A Hundred Doors

One weekend, I sat down at my computer and began to write.

This time, not a novel.

Emails.

Book reviewers, blogs, book sites, cultural publications, newspapers, magazines, and professional media.

At some point, I lost track of whether the number had actually passed one hundred or was simply very close to it. But within a few days, I had knocked on roughly a hundred different doors on behalf of P.X.

At first glance, you might imagine this as a simple bulk-email exercise.

Write one message.

Find the addresses.

Send it.

I could not do it that way.

After only a few messages, I realized something: if I did not care who the person on the other side was, there was little reason for them to care who I was either.

Every outlet was different.

One reviewer read only certain subgenres of science fiction. Another did not accept long books. Some wanted digital copies only; others used their own submission forms. One book site was open to author interviews. For another publication, my professional background might be a stronger point of entry than the novel itself.

So instead of approaching every door with the same sentences, I began thinking about why I was writing to that particular person or publication.

Sometimes I emphasized the first-contact aspect of P.X.

Sometimes the historical mystery that begins in Vienna in 1815 and reaches into the future.

Sometimes the fact that it had been written in English from Türkiye mattered more.

Sometimes my background in naval architecture.

Sometimes it was the combination of all those things.

The work took much more time than I had expected.

Finding an address was easy.

Understanding why the person behind that address might care about P.X was harder.

And at the end of all that preparation, there was always the same small action.

Send.

Then silence.

I think this is one of the strangest parts of producing creative work.

You spend months, even years, on something. Your relationship with it becomes intensely personal. Then you send it into the inbox of someone you have never met.

For you, it represents two years of your life.

For them, it is another email appearing on a screen.

Maybe they will open it.

Maybe they will read a few lines.

Maybe it will interest them.

Maybe they will never reply.

You have to learn not to take that personally.

The hardest part was that, this time, there was nothing I could fix. I could rewrite a sentence, redesign a cover, or upload a file again, but I could not control whether a sent email created curiosity on the other side. For someone like me, accustomed to moving forward by solving problems, waiting felt more unfamiliar than I expected.

Some messages received no response.

Some brought polite rejections.

But different replies also began to appear among them.

A book platform in Türkiye wrote that it found the publication journey and themes of P.X interesting, that it could feature the book in a review, and that it would also like to conduct a question-and-answer author interview with me.

It was a small email.

But it told me something important.

The story was beginning to mean something on the other side as well.

At roughly the same time, a P.X approach I had made to international maritime media opened a door I had not expected. Rather than covering the novel itself, I was invited to write for a general maritime audience about my professional life and experience on large-yacht projects.

A door I had originally knocked on to talk about the book was opening into an entirely different kind of writing.

That showed me perhaps the most interesting part of the outreach process.

When a door opens, it does not always lead into the room you expected.

Sometimes it takes you somewhere else.

And that is not necessarily a worse result.

At that stage, nothing dramatic had happened. P.X had not suddenly become the book everyone was talking about. Reviews were not pouring in. My phone was not full of messages from publishers.

But it was no longer complete silence either.

Somewhere, people were beginning to see the title of the book.

Some read a few lines. Some replied. Some found a different angle.

For the first time, I felt that P.X was beginning to create a small movement of its own beyond my computer and my immediate circle.

I had knocked on roughly a hundred doors.

I did not know how many would open.

There was nothing left to do but wait for a while.