If you Google contemporary gay fiction, the engine returns a list of ten titles. At the top is A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara - the only one of the ten that I have read and it happened a few years ago. At the time, I was a member of a local state-run library with shelves of English books and magazines. Take my word, it was a librarian who suggested this book here in St Petersburg, Russia.

Many days have passed since I took the risk of printing a few hundred copies of Truth with Ornaments in Russian. I look back and remember a phone call to the Singer House, also known as the House of the Book, in the heart of the city on Nevsky Prospekt, to ask if my book could be sold there. A shop assistant asked me what my book was about. For a few seconds I thought hard, trying to find the most neutral words to describe my novel; her immediate and definitive answer was:

It had taken me some time to discover the very first (and, as far as I know, the only) gay bookshop in the same area, just a few hundred metres from Singer House. The place had two spacious rooms with shelves packed with queer literature in Russian. Within a few weeks of the launch, the book had sold enough copies to cover all the initial costs. Quite soon I received positive and encouraging comments from both straight and gay readers, and it felt good.

Not long after the anti-gay law was introduced, I made a decision of destroying the remaining copies in Russian and translating Truth with Ornaments into English. The number of details and facts that happened after I decided to make it happen deserves a full story, which I intend to cover at some point in the future.

I did some research to understand how the publishing business works in the United States. The websites of many publishers said that unsolicited material was not accepted and recommended finding a literary agent to represent your work. Oh, where do I find one? I thought, and after digging a little deeper, I learned that literary agent directories could help. As well as make things more complicated and discourage me.

Then one day Amazon announced Kindle Direct Publishing and I started looking into self-publishing.  Before long, I dug up a piece of advice that said my book needed reviews. Among the people and organisations that offer a professional review, Kirkus Review stands out. For a fee, they provide a literary service that some independent authors don't like, according to their negative comments on the Internet. Who are these writers, who are these reviewers? If they're as professional as those who praised the last book on the list returned by Google, then I certainly don't need them.  What I need is to wait patiently for my novel to be noticed by someone who actually cares about books, which is neither good nor bad, but which have value.