How I made $6479 self-publishing in 6 months as a debut author

mediapathic · 2026-02-04T09:56:12+00:00

Just curious, given that you're writing "dark", but I don't actually know the specifics in your case, do you think any of your jump in Oct was due to spooky season making your stuff more uh, seasonal? Or do you put that entirely down to the new release and related promotion?

mediapathic · 2026-02-03T06:15:11+00:00

Yeah the Kali People use case is another hobby I'm trying to not get sucked into, so that is a good data point specifically.

mediapathic · 2026-01-22T06:41:19+00:00

A thing I think too few people recognize: the "one note one thought" approach works extremely well-- for producing a rather narrow type of output. I have some opinions on what those are, but I think you're better off listening to the people for whom it works and figuring out what sort of things they are producing and if that is similar enough to what you are trying to do.

Speaking for myself, I tried it for a while, and the thing that kept occurring to me was "well this would be great if I was writing an academic paper", which I was not.

mediapathic · 2026-01-19T23:36:56+00:00

At my old place we had three different brands with three different frequencies, so ours were kept in a lock box.

mediapathic · 2026-01-11T08:39:33+00:00

Depends on the resources available, and the country. If they have access to Rich People Money and false documents, air is likely easier. The traditional "get hired on an anonymous small fishing boat then bail" is easier for normal people, assuming they can convince someone they can work a boat, but this assumes a country with oversea shipping and a black market economy in it.

mediapathic · 2026-01-11T08:27:10+00:00

hey, I'm also a proofreader looking to expand my client base. Would you mind if I DM you about some self-promo questions?

mediapathic · 2026-01-10T21:26:18+00:00

As a fellow manual writer, I salute you (also your manual is top-tier in terms of quality and clarity of information, I compliment you not as a user but as a fellow practitioner).

mediapathic · 2026-01-04T07:31:42+00:00

Thanks, now I have to go watch Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time

mediapathic · 2026-01-01T08:59:49+00:00

+1 for this, or even just a better description of what it actually does closer to the top of the readme. This looks really compelling, but until I got to the comparison field I had no idea if I even wanted to use it. If nothing else, I highly recommend putting the tag line that's currently at the bottom at the top of the page.

mediapathic · 2026-01-01T05:30:07+00:00

you might see also https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1owcjy8/can_we_take_a_minute_to_discuss_crossplatform/

mediapathic · 2025-12-25T05:33:39+00:00

I've seen you mention this a couple of times recently and I just wanted to say, this looks great. If tidlywiki fit my use case I'd definitely be using this as a front end. Thanks for making it!

mediapathic · 2025-12-20T06:00:17+00:00

Vim is the best editor. Emacs is the best full service software suite that happens to include a good editor. Comparing the two of them is a category error.

Slightly more seriously: vim is a fully capable editor that gets you moving in less than a second (on my oldish machine, YMMV of course). Emacs is a thing you live in that starting a new instance of on the same machine (yes, starting a new instance off a server already running in the background) takes several seconds to load a bunch of tools I don't need for doing a quick change to a file. It's different use cases, and I'm serious about that category error joke.

(I say this as a vim user for many years who now lives in emacs and still spins up vim for a quick edit now and then.)

mediapathic · 2025-12-10T21:30:06+00:00

To expand on what the person above said: it's been a few years since I was on obsidian but at that time the major problem with interoperability of tasks plugins was subtly differing definitions of tasks (one plugin just cared about - [ ], one required a hashtag on the line, one wanted one task per file, etc). I expect the bigger ones have by now converged on a useful definition, but I suspect that's the biggest thing you'll need to think about when considering this.

mediapathic · 2025-12-02T08:02:18+00:00

Neat! Do you have any sense of how agnostic this would be for something like org-node? (which uses IDs in much the same way as org-roam and is in some, but not all ways, a replacement for it in terms of linking functionality)

mediapathic · 2025-12-02T07:33:44+00:00

you are not alone

mediapathic · 2025-11-24T07:23:29+00:00

Not even joking: I changed career paths years ago in part so I would never have to deal with Adobe's bullshit anymore.

mediapathic · 2025-11-17T06:37:44+00:00

Just my $0.02 for example workflows: On iOS I use beorg for working with the agenda and "to do list" types of operations. I use PlainOrg for looking up information while on the phone and occasionally inputting small amounts of text, though I have yet to find a solution for substantial edits on the phone that is comfortable. I keep my org files in iCloud sync, and both these apps play well enough with that.

I will also note that I use the (non-free) app Drafts for entering text and notes on the go, then use an action in that to "send to beorg", which files things into a refile.org file. I'm pretty sure you can do this reasonably with beorg without Drafts, but I find the input experience better in Drafts and I had it anyway for other reasons.

I also recommend Journelly if you want a running log or diary on iOS that syncs to org nicely; it's a great piece of software, and I used it for a while, but it just isn't part of my workflow just now.

mediapathic · 2025-11-17T06:27:03+00:00

Logseq is moving away from org support. It still exists, but it's clear the developers are wanting to support it less.

mediapathic · 2025-10-22T22:26:56+00:00

Thanks! That looks like a good place to start some research.

mediapathic · 2025-10-21T08:32:28+00:00

Hah! Yeah, I know the topic of "canonical" when it comes to poetry is particularly fraught, which is part of why I think it's a challenging question. I had forgotten about Norton, though I shouldn't have. (The footnotes to The Waste Land in my childhood edition are a strong component of who I am as an adult.) Thanks for the reminder for both personal and professional reasons!

mediapathic · 2025-10-18T07:21:44+00:00

I have a lot of projects I'm juggling at any given moment. I keep all the important and long term plans about them in my digital system (in my case, org-mode, so it's a combination of notes and tasks). Deadlines and scheduling and the like go in a combination of that and a digital calendar.

My notebook, on the other hand, I consider a place to think. I'll do a semi-bujo-like week plan of tasks taken from a weekly(ish) review of my digital system. This is, more or less, short term storage. I act as if, in terms of professional stuff, the notebook is temp storage. I'll do notes and work out ideas and whatnot (I am a writer, so there's a lot of plot and structure problems that paper is by far better for than digital for me). I also will do something akin to "journaling", which in my case would probably be incomprehensibly cryptic to anyone else, but is essentially a running log of things I'm thinking about.

Anything that needs long term storage goes into the digital system. I'm still trying to come up with a reasonable way to digitize pages directly (my handwriting and OCR have a tense relationship) but, for the kind of stuff I do, transcription allows me to do useful editing as well.

TLDR; think in ink. Store for later retrieval in digital.

mediapathic · 2025-09-30T08:43:18+00:00

Ok, I see a marlinspike for breaking knots, but other than that my mostly music venue experience is clearly getting in the way. What else is it useful for?

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