A month ago this website was a full publisher site. It had pages for authors and pages for readers. There was submission guidelines, forms and everything you would expect on a decent publisher site. But that is no more because I’m going back to the the start.
What is that start?
It is an idea. An idea that I have partly carried with me my whole life, and partly an idea I am coming back to. The idea that I, and other writers with a similar impetus than me, can get good stories out to writers.
I was still in my teens when I learned about the pulp magazines and saw that we had never had something exactly like that in South Africa. We had the old photo-book stories which were kind of close. But nothing that published short stories and novellas and even full novels as serials.
Photo-books and Pulp
We only had serious publishers who published serious books and had offices in Cape Town and the centre of Pretoria and somewhere in Johannesburg I think. If they were English they had an office in London and maybe New York and they got to us through places like CNA, when that was still a thing.
Today we are very much right back there. In a sense publishing in South Africa had gone backwards. Almost everything on bookshop shelves are shipped in from overseas. What is local fills a tiny space if it is English and an increasingly insular enclave if it is Afrikaans.
Sorry that I stick to those two languages. It is the only two of the official twelve in South Africa I can speak and write in.
Today we have an indie revolution that would be able to bring back the hopes of getting back to writing things for the hell of it and getting it to readers. Something I could imagine as a teen but which is only now possible. Writing and publishing books for virtually nothing and making them as good as they can be with hard work and common sense and fairly average intelligence.
The Publishing Sidelines
What I however know is that the great global revolution in publishing is something that kind of leave us South Africans standing on the sidelines. Because global is not really the way it works.
I can say that because I have been dipping in and out into the revolution since 2009. The promise was then there that whatever you published on Amazon would get an audience. The examples of others who did exactly that was not multitudes, but enough to prove a concept.
And I tried it, with several short stories. And I had crickets.
I pulled my stuff from publication and wrote and read and watch YouTube videos and kept trying to find a book I could write to break into the market. Too many false starts later I eventually got a novel finished, at a point in my life when I had absolutely no funds to pay for any marketing effort whatsoever.
So I did what I could with what I had, closed my eyes and published, and crickets.
Between 2009 and 2025 there had been enough of a shift that just putting a book up was no longer enough. It required a system, reviews, a following, and most likely quite a bit of money. It also require being plugged into a network and ecosystem that even for my global pretensions is still a foreign world.
I am not alone. The number of other writers I come across that keep writing with small followings, scant sales and even less readers is quite big. And I’m only puddling around in the shallows. The number of those who are fellow South Africans I do not know.
I am not a networker or community person and I find they do not organise well enough to be an identifiable group. But they are out there. I spoke to one just this week. Somebody who wrote two novels and don’t really know what next. Same as myself, two novels and a short story collection in and still desert life sales or attention.
Less Answers than Prayers
There is no simple answer but what I had was maybe a publishing enterprise that pool resources. And if not resources then hope and prayers. Because I still can see a way to get stories to readers in a sensible way, without selling souls, killing chickens or burning money. And I also believe it has to be possible for a South African writer to do so.
This is what Simile Press is about. I’m drawing a little circle in the global publishing sandpit and saying this is mine. And I’m inviting like-minded writers to partner with me to make things happen for us.
And I’m not picking a pretentious publishing site back up. Because this is doing it from scratch, not faking it until you make it.