Dear Reader,

I want to pop in today to talk about self-publishing, but not in the way people usually frame it. Not as a strategy. Not as a workaround. Not as the thing you do when someone else hasn’t said yes yet.

I want to talk about it as magic

There is something quietly radical about deciding your work gets to travel. About not waiting for a publisher, an editor, an institution, or an invisible panel of curators to tell you whether it’s good enough to exist in public. You write the thing. You shape it. You choose its form. You press send. You print the pages. You staple the spine. You put it in an envelope. And just like that, you’ve made contact.

Self-publishing collapses the distance between you and a reader. It removes the middle layer and says: I do not need external permission to reach you.

So many of us have absorbed the belief that legitimacy comes from outside. That the work isn’t real until it’s selected, approved, acquired, optimized, or praised. But writing has always been a technology for reaching one another. Pamphlets circulated by hand. Letters carried across oceans. Small presses operating out of living rooms. Zines traded at shows. 

Newsletters sent to a list of fifty people who actually care.

These are not lesser forms. They are ritual forms.

Repeatable structures that allow meaning to travel across distance and time. Forms that build trust through consistency. Forms that say, I am here again. I am still reaching.

That’s what Rituals of Technology : How Writers Make Contact is about. This is the class I am teaching this Saturday March 7 from 9-11am PST / 12-2pm EST

In this two-hour studio, we’ll explore newsletters, analog publishing, and self-published work not as marketing tools, but as acts of devotion. We’ll talk about what makes a reader feel personally addressed. We’ll look at how repetition creates intimacy. We’ll examine what changes when you think of your newsletter as a ritual rather than content. And we’ll consider what it means to self-publish not for scale, but for contact.

This is not a class about growth hacks or funnels or algorithms. It’s about attention. It’s about intention. It’s about building forms that invite readers in rather than floating at a shallow level of performance.

If you’ve been waiting for someone to tell you your work is ready, this is your reminder that you don’t have to wait. If you’re self-publishing already and want a deeper framework for what you’re doing, this is for you. If you’re tired of thinking about platforms and want to think about practice instead, this is for you too.

You don’t need a large audience. You don’t need a genre. You don’t need certainty. You just need the desire to reach.

Self-publishing isn’t about bypassing the system because you couldn’t get in. It’s about realizing that contact has always been available to you. 

If you want to look at the creative and practical side of self publishing through mediums, this class is for you. Recorded with lifetime access if you can’t make it live.

With care,
Cody

→ info@codycookparrott.com
→ www.codycookparrott.com
→ Follow Along on Are.na where I track research for self publishing projects and will show you how to use it too!