The Joys of Unpopularity

On the weird blessing of not having a ton of readers

In high school, I was an exchange student in Germany and I spent the first month of the program with a group of about ten other American kids doing a German immersion course. In that group of ten, exactly ZERO of the other kids liked me.

I wasn’t bullied or anything; I was just ignored, occasionally endured some eye-rolls when I spoke, and was mostly left out of activities outside of class, whenever they could find ways to exclude me. It was one of the longest and most wounding months of my young life.

I’m grateful for it.

I wasn’t at the time, of course. It was miserable and filled me with self-loathing and sadness. Socially awkward as I was, I kept digging the hole deeper the more I tried to get the others to like me. In groveling for their approval, twisting my personality into contortionist knots, I fulfilled everything bad they already thought about me. I really did make myself insufferable.

The blessing of that time though, in retrospect, was it forced me to figure out who I was all by myself, what I liked, and who I wanted to be. I had no choice. I was in a country where I didn’t speak the language, and I was the only friend I had.

I read a lot, honing my taste and affirming that novels could be a place for safe exploration, free of judgement or shame (and I felt plenty of both outside of novels). And because I was alienated from my peers and my own language, my reading was completely independent, guided only by what I could find in English at the bookstore and what randomly caught my interest. I read Irvine Welsh and Denis Johnson, Jim Thompson and Russell Banks and James Baldwin and Katharine Dunn. Clive Barker and Stephen King. A truly random list based totally on vibes. My musical taste was even more random.

Once I realized that I could enjoy my own company and that any attempt to make myself likeable to people who didn’t like me was doomed to fail, I started to have a lot more fun. I embraced my odd and ever shifting tastes and let my curiosity lead me to weird angry books and weird angry music that didn’t have to appeal to anyone I knew but me (and often didn’t).

Eventually, I found people who dug what I dug, other anxious weirdos with quirky tastes and my same brand of late 90s cynicism (who were maybe also closet cases themselves, though I was too clueless to see it…alas, missed opportunities…).

Once I gave up on the idea of being popular, or even of liking popular things, I found my way. I didn’t have to be mainstream to be happy and I didn’t have to like mainstream things to enjoy them.

As an author, I’ve had to relearn that same hard lesson over and over again.

Every book I write, I want to be popular. I want the big sales numbers and splashy marketing and huge lines of eager fans waiting for my autograph. I want the validation I’ve always wanted.

And of course, I don’t usually get it. Even my most successful books—like most published books by anyone —are rapidly forgotten and not all my books are commercially or critically successful when they come out. I’ve done events with zero people, sat in signing areas at book festivals with zero people in my line while other authors sign for hours.

Every time, I feel like that exchange student again. Ignored, loathed, best forgotten.

In the ‘attention economy’ trying to get people to spend their hard earned money and harder earned time on your made up stories isn’t so easy when no one is paying attention.

But it turns out, it’s liberating to give up on being popular.

I don’t have to meet the expectations of a brand or appeal to some predetermined view of what an “Alex London Book” is. I hop genres and styles and age groups. I play around. Sure, it’s not great for marketing, but since when was being marketable the measure of a creative life well-lived? Back in the 90s, the worst thing you could be called was a ‘sell-out’. Nowadays, market success seems the highest measure of validity, and success demands making funny short videos on the internet to amplify your brand.

But I didn’t get into books because I wanted to be a brand.

Not gonna lie, 2025 has been tough for me as a writer (microscopic problem in the relative toughness of this year for millions of others, but this post is about writing/publishing so…). But I’ve embraced the freedom of having no expectations for my next book.

I’ve got a graphic memoir coming out in the spring, and it’s nothing like anything I’ve done before. I’ve got nothing new under contract right now, so I’m playing with something else (for adults!) unlike anything I’ve done before (clues: punk librarian, drag queens, nuns, gangsters, murder). I’m fiddling with a time traveling dad fighting fascism short story and a very strange horror screenplay about the comforts of terror.

I’m reminding myself of the fun of writing when it was just for me (and maybe the blue haired punk boy I had a crush on in Germany)

And I guess that’s the thing I have to remember. Being unpopular isn’t just an upside-down sort of blessing. It can be really, really fun.

What kind of creative fun would you have if no one was watching? What would you make even though it would not matter to anyone but you?

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It’d be more fun for both of us if you bought my books of course!

You can pre-order my graphic memoir, PULL, wherever books are sold (cover reveal coming soon)

My 2013 dystopian about queer teens fighting the neoliberal capitalist fascistic order of an unjust society, PROXY, went out of print but I brought it back self-published (ironically only through that one retailer, alas).

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I was recently one a few podcasts, if you want to listen:

The Children’s Literacy Initiative - Fifteen on Friday, talking about reading choice and children’s literacy and my journey as a reader

The Librarian Linkover -talking about my masters of library science and how it impacted my journey as a writer

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Thanks for reading!