher, you look good. You can sally forth in the public eye with a victory under your belt. Exposing yourself under lesser auspices can seem intolerable, especially to a writer.

The result is many careerists, not so many careers. There’s an obsession with the status-granting institutions, and less on what’s possible, what’s new.

Embarrassment can stop you cold. Like all social media, even Substack can feel like the kind of place where an old acquaintance can't hide their disappointment that you're there too. How’d precious you and precious me wind up on the dirty dollar shelves of off-kilter vegetables beside the produce stand?

In the money mills

Until the King of Sweden hangs the gold medal on your neck, there are bad afternoons. The day job drags on, or goes badly. The worst part is where you’re just supposed to sit there and pretend precious nothing is going on behind your eyes.

My kids have bad afternoons, and they’re still young enough that those are my fault, too. After all, they were my idea, as I’m sure they’ll soon learn to inform me. It’s never easy, and writing doesn’t always make it easier. But writing sometimes does things that are infinitely more important than making things easier.

Nobody

If you’re a writer or an artist, what are you trying to say?

There’s a lot of talk floating around - a ton of it. What will I say? A joke is a risk, a statement is a wager.

I’ve always been partial to the long shot. Or maybe I’ve always chosen the kinds of games where I’m losing by a lot, with time running out. But nobody’s stopping me.

Buy me a coffee!

Share No Homework