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After what seems like a lifetime of saying I’ll get round to publishing it, I did it, Allegorically Speaking is now widely available to all on two of the biggest platforms for reading books and also right here on 0800YOFAM.com/shop.
What took so long fam?
Well in all the years of writing what was to become some form of chronological journal of allegory, I managed to compile it but hadn’t ever gone through and read it. I had a go at editing in sometime in 2013 but that shit was still fresh and I guess I wasn’t ready to dive in without catching feelings of despair and maaaad cringe. That’s not to say that I didn’t love and appreciate it when I was writing but I guess back then I wasn’t ready to revisit of come face to face with just how dark and vulnerable those times were for me mentally whether I was aware of it at the time of not. Also technology wasn’t on my side, there wasn’t a straight forward way to publish a book electronically on my own terms. In 2012 technology wasn’t as accessible as it is now and if you wanted to release something you’d have to go to the expense of going physical or paying a bunch of nerds to convert your .doc or .pdf into a reflowable ePub format, or buy some maaaad expensive software that was so convoluted to get your head around to do it for you.
What’s different nowadays?
Well at some point there was an update to Pages which allowed me to export an EPUB straight to the iBooks store without using iBooks author, which didn’t offer a reflowable option. Also prior to the update which brought the ideal solution with it, I went through the eternal abyss of Scrivener and Storyist where there were so much features that I didn’t need, and also found to be MEGA confusing as their features crowded the interface. If I were a traditional writer who studied the trade rather than write from inspiration and just wanted to focus on getting what was in my mind out onto the page, then I’d probably utilise the tools for planning a story, but when my new portable arrived I went on a mission to bring everything into pages.
Still seems a bit random don’t you think?
I can’t lie, these uploads started as a test or perhaps it could’ve been doing some reflection post reading chapter one of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, which reminded me of the fact that I used her book No Logo as a point of reference for my dissertation which led to me going on a hunt to find my dissertation, add some meta data and a table of contents before thinking ‘fuck it’, i’m going to upload it to iBooks and sell it. Within 24hrs my dissertation, The Deification of Popular Culture: The Cult of Personality, was available on iBooks and Amazon Kindle stores however I still hadn’t cracked the code of selling my books digitally on 0800YOFAM.com.
So you went down a rabbit hole of optimising your website?
I definitely did. You have to understand that it was something I had been putting for quite some time, mainly because I didn’t think I had any product or better yet, I always had a product but just didn’t commodify or apply the thinking that there’s a billion ways to skin a cat and I just need to think outside the box. Maybe if I had brainstormed and planned everything out, I may have come to that conclusion much earlier but hey it is what it is. I programmed everything from analytics, to how to take payments properly and deliver files for a unique one time use download, even doing a mailing list in the process. These were all things that I should of got round to but didn’t for some reason or other -time maybe?
What’s the plan for rolling it out?
There’s no plan, the book has already been released and my next steps are to release some of the recorded readings. The criteria behind the choices I’ve made in regards to which ones I deemed worthy of recording were based upon how profound and relevant to a variety of circumstances. I’d say I picked the most moving ones.
Where can we purchase them from?
0800YOFAM | iBooks | Amazon Kindle
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