Brain Jar Press launched issue 2 in The Kaleidoscope’s Children earlier this week. It’s shiny, in a LoFi kind of way; a 14,000 word novelette about unlicensed bootlegs, murder-happy fans, and family legacies being discovered.
All in all, this is a very different beast to Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor & Other Things We Called the Band. We switch to third person, mess with the timeline and bring in a new protagonist.
This was by intent.
The series is a kind of mosaic built up around a central conceit, which means we skip ahead five years and introduce a younger protagonist who grew up with YouTube and Spotify rather than CD stores and songs taped of the radio.
And, of course, if you haven’t read issue one you can still pick it up for free.
I’m going to come back and talk about this release a little more next week, largely because it feeds into some of the thinkings I’d started doing about writing prose like it’s a comic (largely derailed by a Pandemic and publishing a hose to books by other people that went gangbusters).
For now, I’m just going to breathe a sigh of relief that it’s out in the world (which seemed like a dicey proposition at several points over the last two months) and get started on issue three.
For the past few years I’ve been running a more-or-less weekly newsletter that goes out to a couple of hundred loyal readers. What started out as an exercise in promoting new books and updating folks about projects gradually evolved into a weekly missive where I stashed write-ups about publishing, writing, technology, creative processes, culture, and other interesting things I came across while working.
Basically, all the things I used to blog about back in the days when folks read blogs.
And it turns out I wrote long newsletters. They average about two thousand words a pop, plus a handful of graphics. A lot of the time, my clumsy attempts to sell books either got lost amid more interesting elements or felt like an awkward intrusion.
I haven’t been happy with that balance for a while, so I did something about it. A few weeks ago, I decided to pull back on the overt marketing in my weekly emails and embrace the idea of treating the newsletter as my own personal, eclectic zine full of things that interested me.
Today, I pulled the trigger on the next evolution of thinking: I’ve compiled all the mini-essays, articles, and write-ups I did across May and June into a 44 page zine folks can download to the ereader of their choice. You can grab your copy for free by clicking the cover below.
It’s an intentionally quick-and-low-budget project, adapting the newsletter content into a form that’s better suited to archiving and revisiting. The audience for it will likely be small, but they’re also quick to produce.
To pull this together was about an hours extra work, and much of that was a proof of concept thing. I loaded the content of each newsletter into Vellum week-by-week, then pulled together a standardised cover design that’s easy to update. Every new issue involves changing the issue number and pulling a new image from my photo album. Vellum compiles everything into files compatible with most ereaders and kindles with the touch of a button, and everything gets uploaded to Bookfunnel who’ll handle the distribution.
All in all, the biggest time investment in getting the first issue together lay in writing a short introduction, and that was mostly because I had to grapple with the fact that a writer I quoted in an early newsletter was hit by #MeToo in the middle of June.
I’ll be pleasantly surprised if more than a half-dozen download it, at least in the short-term, but for me the main point lies in the production rather than the consumption. It’s all too easy to get trapped in thinking that stuff you write for one medium is only ever going to live there, when in truth it’s relatively easy to proliferate it out.
And like most things in digital publishing, the value doesn’t really kick in until you’ve invested in something for a stretch. I suspect this will be a lot more interesting when I’ve got an archive of 20 or 30 zines rather than a single issue.
The truth is, writing is hard, and publishing is a brutal business—and not always a meritocracy. To survive, and thrive, you need to be tough. You need to believe in yourself and trust your gut. You need to see through smoke and mirrors. You need to shut out all the noise, and find your own path.
But it’s just not that simple, because that takes resources and support. You need a solid platform in life in order to get a really good leap. I know that.
I struggle with the reality that there are a lot of asterisks on good advice. Mental health, physical health, financial stability, access to opportunities—they all factor into our ability to do what someone else has done. Publishing is a weird formula nobody has ever quite figured out, and privilege weighs heavy.
Success takes a lot of hard work. But it also has something to do with the position you start from. And privilege is often called luck.
York, Zoe. Romance Your Brand: Building a Marketable Genre Fiction Series (Publishing How To Book 1) . ZoYo Press. Kindle Edition.
It’s not like I’m unaware of this, as I’ve acknowledged in the past, but I honestly think York’s intro should be a foundational statement for any discussion of craft.
