“What’s truly good sells itself. You don’t need to advertise it.”
“Let me know when your book is out in print. I can’t read on those gadgets.”
“A book is only a real book if you can hold it in your hands and smell the pages.”
Well, then I’m not your person.
Especially not here at the end of 2025, when our computers keep getting smaller, our phones bigger, and my e-book reader lost all meaning about two years ago. Sure, I still own beautiful, colorful, scented books. But most of the time, I buy e-books myself. Why? Because the only time I can really read is on a plane. That’s when I “pack” two or three books for the round trip. In fact, the last time I traveled, I enjoyed my favorite novel, the one I also keep in print form, with my eyes closed, as an audiobook.
And let’s not even start on publishing. I’ll admit, I’ve never been particularly persistent there. For a long time, I only saw it as a form of advertising. On a single market. But with a paperback released in a small country, you don’t have much chance of reaching the rest of the world. Of course, someone might say again, “What’s truly good sells itself.”
But how am I supposed to show it to someone who lives thousands of miles away if I don’t put it in front of them? I can’t. And how do I put it in front of them? Well… with great difficulty. Especially when one might think, Perfect! I’ve written it, I’ll post it on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, and voilà — the whole world will see it. I mean, Uncle Larry got discovered on TikTok! His daughter uploaded the book he wrote about his overgrown toenails, and “the internet exploded.” That phrase makes me itch even more than hearing someone say, “Let me know when I can hold your book in my hands.”
As if you couldn’t hold an e-book in your hands.
And as if the internet could actually explode.
Twice a week, no less.
And what about the smell of books?
Sure, a new book smells amazing, I love that too.
But not everything that smells good is good. A man (or a woman, for that matter) can still be a jerk, no matter how nice they smell. Just because someone can afford an expensive perfume doesn’t mean they’re not a complete idiot. Which brings me back to one of those marketing lessons I’d long forgotten: good packaging.
So many promising covers have hidden truly unreadable crap inside!
Once, at a train station, I bought a book titled something like The Last Days of So-and-so.
I thought, Great, this will be interesting — after all, the destruction that man caused during his time as prime minister is still legendary. It wasn’t until I sat down on the train that I noticed the tiny subtitle underneath: As I Imagine Them.
So someone actually wrote an entire book imagining a politician’s final days in the hospital — complete with invented small talk between IV drips and night nurses. I still remember how angry I was. Partly because I suddenly had nothing to read, and partly because I had no idea where to hide that book from my fellow passengers so they wouldn’t think I was a total idiot.
What would I do today?
I’d just buy something online. Maybe even something juicy and erotic — no one would see what’s on my screen anyway. Back in the day, we had to hide cheesy romance paperbacks inside political or scientific magazines, and the porn mags went under the bed.
We forget how much freedom we actually have now, we’ve just gotten used to it.
I’ll grumble about it for a bit more, and then I’ll pull up all those lovely statistics and reports to calculate the perfect minute to post my next “spontaneous” update on every platform.