D.A.N.O.T.I.

Do Anything Not On The Internet

New song out this week!

As an ideology, DANOTI is clear enough.

There are wide implications to adopting DANOTI in any aspect of life, but I’m particularly interested in what it might mean for book publishing.

If you’ve followed my posts for the last year or two, you know that I've struggled with contemporary issues surrounding both traditional book publishing and self-publishing.

In short, with traditional publishing, I don’t like the increased number of filters that get in the way of communication from writer to reader. Creative writing programs, agents, editors, marketing departments, sensitivity readers, political activists—that’s several too many.

With self-publishing, I don’t like the shift in literary culture that focuses on fulfilling customers as opposed to readers. In short, self-publishing has become synonymous with publishing genre work on the internet. That’s not work that typically appeals to me.

Traditional and self-publishing are the two prominent ways to publish your work in 2025. Having to choose between these two unattractive approaches (if you’re lucky enough to get to choose) is a big reason why I haven’t published a book in over a decade.

I propose a third way, the DANOTI way.

From my perspective, adopting a DANOTI approach to the publication of your book allows the writer/publisher to ignore the downsides—as I see them—of both traditional and self-publishing. Both of these paths are fine for what they are. I’ve pursued both. If you want to pursue them, go for it.

The DANOTI approach as it applies to book publishing ignores all of the secondary aspects that tend to dominate discussion in contemporary book publishing and focuses instead on authors connecting with individual readers through the contents of their books. For example:

There is no careerism in DANOTI.

The way to speak directly to readers is to speak directly to readers and not to the institutions that currently dictate which authors have careers and which won’t. The shift of writer attention from the impact of their words on the reader to the impact of their words on the institutions of publishing has gotten consistently worse for at least a hundred years, and it’s only moved in one direction. I believe we’re now stuck with a traditional publishing industry that kowtows to the values of its corporate parent companies and/or social media, the latter often serving as the watchdog of the former.

You can, of course, skip these drawbacks with the traditional market and go for a self-publishing career through Amazon or some other digital outlet. The self-publishing realm also comes with drawbacks. In this realm, the author is too submissive to the whims of the customer as opposed to the wishes of the reader to create work that enriches them and doesn’t just take their time.

The only way out of these problems is to remove the need for a career from the process of writing and publishing. A writer’s ability to communicate honestly and directly with readers is hindered too much by opposing values that focus instead on making sure no group is offended, or that the conventions expected by the customer are adhered to. You can’t communicate to individual readers on a deep level when you’re focused on communicating to groups, or abiding by rote conventions. Get rid of career aspirations, and you can get back to writing for readers as opposed to the institutions and conventions that dictate in this day and age who has a career and who doesn’t.

There are no International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs) in DANOTI.

This is the barcode on the back of books used by a company called BookScan to track book sales. ISBNs tracking offers the industry some idea of which books are selling and which aren’t. These sales don’t reveal which books are connecting with readers. There are too many other competing reasons why these books might be selling, and practitioners of DANOTI aren’t interested in those reasons. They’re interested in communicating to readers.

There are no ebooks in DANOTI.

The DANOTI approach seeks to remove barriers between readers and the contents of books. Ebooks include the impediment of Amazon or another digital portal in between the reader and the book’s contents. Whether people who read ebooks care about this impediment or not, it violates private reading experiences. DANOTI works are not made to foster monitored experiences. They are made to be read by readers who value fewer filters and impediments between writer and reader.

There is little to no traditional marketing of DANOTI works.

The forms of marketing relied on for book marketing these days have been greatly impacted by people not concerned with the deep communication of the contents of books to readers. These people can be concerned with an endless list of other things: their careers, political correctness, self-promotion, being mean.

DANOTI works are not interested in promotion for these concerns. The type of book reading that interests DANOTI writers is done one person at a time. To the DANOTI writer, how a book might impact a group of readers isn’t important. What matters is how the work impacts an individual reader. Each reader is an individual with their own relationship to the book and world. Individuals respond to works differently than when they’re in groups. DANOTI practitioners focus on conveying their works to readers, not groups of readers.

DANOTI writers and publishers are not concerned with writing for any group. They’re individuals who are concerned with writing for individuals, all of whom are different. They aspire to have readers who have private relationships with their works and are touched deeply by the contents of their books.

The marketing of a work is inherently about making the work public. Leaving behind the careerist aspects of the publishing industry means you don’t have to do any marketing that might violate the private relationship between the reader and the work.

Those are the prominent aspects of DANOTI as it applies to book publishing. It’s really about getting past all the sound and fury surrounding publishing and getting back to the only thing that matters: the special way books communicate from writer to reader.

Enjoy my new song DANOTI at Bandcamp and Spotify, and maybe think about how we can improve our lives by practicing this simple dictum.