The Most Authentic Way to Publish Your Fantasy Stories

Stop feeding the machine.

The book market is filled with slop. Low effort garbage that no one with half a brain would ever want to read. Even before AI, people or teams of people pumped out as much claptrap as they possibly could because it makes money.

It’s nothing new.

But AI has made making poppycock almost effortless. As of 2022, there were about 11,000 books published through KDP every day, and it’s only going to get worse. Today we can go to a free website and have it spit out an entire book in a manner of minutes.

To put this into context, Spotify’s entire catalogue of music, you know every major song released in the last hundred years, doubled in the month they opened the doors to AI generated balderdash.

That’s 100 years worth of music, driveled together in a month.

Since opening The Arcanist: Fantasy Publishing, a small press dedicated to sharing independently published Fantasy, written by flawed but artistic and devoted humans, this problem has begged the question: how the codswallop are authors supposed to stand out amid thousands of competitors flooding the same platforms with bullshit every day?

Well, they’re not.

No, instead of trying to play a rigged game, we indie Fantasy authors can simply opt out. We can make our own game.

While The Arcanist does publish to Amazon, my main strategy for selling books has been directing people to the Webstore that I own and operate, where readers buy books from me, not goddamned Jeff Bezos.

I have a million ideas for how to build niche, high margin followings that focus on quality connections with readers, but I think this might be the coolest, most authentic idea I’ve come up with:

Click the picture to check out the video version of this post.

I am in no way daunted by the miserable state of the arts. Smart people looking for thoughtful fantasy are quickly learning that the internet, or at least, algorithm based mass storefronts are no longer safe places to find thought-provoking material written by actual writers hoping to say something that matters.

This is why I’ve started hand-binding short fiction into booklets. What better way to show the world your authentic, hand-made fantasy than by printing it and turning it into a book?

Seriously, I’m far too excited by the simplicity of this project, but I think stuff like this just drips with style and that rebellious rage against the machine.

Real Quick…

I want to tell you about my next major project. Old Sorcery by James Callan is the latest Arcanist published novel that follows the story of three heroes (and one badass necromancer) captured by machinations of the most powerful sorcerer in the wide world of Garden.

It’s witty and hilarious, deep and nuanced, and one of my proudest achievements as an editor and publisher.

When you follow the project on BackerKit, you’ll get a free eBook of the entire 2025 volume of The Literary Fantasy Magazine.

The Novelty of Garbage

Several months ago I picked up a few old copies of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine from the 80s. Obviously I was taken by the novelty, we don’t see stuff like it anymore.

The books are small, so I put one in my pocket and read it on the bus. Nothing in here blew me away, and a few of the stories were pretty bad. But they were bad because they were clearly written by a writer who was still learning, and the editors saw enough potential to run the story.

Not because they lacked soul or sincerity. Or… humanity, which is something we unfortunately need to look out for.

The whole idea behind Pulp Fiction is that magazines like this are disposable. You read them on the bus and throw them away. Nothing about these were meant to be cherished, or even read more than once.

The paper is so cheap that it turns to pulp if you spill your coffee on it. It’s essentially garbage, no different than the advertisements stuffed in the mailbox or the absolute blether flooding the internet, right?

But it’s not.

While that was how we thought about publications like this at the time, they’re now a relic of a bygone era. What was once a bundle of cheap paper selling for a dollar a piece is now a treasure listed at $10 per book in a boutique antique shop.

The way that society looks at things like this has fundamentally changed, because we live in a world dominated by comforts and conveniences, where you can click a button and charge your credit card to get whatever piece of information or content you want instantly beamed to your screen from space.

The way we consume media is so destructive and thoughtless.

But this magazine, intended once to be consumed and thrown in the trash, exists in our world. It’s weird and uncommon. It demands that the reader acknowledge and ponder its presence. How it survived the decades, and made its way into our hands. Thus we pay more credence to what we read in a magazine like this than anything we read on Facebook.

Handmade, just as novel as vintage.

I think printing and binding your short fiction into a individual volumes is such a cool idea. Just like the pulp fiction, my zines are made of printer paper and cardstock. The beige covers are from a trashed scrapbook. But it’s my words on the page, which was spat out from my 20 year old laser printer, and my fingers stabbed by my sloppy needle work.

I treasure these strange little books, and maybe one day, to someone else who will love the novelty and go on to fall in love with the words I’ve hid inside. Handing something tangible, handmade to a friend is so much cooler and fresher than sending them a link to your blog or another eBook to add on the endless pile.

When a prospective reader picks up your zine, sees the linen thread in the spine, the crooked cuts on the margins, they’re forced to ponder it. To think about it. To handle it, to feel the grain of the paper touch their fingers, for the synapses to fire, connecting them to a memory of the last time they touched Hammermill printer paper and how much more boring that was… and how neat this new encounter is.

I started making zines out of necessity. I really want to get involved in local arts fairs and in my community, but most of those events don’t see novels printed with print on demand services to be valid forms of art. I can sell them, but only if I have something handmade to sell alongside them.

So, I took some time to learn a new skill. And I ended up really enjoying traditional book binding with needle and thread. Surely, I could just staple them and pump out ten booklets in the time it takes to make one, but that defeats the purpose. These aren’t mass produced. Each one is unique, and spends time in my hands after the story spend so much time in my brain.

If you’re trying to find an interesting way to stand out amid a sea of authors doing the exact same things, I urge you to consider printing out some short stories, and binding them together yourself.

Mordschlag: The Community Sword & Sorcery Zine

I’ve been really inspired lately by all the cool magazines I’ve seen in the world. An author friend of mine, DJ Tyrer, sends out publications on printed A4 folders. New Edge Sword & Sorcery has some of the best art direction I’ve ever seen in a magazine and does gangbusters on BackerKit.

It’s clear that people want curated reading that comes from other people, not the machine.

Which is why I’m opening up a special submission window to you all. I will consider up to three Sword & Sorcery stories between 1,000 and 10,000 words and submissions accepted for publication in my new Sword & Sorcery zine: Mordschlag.

Published stories will be selected based upon my editorial judgement. Only the best will know the sweet taste of Hammermill paper.

Mordschlag will be printed on my ancient Brother printer and handbound and mailed to the published authors. Specific submission and publication guidelines are available via a free post on my Ko-Fi. There is no obligation to join, this submission call is open to everyone.

Last week, I talked about publishing Sword & Sorcery short fiction. Next week, I’ll talk about what makes Sword & Sorcery effective. If you’re new to the genre, I highly recommend sticking around and learning more about writing authentic Fantasy, especially if you want to get published in Mordschlag.

Until then, keep writing, keep revising, and don’t let the machine tell what what to like.