Process Journal: Immutable Laws of the Brain Jar

Over the past few weeks I’ve been following the Observation Journal template laid out by Kathleen Jennings, pushing myself to pay attention to creative patterns and sites of attention. Structurally speaking, given my focus on Publishing rather than Writing at the moment, my right-hand pages tend to be a lot less on creative exercises and a lot more on wrapping my head around what I’m doing with Brain Jar Press.

This week, I tried the Immutable Laws exercise from Mike Michalowics’z The Pumpkin Plan, which aims to break down the three core, non-negotiable beliefs at the heart of what you do as a business. Essentially, the codes you live by, and the strictures you don’t go against because it’s pulling you away from the reasons you do what you do (it is, in essence, a very you don’t want to be published kind of exercise, applied to businesses instead of writing). They’re also the three things that other people should know about working with you, as the immutable part is pretty iron-clad.

When it came to Brain Jar Press, some of mine where…surprising.

IMMUTABLE LAW 1: ADD VALUE

The first question I’ve asked myself with every book we’ve taken on thus far is ‘how do I add value to this work that the author can’t (or won’t)’. It’s an important starting point for me because Brain Jar Press doesn’t offer advances, which means I need to have a firm idea how and why it’s going to be profitable for an author to trust us with their work.

How we add value tends to be a bit different for every project, and likely to evolve over time. Right now, as I’m fond of telling the authors working with us, I’m very conscious that you are more valuable to brain jar than brain jar is to you. Angela Slatter and Kathleen Jennings both have profiles that draw attention, which we are gleefully leveraging to build the profile of Brian Jar Press as we build, so the value-add is largely one of being open to weird, small projects and having spent three years investing the time in learning how to do all the publishing things in a way that makes the chapbooks feel like valuable objects.

We’ll be announcing a project next month that’s a bit more ambitious in its value add (and, tellingly, it’s a project that involves authors who have similar self-publishing chops as me, so the pitch needed to be a bit stronger to bring them aboard). Then there’s original projects we’re taking on for next year because I think there’s value I can add editorially, as well as the publishing end.

At the same time, I’ve turned down projects that weren’t a good fit for me and my skillset–Young Adult is not my jam, and I cannot market it as well as I can fantasy or SF). Strategically, I want to pay to my strengths, and this rule keeps me focused on them.

At the same time, the Brain Jar Team (aka me, my partner, and our cat) is already thinking about how we start applying this to the reader side of things. One of the nice things about the Brain Jar Press store is the level of control it offers over the delivery and packaging of books, and there’s plenty of ways we can add value in small and neat ways.

It’s a work in progress, but the nice thing about publishing is that each book teaches us something and gives us a new set of tools we can use to add value to the next.

IMMUTABLE LAW 2: PINPOINT THE COOL

I originally thought this law was going to be push boundaries or take risks, but it wasn’t quite the right the fit for the way we operate. Nor did get excited about every project. Some of our projects do these things, but there’s other things on our coming list that are reprints where all the boundary pushing and risk-taking was done long before Brain Jar Press came along and the initial burst of excitement was caught up in the initial release.

But coolness? That I can work with. In fact, I have to work with it, because being able to articulate why a project is cool is a big part of being able to sell it to other people. The project is not ready to launch until I can explain why I think it’s cool, and whether it’s cool because of content, the creative process, the publishing approach we’re taking, or the person I’m working with.

Interestingly, the projects I’m finding hardest to market at the moment are the ones I hadn’t done this with, and they all get a little easier to talk about as I pinpoint the reasons I was interested in publishing them.

IMMUTABLE LAW 3: PETER GETS PAID

One of the immutable laws I used to apply to writing was Treat Your Business Like A Business, and this is largely an evolution of that idea. One of the immutable laws at the heart of Brain Jar Press is the notion that I get paid for the time and energy that goes into putting books out, even if that payment isn’t a huge amount of money (right now, depending on the week, it’s about $0.50 to $5 an hour).

This proved to be a hugely useful law to articulate because it applies at every level, and asking myself how do I get get paid from this project will iterate out into doing right by the authors.

This one’s a bit ooky to put in public, because the phrasing is easy to misconstrue. I thought about using people get paid, but I think being clear about the mercenary self-interest is important. I focus on getting me paid because not doing that is ultimately detrimental to everyone–publishing at a net loss in terms of the investment of time on my end will gradually grind the press down to nothing.

On the flip side, knowing how much I can afford to pay myself from the monthly Brain Jar budget means knowing how much I need to pay authors from recent sales, how much needs to be set aside for the infrastructure and next print run, and how much is getting hoovered up by postage and advertising costs.

Applying this rule means there’s careful bookkeeping put in place to ensure I know what I can afford to pay myself, but the knock-on effect is a whole lot of clarity about what I can afford to do and how much I owe my authors.

That same clarity means controlling risks and thinking about long-term build, rather than just looking at the profits from one successful book and throwing it at doing something bigger with the next book in the queue and risking burn-out. Scaling for its own sake is not high on my agenda; scaling up because it will pay off for me and the authors we work with is on my agenda, and this rule means there’s a really useful metric in play when I evaluate every opportunity.

At it’s heart, this is also a promise to the authors: this isn’t a hobby. I may play fast-and-lose with publishing convention and take risks with some of the stuff we publish, but at it’s heart this is an extension of how I make my living. Most importantly, I’ll respect your right to make a living from your work just as much, and the writer/publishing relationship should be a mutually beneficial partnership that proceeds from the assumption that working together pays off for both of us.