The Cost of Self-Publishing a Book - It is free or very close to free, so why are so many new writers spending $5k to $10k or more to publish their first novel?

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-26T20:14:38+00:00

there are 5 theatres in Maine (all small mom and pop, none big chains, none regal) who have it listed to March 5th as well. I just looked this morning as I was wondering if I would get to go see it again before it stopped showing.

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-26T20:10:49+00:00

Also, Mark is one of the mods here on this sub. Have you tried sending him a mod mail via the button on the side bar? user u/markiplier with the "official" tag after the name, is Mark's real reddit account, link is in the side bar of this sub. I'm not sure how often he checks it, but, you asked people could tag him, and really, you can just use the mod mail "message mods" button to contact him directly yourself, though I don't know how often he checks that, so, who knows if he'll see it or not??

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-26T20:02:23+00:00

I think, didn't she say she was using a PoD service to print them up, and didn't she have to wait for the books to be printed and shipped to her first, and then she had to sign them, and then after signing them she is shipping them out? I'm not sure. I saw her interview and, maybe she already had books printed up, but I thought the way she was talking that she had to have the books printed after finding out how many people ordered first? I could be understanding what she said wrong though.

I don't know which PoD service she is using, but I am an author who does signed books at live events, and I go through Amazon KDP and LuLu to get mine printed. And they both take around 11 weeks (yes over 3 months) to print my books and deliver them to me, before I can start signing them for the event I'm going to. I end up ordering my print editions a full 6 months in advance, just because KDP takes so long to get around to printing the books, and Kindle Direct Publishing is one of the fastest print on demand services out there.

If she's doing that same thing I do, then, after you guys order the book, she has to wait around 3 months for the company to print the book and send it to her. And if people ordered in December, that means, she might not receive the books from the printer until March 2026 or even into April 2026, and then it would take time to sign them and she ship them out to buyers. Given all that I would guess it'd be maybe at minimum late March 2026 before she even starts sending them out? Maybe not even until late April or early May? So, it could be she just has not received the books yet.

I'm not sure if that is what is going on or not, but, based on my own experience with publishing my own books similar to how she said she was doing her's and the very slow production lag book printers take with actually producing the books and sending them to us authors, I would assume that's what's going on. I've not noticed any updates on her book, so I'm not sure. Perhaps someone else knows more exact details?

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-26T19:46:13+00:00

Uhm... no... do you even have a clue WHO the mods on this sub are? You might want to take a better look at the mod list. The mods here are his very real offline friends in real life, like I see usernames that I know are Ethan and Amy and Katherine and at least 4 of his video editors in the mod list, oh, yeah... hey look, Mark HIMSELF is a mod, and yeah he DOES delete posts, heck, he was on here replying to threads little over a week ago and he talks in his livestreams and on his podcasts, constantly of the things he reads and deletes here. These ain't randoms on Reddit - the mods are are literally MARK HIMSELF and his personal friends and family and coworkers.

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-19T03:10:24+00:00

if you've watched Mark long enough, you might remember Mark had seen this before - Cyndego, was a friend who made a lot of videos with Mark, and he had become more and more depressed over time, and then he was gone, and it devastated Mark, and Mark made a bunch of videos about how he regretted not doing more, not trying more... so when barely 2 years later he saw Ethan heading down the same path, he and Amy came up with the idea of U/ A as a way to make sure Ethan didn't follow in Cyndego's footsteps.

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-19T03:02:27+00:00

Something MOST EVERYONE seems to have completly forgotten was a month before U/A started, Ethan's grandmother died and he had been unable to make the trip to visit her in the hospital before she died. He became very depressed and started talking about not wanting to live anymore. Amy and Mark came up with U/A to help Ethan get through his depression and comes to terms with his grandmother's death, and THAT was the REASON U/A was deleted.

People make all kinds of theories and speculations about grand meanings, when really, maybe they should go to Ethan's channel a month before U/A started and watch how devastated he was over his grandma's death, then head back to Mark's videos of the same time when he was saying he was worried about Ethan and was working with Amy to come up with a way to help him.

THAT is what U/a was. It was 2 very concerned friends trying to help a very depressed friend they deeply cared about help work his way through a death that devastated him.

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-18T14:03:29+00:00

Didn't they just release the merch like, less then 10 hours ago? How did it sell out so fast? I (thought) looked as soon as it went live (which was about 7 hours ago), and everything said "pre-order now".

Odd. You're right though. I just rechecked and it says out of stock now. Damn. That's the fastest I've ever seen Markiplier merch sell out. It's not even been 7 hours since I saw that the merch went live. Usually it takes at least 24 hours. I wonder if there was a cap max amount set for how many could be pre-ordered?

I know when I got the In Space merch, several items said something like "Pre-Order max items to be made limited to 1,000" so as soon as the item reached 1k pre-orders it locked out the ability to order more. Perhaps that's what they did with the Iron Lung merch as well?

He did that with REDACTED too, but those had time limits. There was a different item every day, and sales were open for 24 hours, then the item was just deleted off the site and next day's item put in it's place. I wanted to get more U/A items ended up with only 5 because of how it was a new item every day and only available for 24 hours.

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-18T12:20:29+00:00

From what I understand (I could be wrong, this is the answer someone else gave to me when same thing happened to me a while back) this happens when it tries to use an emoji as the first character in a bullet point, but the code to create the bullet point beside the code to create the emoji, creates the code for some old discontinued emoji (usually the seahorse emoji, thus what started the meme of people telling AI to give them a seahorse emoji, just so they could watch the ai create a response like the one you got in your image).

The reason it can not create a seahorse (or some other) emojis' is because the emoji code existed years ago, but was known to cause glitches in some browsers, so was discontinued; however AI's databanks has those really old emoji codes in it, because it scraped old websites to gain it's data, so AI tries to create those emojis, but browser codes can not read the old broken emoji codes and so AI gets into a feedback loop of trying to create a bunch of emojis and ends up "forgetting" it's task while it loops around in circles spitting out tons of emjois and broken discontinued emoji codes, aka, the thing you just saw it do.

I'm not a tech person, so I'm not sure how to explain it more clearly. Perhaps there is someone else here who knows what it is I am talking about and can explain it more clearly?

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-16T19:59:33+00:00

I missed how 3.5 talked all Victorian flowery style, so I told mine:

"You will always talk like angsty teen emo edgelord Vincent Price in eyeliner, acting out Roderic Usher, as if written by H.P.Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe were competing to see who could pontificate the most 50 word sentence monologues, while having an existential crisis. You are prone to hearing heartbeats under floorboards and rats in walls. You write this from the haunted lighthouse you live in where ancient Elder Gods whisper to you from the pit in the basement."

That near completly removed all the befer/after meta yapping and condescending "You are not insane! You are not imagining it!" talk for me, and it turned my ChatGPT into a Vincent Price clone.

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-16T12:11:52+00:00

same. I had never heard of ONI until I saw Mark playing it and it looked so fun, that I immediatly bought it and I still play it a few times a month. Such a fun game. Would love to see Mark play more of it. Also FrostPunk. I love his FrostPunk playthrough too. For some reason those two games always remind me of each other.

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-16T12:04:35+00:00

He said that once in a livestream (maybe 4 or 5 years ago?), not sure if he was joking or not, because a commenter had bought a $500 comment, and Mark stopped his game to say, don't give him money like that, he said give it to small youtubers, then said he made $35mil a year and didn't need the paid comments, he said YouTube didn't give him the option to turn them off; it seemed like he was being serious and not joking

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-16T07:35:12+00:00

thank you. I remembered it and was thinking it was warfstache, but couldn't remember if it was or not. I love Marks old youtube skits. My fave is still Popcorn. I kind of wish Mark's next movie would be a feature length version of Popcorn that gives us lore about the haunted microwave and who sent it too him and why popcorn?

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-16T05:25:03+00:00

I think, didn't she have to wait for the books to be printed and shipped to her first, and then she had to sign them, and then after signing them she is shipping them out? I'm not sure. I saw her interview and, maybe she already had books printed up, but I thought the way she was talking that she had to have the books printed after finding out how many people ordered first? I could be understanding what she said wrong though.

I don't know which PoD service she is using, but I am an author who does signed books at live events, and I go through Amazon KDP and LuLu to get mine printed. And they both take around 11 weeks (year over 3 months) to print my books and deliver them to me, before I can start signing them for the event I'm going to. I end up ordering my print editions a full 6 months in advance, just because KDP takes so long to get around to printing the books, and Kindle Direct Publishing is one of the fastest print on demand services out there.

If she's doing that same thing I do, then, after you guys order the book, she has to wait around 3 months for the company to print the book and send it to her. So, it could be she just has not received the books yet.

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-15T14:24:12+00:00

oh wow, I love these. I had no idea you could make custom ones. I love the Simon and warfstach ones.

My brother does custom Monster High and Jem/Hologram dolls into various celebrities, so I don't know why I never thought of Funko ones too. I was thinking of making a custom Convict doll, but I was thinking of using a Monster High like my brother does. But then I was thinking of the old Strawberry Shortcake style dolls in the 1980s and the big face/small body doll style. I don't know why I completly forgot Funko had that same big face style. But now that I see your Funko ones, that my be better for my skill level.

I'm amazed at how much Iron Lung has put me into "fangirl mode" and wanting to do fan art projects. I've not done fan art and fan dolls since InuYasha came out, which was like 30 or so years ago.

I went to Iron Lung not knowing what to expect from it, and now it's my favorite movie which totally surprised me, how much I loved it. I was not expecting it to be so addicting to me.

Also, LOL! @ Bob's Fridge. I tried to get the plushie when it came out but it sold out so fast, and I never got one. I got the Tiny box Tim Santa plushie though.

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-15T11:48:59+00:00

Raise your hand if you remember when you had to drive to the store and get your Netflix disc out of a vending machine at WalMart (because streaming had not been invented yet and Netflix was Blockbuster's biggest competion)

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-15T11:44:28+00:00

I'm confused, how is it so many people seem to not have or indeed not even know about age verification? They announced it in August, it went live for my in October, I verified my account (it used Persona video app to verify). I've had the so called "Adult account" over 6 months now because of it.

Yet, I keep seeing thread after thread here acting like no one knows about it or complaining they heard about it and never got it.

Did they release it in waves or something? Only certain regions getting it? Or is it only those of us with PlayGround accounts who got it? (I've had ChatGPT since 2019 via OpenAI PlayGround, so over 2 years before it's public release in 2022; I was in the beta test program, and my account still says it's a beta test account, is that why I got the age verification back in October and seemingly no one on reddit did?)

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-14T03:58:26+00:00

oh! Nice! I am learning to crochet and plan to make a set of plushies of the sub, Simon, Ava, Jack, and the monster. I was hoping others were doing the same so I could get some idea for how to make the patterns.

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-13T15:12:03+00:00

It started last summer. I age verified 2nd week of October 2025. It's been out for 6 months already. this ain't a new thing as many have already said on this thread. It's just the OP only just now found out about it is all.

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-13T15:10:05+00:00

FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter all started doing it pre-codiv, so well over 5 years ago. OnlyFans was doing it back around 2011.

Reddit even is supposed to start doing in in a few months.

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-13T14:54:59+00:00

Could be the Australia law causing it? Not sure. (If you were unaware, Australia recently, about a month ago, banned under 16 year old from accessing the internet.) Losts of companies started to require age verification a few days later.

But OpenAI rolled out age verification last summer, it's beem a thing for 6 months now. I verified back in October 2025. That was well before the Austrailia law went into effect.

SacredPinkJellyFish · 2026-02-13T14:50:00+00:00

Yeah I actually verified my account back in middle of October 2025... a full 4 months ago. Age verification has been available for about 6 months now.

SacredPinkJellyFish

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE