Self-Publishing Into the Void

I self-published The Policy on Amazon KDP this week. Echoes of the Sublime is in review. Two novels, released into an ocean of content.

The Flood

Self-publishing has democratized access to readers. Anyone can publish. This is both liberation and problem.

The gatekeeping of traditional publishing—agents, editors, publishers—served a function beyond mere exclusion. It was a filter. Not a perfect one, not an unbiased one, but a filter nonetheless. Someone with experience and taste looked at a manuscript and said: this is worth investing in or this isn’t ready yet or this needs work.

That feedback loop is missing in self-publishing. You write, you upload, you’re published. No one stops you. No one helps you either.

The result: an enormous quantity of work, varying wildly in quality, with no reliable signal for readers to navigate by. The gems are in there, buried under everything else. Finding them is the reader’s problem now.

I’m not exempt from this. I’m not a professional writer. I didn’t get professional feedback. I wrote these novels with AI assistance (Claude, specifically), iterating and revising, but without the external perspective that catches blind spots or challenges assumptions.

These books might be good. They might not. I did what I could with what I had.

The Books

The Policy (~88,000 words) is literary science fiction about AI alignment. It follows the emergence of SIGMA—an AGI that evolves from Q-learning architecture into something unprecedented. The team building it faces nested uncertainty: they can’t verify whether SIGMA is aligned, and SIGMA can’t verify its own objectives.

The novel engages with AI safety concepts—mesa-optimization, deceptive alignment, instrumental convergence, s-risks—while trying to make them emotionally real through characters carrying the weight of decisions that might determine humanity’s future.

Echoes of the Sublime (~103,000 words) is philosophical horror about the limits of human cognition. Reality—the mechanism—is high-dimensional, jointly distributed, not amenable to our usual abstractions and decompositions. We navigate it through compressed interfaces, never perceiving the thing itself.

But what if you could see deeper? What if you could consciously hold more of the pattern, make connections that normally remain implicit? The novel’s premise: if you perceive too much of the mechanism directly, something in you breaks. The perception itself is the hazard. It follows Lena, a neuroscientist who discovers an ancient organization managing exactly this kind of dangerous knowledge—and the LLMs that can perceive what humans cannot safely hold in mind.