Self Publish and Be Damned! (Naked City)
Image: Urchin Books/Facebook
Self Publish and Be Damned! is the latest edition (August 4, 2025) from Coffin Ed‘s The Naked City column – exclusive to City Hub.
I once read that for every book that is published there are at least a thousand manuscripts rejected by publishers, for all manner of reasons – many of them purely financial. If you have just written your first novel or complied a pictorial history of Donald Trump’s sordid sex life, it can be horribly demoralizing finding a publisher to take up your cause. All is not lost however and thanks to some modern technology and facilitators like BookPOD, you can now become your very own publishing company.
It’s not cheap of course and you will need to pay not just for printing but for typesetting, e-book conversion, cover art and design, ISBN numbers and the shipping of books to stores – not to mention shouting free drinks at your celebrity book launch. BookPOD is just one of a number of companies that will guide you through the printing process but editing and promotion is entirely up to you.
Mark Cornwall is one local author who has gone through the self publishing process and released three very successful books to date. He readily admits that “he knocked on more doors than the Mormons” seeking publishers for his early manuscripts, and after about twenty five knockbacks gave up.
He’s realistic about the current state of the publishing world noting:
“The market for literature in general these days is tanking, and if you choose relatively obscure or niche subject matter, you consign yourself eternal to an audience somewhere between midnight and dawn. Publishers, bookstores, everyone is doing it hard and it’s a credit to their ingenuity and perseverance that they keep going at all.”
Nevertheless, after three very well received volumes, he admits that:
“This bizzo of writing stories and getting people to read them has become an unhealthy compulsion for me, albeit a very satisfying one, a cure for all what ails ye. And no-one gets hurt, unlike in the quest for quenching other unhealthy compulsions.”
The compulsion would appear to be paying off and after two earlier books on Frank Thring (‘To Be Frank’) and P.J. Proby (‘Proby And Me’), Mark has just released ‘Headonism’, a rollercoaster read tracing the career of musician Peter Head. Whilst pianist Peter might not be a household name in the Australian music biz, his sideman experiences have seen it all from the 1960s onwards. There’s a new anecdote every two or three pages and a veritable cast of thousands from Bon Scott, Keith Moon and Robyn Archer to non-musicians like Molly Meldrum, Don Dunstan, Denis Wong and Abe Saffron. It’s the club owners, the booking agents, the band managers, the spivs and the gangsters who inject another dimension into Peter’s numerous encounters. Mark singles out one particular episode:
“And for me, I’ll never forget the experience of Peter recalling The Way It Was in the Sydney of the early to mid 1970s when Saffron was King of all he beheld. A miasma of horrors which I didn’t believe at first and then had it confirmed by a pile of other sources, a real mindblower. This was a town all the way out of control. And loving it.”
It was Mark’s role as a ghostwriter writer to extract a myriad of memoirs from Peter’s incredible career, playing everything from strip clubs and remote US bases to countless rock venues and festivals. Whilst you might think it all happened over some jovial coffee shop chat, nothing could be further from the truth. As Mark remembers:
“I started with four lengthy interviews at Peter’s home, just rolled the tape and started pinging him with Qs of all the people I knew he’d worked with. Then I took all these hours of often rambling discourse and detours into all kinds of fascinating but irrelevant and obtuse twilight zones and restructured them into chronological order to the best of my knowledge.”
Literary licence and the basic truth often run riot in many music bios and Mark is keen to emphasize that they spent many hours corroborating the various stories with other eyewitnesses, trawling through countless internet searches and magazine archives as well as the digitised troves of metro dailies and old TV footage.
Whilst Mark has rewarded readers with three very entertaining books, he offers a word of caution to any potential self publishers:
“Be emotionally prepared to lose money and cop a lot of ‘no’ from a lot of people who are saying that with good reason. It’s a business, not a freakin’ ‘journey.’ Don’t write more than 80,000 words. Fewer if possible. People don’t read doorstops any more. And your first draft will be quite terrible. Count on it. Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. Don’t get 500 copies printed. You’ll be stuck with 300 of them for life.”
If you are after endless chuckles and some remarkable recollections of the Australian music and entertainment industries, you’ll find Headonism in your favourite indie book or record shop or on sale from the behemoth Amazon. All power to the self publishers!
