Jet Pack

Tolkien and Lewis, Graves and Sassoon, Lovecraft and Howard, Gibson and Serling, Capote and Lee, Scorcese and Coppola and Lucas and Spielberg and DePalma — history’s full of stories of lively, motivated writers made more lively and more motivated by challenging and promoting each other, right? The great Intellectual Property Scare, though, has writers thinking they’ve got to keep their shit secret until a publisher tells them it’s good, and then the publisher keeps it secret until the street date. And then it is spoiled like Dumbledore’s murder and the whole thing is done until the next one comes out. That’s the life of prose fiction.

But DVD special features have taught people to watch and re-watch, to appreciate deleted scenes and process stories, to hunger for the story of the story’s creation, to appreciate ingredients in addition to the meal. Or, more accurately, DVD special features have taught us that people had an interest in that stuff already. Plus, readers love to eavesdrop on people at work, and people talking shop, so maybe they’d like to watch a story go through the paces.The Internet can be the new Denny’s, and it is always midnight there.

This was a sticking point for some writers I talked to about Jet Pack, but I thought we’d five it a shot. Wil Wheaton sells work he’s already published online for free, and that work goes through an editorial process from blog to book, so…

Some folks don’t let the early-reader experience get in the way of their purchase, and for some the book becomes a keepsake or a memento — an artifact of the read. And the ones who don’t buy these works later instead did us the favor of reading our work, maybe giving us feedback, maybe helping us sharpen these tales for the people who don’t hear about us until the story’s for sale.

The majority of my time spent workshopping stories according to strict processes of prefab questions and rote exercises has not been real helpful. Mandatory, systematized criticism in a ring of folding chairs has always looked washed-out and florescent, in my experience, compared to dog-earned notebook paper passed around a Denny’s at midnight, the window lit by streetlights and neon.

But most of the writers I know don’t live near me, so we needed another solution. Here it is: The Internet can be the new Denny’s, and it is always midnight there.

So this isn’t a magazine. This is the showroom of our writer’s workshop, the part with the big steel doors we open to the street so passersby can eyeball our wares. It’s also the loft space where we sit around scratching in our notebooks, or typing on our notebooks, and plan a big reading party that never happens because people can come by and read us everyday. And also it is a midnight diner. Because this is the future and everything is more than one thing.

This is the future — everything is
more than one thing.
I just wanted a place where writers can be read, where readers can find a variety of short and crazy stories, where writers can workshop together instead of toiling alone, where feedback is quick and lively instead of nonexistent. I want to talk shop. I want to read what my comrades are cooking up in their insane skulls. I want to be a better writer by visiting a shamelessly Bohemian intelligentsia cafe with a wicked genre fetish, and I’m willing to do it online in the absence of the real thing.

Think of this as a writer’s gallery, where we hand out red pens at the door. Let us know what you think.

Selling Stories

We’re seeing more and more writers who are getting books sold by demonstrating audience and capability first. That trumps the publisher who thinks a story is good but otherwise doesn’t know how to sell it.

For the big publisher, finding the audience is more important than honing the work. Major houses sell plenty of shit books when those things are easy to sell, just like they sell sterling, brilliant books when they know (or are willing to bet) people want them.

Publishing through magazines, at this point, is good only for association or visibility. Submitting books and stories isn’t about quality of writing — or not just. It’s about audience. When you demonstrate you can build an audience, or come with one already built, publishers need a good reason to convince themselves not to go with you, assuming you choose to go with a publisher down the line. Just ask the likes of David Wellington, Daniel Suarez, Wil Wheaton, Mur Lafferty, Scott Sigler, and now Max Barry.

Audience-building’s an important part of authordom, and something like Jet Pack makes it easier for us to put stuff in front of you, the audience. We think. We hope. We sing to the stars while plucking a wistful, melancholy tune on our banjos.

So self-publishing is the thing. Love it. Plus, when you self-publish, you now have a revenue stream (yes, I said it) that belongs to you. That your potential audience is worldwide and your shipping costs may be zero? Welcome to the future, I guess.

Further Reading

First, a tip of the hat to something recent that reinvigorated me after I let this site sit, all but finished, for almost a year: In May of 2009, screenwriter John August began a short-fiction-selling experiment in which he published “The Variant,” his new short story, only online — and sold it as a $0.99 electronic book via PayPal and Amazon. Check out (a) this post about the story itself, and (b) the story’s anchor page at his site. He’s written a slew of fascinating posts about sales numbers, Amazon reviews, and more, so put “The Variant” into the search form on August’s site and read what you find.

Let’s not pretend that a story becomes a story only when it is published in a magazine.A lot of this site was first built on ideas tossed around on the subject of modern scifi and short-fiction magazines, from the likes of Warren Ellis (see “Burst Culture” and “SF Magazines: On and On and On…”), Cory Doctorow (see “SF Magazines in Sad Decline“), and Jed Hartman (see the short fiction editorial), plus links and links and links spinning off of all that. We’re none too happy to see magazines in the state they’re in, but neither are we doing them much of a favor by submitting material to them that they don’t want to publish.

Don’t mistake us: we’d love to get published in some of the magazines that are ailing now — I do and will continue to submit fiction — but we’ve decided not to put our visibility on hold until a beleaguered editor gives us the go ahead. Let’s look at them as monthly showcases of notable work and not pretend that a story becomes a story only when it is published in a magazine.

Our mission to publish stories maybe makes Jet Pack a de facto ‘zine, but whatever. We’ll take the label if you’ll agree to read some of our stuff.

What do you think?

© 2009 Will Hindmarch