Is there a good strategy for someone who self-publishes on Amazon

If it's any good it will attract attention

If you're doing it for the attention it is never going to be good

>>8752252
>If you're doing it for the attention it is never going to be good

I have been writing for more than 14 years now. I do it because it is the only thing that really makes me feel I am doing something worthy with my life. When I lay down in bed at night and start to think about who I am it is a refreshing thought to remember that I am trying to create some form of artificial-beauty to make the world a little better.

I don’t want attention simply for the sake of attention. What I want are readers, and especially their opinions. I want to know what people think of my work. Right now I feel that I am sculpting marble statues on a desert island and that no eye will ever contemplate them: is as if they still exist only inside my brain, and not on the physical world.

>>8752252
>If it's any good it will attract attention

I wish I were so optimistic about the rewards of truly significant art.

>>8752314
If it's amazing, you'll probably get noticed eventually.

However, if your writing is still clumsy and you want advice, try contacting publishers. If they see potential, they might help you, if not you'll probably still get advice. Other than that, you'd be surprised how college teachers or writers can be helpful. Try getting in touch with one or two.

Also, if you want, you can share a few paragraphs of your writing; I have a good sense when it comes to judge the potential or lack thereof in young writers.

>>8752245
my approach would be starting up a website and asking for donations. I am that confident in my abilities.

seems like a good way to set yourself apart from the thousands who peddle their mediocre stories

>>8752376

Well, if you don’t mind I will love to have the opportunity to show my work. I have already got some good criticism on /lit/ but it has been some time since I don’t post anymore. I was feeling very disappointed with myself lately and my productivity was low.

I must say, however, that English is not my first language. The original material is written in Portuguese. I was planning on publishing it on the Amazon of Brazil. Also, it is not a novel, but a play. I have used Shakespeare’s tragedies as models. It is set on the medieval Japan, when a number of war-clans were fighting for power, and it presents the main leaders of the Oda, Tokugawa and Takeda clans. I think that part of my fear is related to my knowing that I am probably writing in a semi-dead genre.

You can take your time to give advice and can be brutally honest. I really don’t get offended when people point out defects on my writing. I myself am usually so disgusted and nervous with my results that bad critical opinions are not a surprise.

I will post some translations that I myself made. I apologize if you have read them before on /lit/:

>>8752416

FIRST GENERAL: I have here with me letters that are still wet,
Letters from spies that I have sent to the coastal
Cities that report seaquakes and maritime pandemonium,
Gigantic waves and earth tremors.
They say that the salty fertility
Of the sea has frown into a broth of hate, heartburn
And convulsions, that the mating of the waters and the wind
Have shouted a brood of titanic
Leviathans, riding mountains
Whose crests of foam bite the clouds,
As if they desired to disembowel them
To gain access to the orchard of candles of the stars
And drain them as if they were gleaming candies,
Sucking the honey and the silver sugar
Of light, silencing the fire and condemning
The whole world to eternal night. Against the coast
The typhoons have spurred their green steeds,
Colossal hippocampi roaring tsunamis.
The letters say that the elderly that in fisher
Villages and harbor cities
Have live for their entire lives have never seen
The sea throw himself with such bestial fury
Against the seashore, against the rocks, cliffs and beaches;
That never so many seaweeds, so much foam,
So much rheum and bile of the abysses
The waters have vomited thorough the coast.
It is as if the ocean desired
To devour all Japan, disintegrating
With salty saliva and foaming
Mastication the rocky vertebras
Of the archipelago where the sun has his nest.

SECOND GENERAL: I have heard similar news: panic
Spreads across many areas of the nation.
Nature and chaos have copulated:
Thus it is croaked across the villages
By old man, homeless, lunatics and prophets
(Those people that, in the art of injecting wisdom,
Contorted logic and illuminated insanity
With wild words that bite us
Are usually brothers). Some fanatics
Say that Japan, rotten and corrupted,
Like a giant corpse, will wreck
In the ocean, and our beloved earth
Will not see the crystalline cheeks,
The violet face and the smiling
Gaze of the serene skies ever again.
Temples, castles, towers and palaces,
The marmoreal beehive and the stony gardens
Of civilization will all dissolve
In slime, the heavenly vault and the winds –
A farrow of acrobatic foxes
Of breeze – in perpetual solitude, silence
And night will freeze,
And all of our clans, the empire, the sun
Will, in the desert country of the shells,
Anchor in collapse and oblivion.

>>8752420

KUMORI: My delights are now all dead.
My grape-bunch of tomorrows, my suns yet
Unborn, they are already all abortions
Of boredom, anxiety and violence,
An eternity of slaughtering and mold
In the bloody womb of the future:
My horizon hibernates in rotten wine.
From wreck to wrack I drag my creeping spirit,
I force my moldy carcass to chew
Every minute and to ignore the heartburn of existence.
I wander in an anemic desert
And endless procession of rachitic suns.
Time coagulates in a dimmish
Wandering of corpses: my apathetic days,
For dead days do hatch dead days,
And dead days do hatch dead days,
In an endless march in which fresh tortures,
Still hot and sweating blood and pus
(The warm dew that raw flesh cries)
Walk upon the fossils of ancient agonies
Of the past, ancestor pains, and this big and rotten open
Pustule that is my kingdom never silences
Its bloody canticle, that will continue to flow
And gush, echoing horrors, until the breaking of the misterious
Hourglass that we know by the name of time.
My life is also my prison; breathing is an incarceration of the mind;
To get up from the bed is a torture:
The gummy and blear light of dawn invades me
With nausea, to the point that I want
The night to crown herself eternal crown and that the sun,
With his smile, no longer erode the darkness,
But that the blanket of the dark drown all humanity
And that all bud-button of life
Would be suffocated in silence. Life, what is life?
Life is a brief dream and dirty shadow,
A nightmare that creates flesh and, for
A grain of dust and ephemeral spark
Of time, shrieks, howls and contorts
In the polluted stage of existence
Until a single blow do solve it in smoke:
The breath of dying do melt the flame
And all that remains, sited on top of the candle-wick, is an eclipse.
Life is a disease that stings
The coarse scarecrow of inanimate
Matter and makes its aware of itself, makes it notice
The very absurdity and meaninglessness of its own existence;
It is a lightning roaring the fleeting
Rumble and chaos of its voice and then dives
Again in the eternal swamp of darkness
And infinite silence of emptiness;
It's a frantic spark and confused torch,
A chimpanzee modeled in fatuous fire,
Stranded and lost in a dark jungle, that reabsorbs him again
Even before the poor beast invents
Any form of sense to the sudden flash
Of being, his existence: the soap-bubble
Caravel that, without any destination or port,
Navigates through a sea off savourless mists;
A ship of nothing, that nothing has conceived
And that, after floating for a few seconds, will drown in nothingness.

>>8752422

KUMORI: I just wanted to tell you that the thing
That discolor, fades and dilutes your beauty -
Maybe not even in the eyes of the world, but only
In your own mind - is sadness.
There is an animal whose beauty
It as legendary as he is elusive:
The snow leopard of Nepal.
He is a palpable specter with moonlight colored
Pelage, a ghost knitted
With wool of snow and fog. It is the flesh
Diamond of the mountains; the heart
And organic entity of the glaciers;
The elusive faun of the aerial gardens
Of the Himalayas; lord of inaccessible
Rocky vegetable-gardens and pale orchards;
King of the white grasslands; indomitable feline.
Hypnotized by such majesty
The stars did cuddle and caress the cat
And on his fur the galaxies stamped
The cold digital of the unreachable
Fires that look to us from the abysses.
Winds pollinated by the dust
Of Ice tempered and seasoned his lungs
With crystal spores; the alpine breath
Bit his blood and inoculated blizzards
In the silver of his powerful muscles.
That is the glory described by those
Who saw the animal in the wild,
That in his own habitat and niche have peeped and observed him.
When I was a child I also saw him,
But he was imprisoned and collared:
Some rascal dragged him from town
To town, exposing him for coins.
A sad an crestfallen pussycat: that is what I saw:
Thin, bald, dirty, with his ribs
On display, an inn and tavern for fleas,
An isle of flies, a wreck - the shadow
Of the carnivorous sapphire that reigns
Upon the peaks of the Himalayas. The captivity
Has corroded him in a scabby and mangy ruin,
But such fragment, could he be returned
To the mountains, would flourish
Again in baron and lord of the eternal winter.
You do not recognize the miraculous
Beauty that you possess, princess, because
You are also imprisoned, and the prison that crushes you
It is the darkest and deepest in the whole world:
Depression, the supreme dungeon,
The sepulcher of sepulchers. Even having
The entire planet as a privative garden
In our own skull we have the cage
If we are depressed: we carry
Everywhere our grids
And the currents wrapped around our veins.
The sadness and the suffering for your sick
Husband are the ropes and muzzles
That silence part of you,
But even so you are capable of tearing up the mist
That wants to choke your beauty,
For there is no cloud that suffocates the sun
Or fog that can completely lock
The ocean of light that the star sings,
The eternal glittering of his chirps.

>>8752427

This is from the play that I am writing. The characters that are speaking are demonic ghosts, and they are taking pleasure in nothing that a gigantic storm is going to strike the land and kill several people. They’re verses, in the Portuguese original, are all rhymed couplets, like: AA, BB, CC, DD, etc.

Sorry for the bad translation, and once again: original is in Portuguese, and rhymed.

Ghost of a Girl (To the ghost of the bloody young woman): And you, my sister, and you: where were you?

Ghost of bloody young woman: Walking inside the clouds of the tempest,
Upon the mists and the dark of the scabby
Storm that invades the heavens with gall.
This sky-coma eats with its muddy veils
The galaxies: the brain of heaven;
Nightmares grease with oily demons
The infinite and the stars, their neurons.

Ghost of a Girl: And she will give birth, she will give birth?

Ghost of bloody young woman: Yes. I wandered inside it’s collied placenta
And I saw that she was pregnant with pepper:
The embryos of the thunder narrated to me,
The tadpoles of lightning told me
That future days will create claws and teeth:
They will be panthers roaring shooting torches;
Suns of petroleum will wander in the winds,
The clouds will have typhoons as offspring,
The thunders will swoop (blond hawks),
Cumulus will rip shatter their lungs
And crush the vitreous grapes of their alveoli
In a wine made of hail, ice and rain.
The nights will scream like owls,
And the cold mists, dirty-water wandering fairies,
Will step the dusty roads in muddy swamps;
The pastures and the grass will dissolve in mucus
And, as dead and moldy wood-trunks,
The cattle, marooned and wet, will be devoured
By termites, bed-bugs and beetles.
The chaos will lay the eggs of its vile treasures:
The atmosphere will be invaded by a fiery hornet's nest,
The soil by slime, snow and mist.
The flu and cough will gnaw the chests,
The fever will hover like fog over the beds.
Rain, winds, lightning, tornadoes,
They will prey upon woods, meadows and villages:
Death will establish its empire upon Earth
And cloud the land under a snowy cemetery
As the spider, that in a white and silent end,
Drowns the moth within its satin cloth.

>>8752434

This is the song that a drowned entity chants in a play that I am writing. These are ghosts, kind like the witches in Macbeth: there are a few of them, one of them a drowned man (or demon). When one of the creatures ask him were he were he sings this song as an answer. The original is in Portuguese (I will post it in a second post).


Thorough lakes and through rivers, on the sea, on the abyss,
In the steppes of slime and pitch I wandered,
Under shrouds of salt, under liquid thunders:
Worlds where light never stepped I stepped.

Ghosts of babies I found crying in the lakes:
They're mothers have drowned them in perpetual cold;
For affection and warmth they are claiming for centuries,
But in vain: not even they're mothers love them.

The specters of raped girls
I saw on the rivers, slime is now they're sepulture;
They died for the hunger of some knave,
And the water consecrate them in mermaids of bitterness.

A green tiger is the sea, sweating foam,
Getting fatter with the winds, roaring waves;
Boats are fleas that pollute his back;
His hurricanes clean him of such wounds.

Man is the caviar of the shark,
And the mariners are the spawn of the ships;
They're crying involves the sea with mist, the choir
Of the Golgotha of masts lost in the emptiness.

The abyss his on abysses have, nights on the night:
There the Kraken waltz, the Leviathan dances;
There they breast-feed the whales, their calves;
They are kings of chaos, they are the angels of Satan.

Like anchors the human spirit languishes:
It marches from the sun into the cold den of the ocean.

The original Portuguese version. The rhymes are xAxA, xBxB, xCxC, etc: only the second and fourth verses rhyme.

It ends with a coda of rhyming verses.

Por lagos e por rios, no mar, no abismo,
Nas estepes de limo e breu vaguei,
Sob sudários de sal, sob trovões líquidos:
Mundos que a luz jamais pisou pisei.

Fantasmas de bebês choram nos lagos:
Em frio perpétuo as mães os afogaram;
Por carinho e calor clamam a séculos,
Em vão: as próprias mães não os amaram.

Espectros de meninas estupradas
Vi nos rios, lodo é sua sepultura;
Morreram para a fome de algum biltre,
E a água as sagrou sereias de amargura.

Um tigre verde é o mar, suando espuma,
Com ventos engordando, a rugir vagas;
Barcos são pulgas que poluem seu lombo;
Seus furacões o limpam de tais chagas.

O homem é o caviar do tubarão,
E os marinheiros ovas dos navios;
Seu choro envolve o mar em névoa, o coro
Do gólgota dos mastros no vazio.

O abismo abismos tem, noite na noite:
Lá baila o Kraken, dança o Leviatã;
Amamentam baleias, seus bezerros;
São reis do caos, são anjos de Satã.

Qual âncora definha o espírito humano:
Marcha do sol rumo ao covil frio do oceano.

>>8752434
Can you post the first part in Portuguese?
I'm Brazilian.

>>8752437

Yes. Thank you for the read.

Menina: (Para a jovem ensanguentada)E tu, minha irmã, e tu: onde tu estavas?

Jovem Ensangüentada: Caminhando nas nuvens da tormenta,
Entre as névoas e as trevas da sarnenta
Tempestade que os céus, com fel, invade.
Seu coma come com lodosos véus
As galáxias, o cérebro dos céus;
Pesadelos engraxam com demônios
O infinito e as estrelas, seus neurônios.

Menina: E ela vai parir, ela vai parir?

Jovem Ensanguentada: Sim. Vaguei dentro da escura placenta
E vi que estava prenha de pimenta:
Embriões de trovões a mim narraram,
Os girinos dos raios me contaram
Que os dias vão criar garras e dentes,
Panteras a rugir tochas cadentes;
Sóis de petróleo vão vagar nos ventos,
Nuvens terão tufões como rebentos;
Trovões vão mergulhar (loiros falcões);
Cúmulos vão rasgar os seus pulmões,
E esmagar seus alvéolos, vítreas uvas,
Num vinho de granizo, gelo e chuvas.
As noites vão gritar como as corujas
E as frias névoas, ninfas de águas sujas,
O pó da estrada vão pisar em lama.
Em muco irá solver-se o pasto e a grama,
E, como troncos mortos e mofados,
Os bois, ilhados, vão ser devorados
Por cupins, percevejos e besouros.
O caos vai desovar seus vis tesouros:
Na atmosfera o incêndio de um vespeiro,
No solo o lodo, a neve e o nevoeiro.
A gripe e a tosse vão roer os peitos,
A febre há de pairar por sobre os leitos.
Chuva, ventos, relâmpagos, tornados,
Vão tomar bosques, prados, povoados:
A morte há de instaurar na Terra império
E a nublar num nevado cemitério,
Como a aranha que, em branco e mudo fim,
Afoga a mariposa com cetim.

>>8752435
This part seems like a poem Cláudio Manoel da Costa could've written if he was of a darker character.

>>8752449
It's good, but I wouldn't expect a lot of success because not everyone has the stomach for it, and it seems quite a complex narrative.

You could say in your marketing that you're reviving a classic style of writing.

>>8752473

Yeah, you are right. In part it is my own fault for choosing an old history for plot and indulging in too long speeches. I plan to correct this errors in the future.
For my next tragedy I plan to use Citizen Kane as a model. The main character would be a giant of the newspapers, of TV and internet communication who starts with god ideals of denouncing the ills of society but ends up movimenting his huge machine only to obtain more power and destroy people who oppose his will.
I will use the obnoxious figure of Roberto Marinho, the owner of Rede Globo (the most powerful communication network of Brazil) as my main source.

>>8752493
But then you wouldn't even need to make a fiction book, just do a biography on him and change the characters' names. Kek.

>>8752516

You got me ;)

The only thing I would like to make is to use the Kane plot-line where he is so intoxicated by his own pride that he tries to run for presidency. Marinho never tried that.

There is also the fact that Kane starts with some social ideals and some dignity, while Marinho was, from the start, an ass-liker of the rich and powerful (one simply needs to see how much Globo grew under the wings of the military regime).

I dont think that self publishing is a good way to get read. It seems to me that the exposure and advertisement that a publishing house offer is extremely helpful.