Books is the publishing side of my work, developed under BWA Express.
It is a deliberately small and strongly curated publishing project. Most of the books published here are mine, either under my own name or under different pen names, but the catalogue is not limited to my writing. I am also open to publishing independent authors when a book has both commercial potential and, just as importantly, genuinely interests me.
I do not want to run a publishing factory. I would rather publish fewer books that I personally want to exist.
For independent authors, the model is intentionally simple. If you already have a strong audience that overlaps with the potential readership of the book, the typical split can be 70% to the author and 30% to the publisher after direct expenses. For authors without an established audience, where significantly more publishing and market-building work is required, the model can be 50/50. In either case, the first question is whether I believe in the book and want to work on it.
Ukrainian Modernism
One of the publishing projects closest to me personally is Ukrainian Modernism.
I am Ukrainian, although I currently live in France. At some point I realised how little many people around me knew about Ukrainian literature. When looking for Ukrainian books to give to French friends, the choice felt strangely narrow.
There were the great nineteenth-century classics such as Taras Shevchenko and Lesya Ukrainka. They are fundamental to Ukrainian culture, but without historical context they can be difficult as an introduction for a contemporary foreign reader. At the other end were contemporary Ukrainian writers whose stories often belong to the same cosmopolitan world as contemporary literature everywhere else.
What seemed largely absent was the extraordinary literature between those two worlds.
The Ukrainian Modernism series focuses particularly on the cultural explosion of the 1920s and early 1930s, the generation often associated with the Executed Renaissance. For me, this is one of the golden ages of Ukrainian literature.
These writers lived in a recognisably modern world: cities, trains, cinema, factories, intellectual movements, political upheaval, sexuality, ambition and experimentation. At the same time, their books carry a distinctly Ukrainian historical and cultural landscape. A French reader does not need to be a specialist in Ukrainian history to enter that world.
The series brings writers such as Mykola Khvylovy, Geo Shkurupii, Yurii Yanovskyi, Valerian Pidmohylnyi and others to new readers, particularly through French editions. Each book is part of a larger attempt to make this period of Ukrainian culture visible again outside Ukraine.
Toki Pona and small languages
Another long-running interest of mine is constructed language.
I have been interested in Toki Pona for roughly two decades. Its tiny vocabulary and radical simplicity make it much more than an intellectual curiosity. Translating into Toki Pona forces you to reconsider what a text actually means once much of the vocabulary we normally rely on disappears.
This gradually became several publishing series.
One explores classical Chinese philosophy, including texts such as the Dao De Jing and The Art of War. Another, Stoic Wisdom in Toki Pona, includes Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca. My Toki Pona edition of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations has become one of the most successful books in the catalogue.
Some of these series also have free editions, learning materials and companion resources. Not everything needs to be a commercial book. Sometimes the purpose is simply to make a text, language or way of thinking easier to explore.
I have also translated the Heart Sutra into Toki Pona. As someone with a long-standing interest in Zen Buddhism, that was one of the projects where language, philosophy and personal curiosity naturally met.
Toki Pona is not my only interest in constructed languages. I have written about languages such as Lojban and about the differences between radically different approaches to engineered communication.
I also created Pictiq, an experimental visual language intended to help people communicate without sharing a spoken language at all. Instead of learning another vocabulary in the conventional sense, Pictiq tries to construct meaning from a controlled system of intuitive visual symbols.
For me, all of these experiments ask versions of the same question:
How little language do we actually need in order to communicate an idea?
Markets, trading and business
Publishing also intersects with my current business work.
A significant part of my professional focus is agricultural commodities, grain trading, brokerage and market infrastructure. That work has produced books and practical handbooks around spot markets, commodity brokerage, grain trading and market monitoring.
The purpose here is different from the literary projects. These are working books: compact attempts to turn practical market knowledge into something that traders, brokers and other participants can actually use.
My interest in markets also extends beyond agriculture.
Through 1D3X, I explore conventional and unconventional ways of measuring economies and markets. One of the resulting books, Burgers, Lipsticks & Underwear, looks at how seemingly strange indicators can reveal changes in consumer behaviour and economic conditions.
A hamburger, a lipstick purchase or even underwear sales can sometimes tell an economic story that is less visible in a conventional macroeconomic dashboard.
Marketing, AI and productivity
I have spent most of my professional life in marketing, branding and business development, so another part of the catalogue grows from that experience.
Gestalt Marketing, for example, develops an approach I began writing about years ago: looking at marketing through unresolved consumer needs and using brands, products and communication to help "close" those gestalts.
Other books deal with how work itself is changing.
Futureproof and Productivity examine business productivity in an AI-assisted world, while other work looks at the transition from traditional SEO toward LLMO and the emerging problem of making companies, products and ideas understandable not only to search engines but also to language models and AI agents.
These books tend to evolve. When the underlying technology changes, I would rather update the book than pretend that an edition written several years earlier is still definitive.
Fiction
And then there is fiction.
This is probably the least predictable part of the catalogue, deliberately so.
Some books are conceptual mashups, such as a story that brings Don Quixote into the world of Peter Pan. Others use philosophy as the starting point for absurd situations, including Marcus Aurelius trying to remain a Stoic during a zombie apocalypse.
There are stories about American small-town life, literary experiments, satire and books that are difficult to place neatly into a genre.
One of the books closest to me is God Was Busy with the Plumbing.
It is an original novel, partly autobiographical in spirit, partly shaped by my background as an artist, and influenced by the kind of existential comic literature in which a person tries very seriously to make sense of a fundamentally ridiculous world.
The story follows an artist who has somehow become a plumber, over the course of a single day around Christmas. There is humour in it, including a fair amount of black humour, but underneath that is a book about work, identity, failure, reinvention and the strange distance between what we imagined becoming and what actually happened.
I started my professional life as an artist. Perhaps that is one reason I still like books that refuse to stay entirely inside the category assigned to them.
A publishing laboratory
There is no single genre that defines BWA Express.
Ukrainian modernism sits beside Toki Pona philosophy. Commodity-market manuals sit beside marketing books. Constructed languages sit beside literary fiction. Some projects are commercial, some educational, and some exist simply because I wanted to see what would happen if somebody made them.
What connects them is curation.
I publish subjects I want to understand, texts I want more people to discover, and experiments that seem worth turning into something permanent.
Books are therefore not separate from the rest of ABVX. They often grow out of the same systems, research, business interests, languages and experiments you can find elsewhere on this site.
Sometimes a system becomes a book.
Sometimes a book creates a new system.
And sometimes a book exists simply because I think it should exist.