No Media Kings
interview with Jim Munroe After having published his first novel "Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask" with Harper Collins, one of the biggest North American publishing companies, Jim Munroe (28) decided to start his own project "No Media Kings" with self-publishing his second novel, "Angry Young Spaceman" in late 1999. The Toronto-based author who also wrote for Adbusters comes from a political punkrock zine background, and both of his two books carry a critical perception of the corporate world and capitalism in general. His website www.nomediakings.orgis highly recommended. Jim, you have your own publishing company "No Media Kings". When did you start it? I started it some years ago. I've been self-publishing for twelve years under different names. I had a press called Lickspittle (an old word meaning a kiss-ass) Adventures. "no media kings" has been going since the end of 1999, early 2000. What is the difference between "no media kings" and the things you've done before? In terms of how they function, no media kings is on a bigger scale, kind of reflective of my "growing" … in terms of what I was doing then, going to school, doing jobs and stuff like that. It was sort of limited by that. But I guess the main thing is, the reason why I chose to change the name is partly why I went independent. I named it "no media kings" because I was excited to self-publish instead of going with a major publisher. I did that with my first book "Flyboy Action Figure comes with Gasmask". Why did you decide to make your own company if you had already published something with a well-known publishing company? Why did you choose to have so much more work? The current media climate is faced with consolidation. If it continues without being stopped, it eventually will be one or two incredibly powerful people that control a huge amount of what we see and filter the world through -- critique culture, broadcast or film, basically an important way for humans to understand the world that they're living in beyond what they see with their five senses. To me, the idea of there being a media king was really upsetting. It feels like a backwards step to go back to a period where the people that had the most impact or control of our lives were not accountable for anything other than their own profits. The monarchy would rule without having to tell the peasants why there were doing what they were doing, and there is really no way to get rid of the king than by overthrowing the entire monarchy. There's a lot of political reasons why I did it. It was mainly motivated by that, but when I started looking into it, I realized that it is more work, a lot of the work in terms of coming up with ideas for promotion or the copy on the back, all sorts of little things, were things I was already contributing to Harper Collins. For instances, I brought in the cover designer, and we worked together on the cover, gave it to Harper Collins and they said okay. To me, it was a fairly natural step in a sense that now I had an idea for promotion, like stickers, I could just do it without having it to pitch it to them and hope they would say okay. It gave me a lot more control over the whole project. As well, I got paid more per book this way. While I was getting about two dollars a book for "Flyboy", I got four dollars a book for "Angry Young Spaceman". How I look at it, I had six months of writing it, and six months of publishing it, and that's a year's work, and I got about 10.000 dollars. That's totally reasonable for me to live off on for a year. Were there things that you didn't like when working with Harper Collins? Or were they nice to you? They were pretty nice and very receptive about ideas I brought to them about covers and that kind of thing. I was on good terms with the editor-in-chief, and when I told her I was going to do it independently, she said she was disappointed, but not surprised. At the very first meeting I had told her I was considering turning it down, that I found the corporate ownership to be troubling. Why did you go to Harper Collins in the first place, then? What happened was, I had written it assuming I was going to publish it myself, but I decided to send it out to a bunch of publishers, just to see what they're thinking, just to get feedback, to see what kind of options I have. So I sent it out to about 60 places, and about five or six responded, saying they wanted to see the manuscript. Of those six, Harper Collins made an offer. For me, self-publishing always had been a totally positive experience. I know that in general there's this impression that it's somehow not as good as being published by another person. And I think there's good reason for that. there's a lot of bad stuff out there that is self-published. But there's also lots of bad stuff that's published by corporate presses, and people just don't acknowledge that it's crap. But it is! It's crap in a different way. A usually more boring way than something not that great that's published by an individual. It's mass-produced crap rather than individually produced crap. I thought that it would be interesting to see what the difference was. Because I've had this experience, but thinking of what mainstream-publishing is going to be like and actually having been through the experience is a different thing. It was just one book, and they could have made me sign for a whole bunch of books. I basically did it to compare it to my own experiences. Happily I discovered that in some ways the way self-publishers do it is better, because you pay more attention to the fact that it is an artwork, and the corporate system tends to break it down in terms of tasks, so you get one person doing the same thing again and again and again. While they might be good at it, there is not a lot of inspiration going into it and that's what I found. Especially with the promotion, what surprised me, was I thought Harper Collins would market the hell out of it and do a really offensive marketing campaign. But they didn't. I was the one coming up with ideas for the marketing campaign. It was interesting… we had these clichés what these big companies are like, and I think it's important to have some sort of real life experience to not only see it for yourself, but to be able to make a statement "I chose to self-publish!" rather than "I didn't have an option", which is at the back of a lot of people's minds, even if they are zine-friendly. The experience has given me a certain amount of credibility and I think that credibility leaks over into other people who do independent projects, self-publishing projects. The music industry was kind of my model. Ten years ago, people saw an indie record and assumened they couldn't get a major label deal, but nowadays, people say "Oh, probably they didn't want a major label deal." To me, that's an important shift that I'd like to see happen in books, too. I actually found it interesting that Harper Collins would publish your book, as it carries so much criticism of the corporate world. I guess that was another thing that made it easier for me to go with them. "Angry Young Spaceman" is critical of the western culture and capitalism, but "Flyboy" is more straightforward about that. To me, it was like, yes, it's a corporate entity that's doing it, but it's also putting out this message that it's bad. I actually was stunned that they were interested in it originally, because there's a part in it that one of the characters has a book deal and it goes bad, he doesn't get the book deal. So it's critical of the book industry in the book. When I was writing it, I thought, forget it, noone will wanna touch it. But I was wrong. In fact, when it was shown around in the States, an editor said "You know, that editor on page soandso, it's me!" I think there are a lot of people in corporate jobs that are sympathetic to the ideas that were in "Flyboy" but are not able for one reason or another to make a stand about it, but are able to put it in and get it out there. There's also this young editor, who was really keen on "Flyboy". He was fired four months after, which was really upsetting. He really backed it. Are there many self-publishing companies in Canada or North-America? Hmm… the best thing to do is to look on my site. There's a new section called "Threat by example", and there's eight self-published books, and it has some interviews on it. I'm really excited by them, and it does feel like there's some sort of a movement, especially people from punk rock backgrounds that are making their own books, and they're good! Do you have a punk rock background too? Yeah, that's how I got into zines and stuff in the first place. I always loved to write, and when I started writing zines, I was sort of excited thinking about those people making them in England and getting them at some show in Toronto. It was probably in '88 or '89. I was about 14, 15. It seemed like a cool way to get your stuff out there, get people commenting on it, because I've always loved to hear what people say. A lot of writers don't like comments on their work, they don't really care that much. I don't have any ideas I'm like the most gifted writer in the world. There's always room for criticism. If you have your stuff out there in that form, it's more likely people write to you than if you have it out in a book form, because you seem more accessible and real. They can imagine you doing it, while a book is "Oh my god, this guy must have a lot of money" - it gives a little bit of a barrier. Are you the only one working for No Media Kings? Yes, I'm the only one. Did you have support when you started it? Oh, I had tons of support! All the people in the small presses were really helpful, like ECW and Rush Hour Revisions, and Insomniac Press of course, I approached them pretty early to see if they would let me piggyback on their distribution deal, because the distribution outlets right now don't take self-publishers. You have to have three or four books in your backlist before they take you out. It's a way to filter out people, it's unfortunate. But there's ways around that kind of barrier, like my deal with Insomniac Press. Are your books available on Amazon.com? I know it's available on ebay or something, I do searches occasionally, but I doubt it's on amazon, and it probably won't be until it comes out in the States. It's coming out there in the fall. It's a big step for me in terms of No Media Kings. I wasn't looking forward to the idea of publishing in a foreign country, it's just the cost - sending out media packages in the United States, making phone calls, it's all very expensive. I would have eventually published it in the States myself, but I sent a copy to this great political guy, he publishes a lot of political books and science fiction now. So I sent him a book and a not, you might wanna consider picking this up, and he did! He bought the U.S. rights for it, and they're gonna do it in the States. If it goes well with them, if I have my next book out in Canada, I will probably sell the rights in the States as well. Did you get any financial support when you started your company? Well, it's funny, because I couldn't get anything from Art Councils because it's self-published. Because I'm a professional writer and had books published with major houses I can apply for grants as a writer, but not as a publisher. So I couldn't get any help there. But there is an entrepreneur grant that I got for starting a small business. They cover your living expenses for your first year in business. It's kind of ironic that it's a business program. I had a solid business plan. I picked up a comic yesterday, M@B, and it also said No Media Kings on it - did you also publish it? No... I have this section on my webpage, it's called "Steal Our Logo", and basically the idea is that these logos are meaningless, the corporate world uses them as stamp of approval. I just think that's bullshit! There's so much stuff published under corporate logos that is garbage. But it's a seal of approval -- people accept it as being good. So I suggested on my site that if people wanted to do self-publishing and seem authentic and seem real, they can take my logo and use it. There is actually a band called Static Eden, and they're from Campbellville (near Toronto) and they put out their CD with a No Media Kings logo as well. So you have the feeling that you make an impact on people, they read your website and take your logo… It's really cool that way. One of my biggest motivations for doing stuff is to inspire people because I get a lot of energy from other people. Obviously I like to create beautiful pieces of writing, that's important to me, but equally important is to inspire people. It's great to see people doing that. I had intended it to be mostly for books, people publish their books and put the logo on it, but it's fine people will put it on anything. I like the cross-genre mix. You just added a new part to your website, the "New Media Kings"… New Media Kings is for other digitally-based projects, there's this little video game... it's entirely text based. The style is called "interactive fiction", which I really liked when I was growing up, I played them all the time. In fact, when I was twelve, I didn't want to be a novelist, I wanted to be an interactive fiction programmer. It had the computer part, and it had the writing part. It's interesting, I haven't had a desktop computer in about ten years, and I think I'm buying one now. So I'm going back to digitally-based things. Something like 20,000 people have checked out my website, and it's pretty cool to think about that audience. That there's a way to get it out there. Experimenting rather than hypothesising how the internet changes our lives. I'd rather make little things, put them up there to get people react to them. To New Media Kings, there hasn't been a lot of reaction, I think most people I sent out emails about it are more into the writing. But then I checked out a newsgroup about interactive fiction, and I posted my address. Then I checked back after a month, and there was this whole string of people discussing it and comparing my video to the script, that I have also posted. This is the exciting thing about getting your work out in public, whether you meet folks or make zines or movies or whatever. You basically add to the culture in a way, it sounds pretentious, but you get people to talk about it, discuss it, and ultimately thinking about doing it themselves as well. The New Media Kings site will eventually hopefully do the same thing as the No Media Kings part, being a resource site, do-it-yourself video. I'm collecting articles about people that write about DIY video. I'd like that to happen.. .it's a gradual thing. I'm writing another book now, and that's my main focus. |