Sperm & Eggs – What I learnt from self-publishing

By Paul Angliss

Did you know that in the animal kingdom, ‘the seasonal synchronisation of libidos exhibited by the big litter strategists is rarely observed in human society? Except, that is, in the transient communities formed on Club 18-30 holidays’? And that ‘a man will feel the urge to play the field. Or, in the case of Norwegian men who entertain multiple partners living in communities distributed along high-sided sea inlets, an urge to play the fjord’?

The above are excerpts from my first foray into self-publishing a book, Sperm & Eggs, a kind of satire of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. These I cobbled together with a bunch of other stand-up type observations to fit a narrative, an exploration of a questionable theory, a proposition that the behaviour of men and women is determined by the behaviour of their respective gametes, their sperm and eggs. It’s presented as an accessible-to-the-masses revelatory Jordan Peterson or Richard Dawkins blockbuster, turning on its head what we know about ourselves. Supplemented by illustrations that have only a tenuous link to the subject matter, Sperm & Eggs is a triumph of style over substance. In essence, it is a parody of the bestseller non-fiction genre. Furthermore, Sperm & Eggs is reassuringly gender apolitical, more of a comment on the absurdity of life.

I initially released the book as text only without illustrations. Despite finding an amazing influencer in sex historian, Dr Kate Lister, on Twitter and her retweets of excerpts from the book going viral, book sales on various publishing platforms were low.

A few years later I wondered if an illustrated version might be a better sell. I have an old mate and ex-work colleague and fellow substandard impersonator of Des Lynam, Simon Thompson, a fantastic illustrator, portrait artist and book designer, who shared the same sense of humour, liked the book and agreed to illustrate and design Sperm & Eggs for a 50/50 share in any royalties we might earn from the relaunched illustrated title.

We wanted to see if there was an alternative to Amazon’s self-publishing service – Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) – for creating paperback, hardcover and ebook versions of your book. However, our research showed strongly in favour of first-time self-publishers using a company that squirrels vast sums of money into offshore havens and offers bathroom facilities for its delivery people in the shape of repurposed Evian bottles jettisoned onto hard shoulders. KDP allows you to choose which genre your readers will search to find you so that you can, as we have been, in the top 20 bestsellers for the rather niche genre, ‘Theories of Humour’, but 2,000 plus in the wider genre ‘Satires’. KDP also allowed us to set a publication date in advance so that we could plan a book launch campaign promoting the book on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

All very well EXCEPT in our case when we wanted to delete my original text-only edition of Sperm & Eggs so shoppers would buy the new, illustrated version instead of the old one by mistake. KDP won’t let you delete a title, but ‘unpublish’ it instead. To do this, you have to request KDP to unpublish your book using the email address you set up your KDP account with in the first instance. 40 emails later and it was confirmed that the email address associated with my KDP account was someone called Sharon. Either our account had been hacked or Amazon had some malfunction in their system. Had she known about it, Shazzer might well have experienced Imposter Syndrome.

Simon and I took a calculated gamble by taking out a full-page advert in Viz, the readership of which we thought would be a targeted audience. It was worth a punt, especially as we had timed our launch for 6 weeks before Xmas. So far, we have seen only 19 sales in total. We still have faith in the book and I’m looking now to try and find influencers who might endorse Sperm & Eggs. You never know what might spark sales, what might be the toilet scholars next must-read.

Sperm & Eggs is presented in three volumes. The first is Sperm & Eggs – Attraction, covering the initial phase of the sex cells herding the procreators together. The second is Sperm & Eggs – Interaction, the third is Sperm & Eggs – Relationships. They are a must read for those who wish to know why they do what they do and then blame something else.

Sperm & Eggs – Attraction can be found now in paperback and hardcover versions here on Amazon.