From An Interview over at The Dharma of Don talking about writing, publishing, and everything in-between! (Check out his blog)
Don: The Words of Traitors is published under Mythos Media which is your imprint, if I am not mistaken. What other houses have you published under, and have you succeeded with Mythos Media where you felt you struggled with branding under your own name?
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| The Olde Occult Daze |
James: My first book was released through New Falcon Press, who published Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Aliester Crowley, Israel Regardi -- it was because of them I think that I got branded an "occult author" although that isn't really entirely accurate. I've worked on several books since then that have been released by Weaponized, which is a UK based imprint.
You will see most of those books also on the Mythos Media website. We are a brand but it isn't restrictive in the way a traditional publisher might be. For instance, several of the books with the Mythos Media imprint have other publishers, and the
film we worked with was through another production house. Mythos Media at the moment is about 90% projects that I've been heavily involved in, but that isn't a rule either.
So there's essentially two things that help me decide what I want to bring in, aside from sheer circumstance. The first is the basic definition:
Mythos: (n) A story or set of stories relevant to or having a significant truth or meaning for a particular culture, religion, society, or other group
Media: (n) Tools used to store and deliver information.
That's probably the one thing we take literally. Mythos also originally meant "by mouth," it is that which is conveyed culturally, as opposed to logos. Any form of media, any story could theoretically come on our radar.
So then there's the 2nd question, which is whether it fits in with the others as sort of counter-culture media. In other words, would they make more sense being listed with a major publisher, or is it a story that would likely show up on prime-time TV? If so, then it's probably not Mythos Media material. There's a bit more about the history of the project on the About page. (
http://www.mythosmedia.net/p/rather-than-avoiding-unsettling-unusual.html )
Don: Can you tell us about your publishing process and how you made decisions on The Words of Traitors? I'm particularly interested in why you chose the size you did, the paper quality, and the type of cover.
James: The print size was a very conscious decision, based on the standard for art books -- though it's within several millimeters of standard magazine size as well. It's funny to me that the standard for our supposedly least and most disposable print media are almost the same, but most standards are historically arbitrary, anyway.
That decision was arrived at as a result of the nature of the art. A lot of it includes dioramas that quite frankly are only fully revealed in their detail at poster size -- I've been running an art show for Words of Traitors that includes canvas prints at 16" x 20" and 20" x 24" size, as well as some of the originals, some of which were larger than that.
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| A GONZOMENTARY?! |
There's no way that it would work at standard paperback size. If it could've made any sense I would've liked it to be even larger than A4, but 11" x 17" is really only feasible if it's hardbound.
What else was intentional... Well, I wanted to make a book that was more about the book itself rather than just the text -- in other words, a book that wouldn't translate well into Kindle format. It's kind of a reaction against the trend, in that way. Not all of my books are like that, certainly, but it was what made sense to me for this one.
I was actually pretty happy with the interior print quality, and that was something of a surprise. I was afraid it was going to be too glossy. It was printed by Amazon directly, and that was the part of the process I had no say in if I wanted to get it out. Paper stock and print process isn't a choice, and full color is so incredibly expensive that at $29.99 our cut is a smaller % than any of our other books. That's how it had to be -- our Indiegogo campaign raised about 1/3 of the goal, so we had to cut back -- a lot of people might have just pocketed the money and said "We'll put it out later," but that's just not how I do things. It did mean that we had to consolidate as much as possible, and it did restrict the scope of what was initially planned.
The full process involved in the book, though. That would take a lot more time and space than the average reader would probably want to take. A single piece of art in the book might have gone back and forth between myself and the artist many times before it was finished. For other pieces, I took art that was sent to me, printed it out myself, and worked it into collages or dioramas that included art I'd made, lit and photographed that, brought it into Photoshop, did a lot of digital painting with the Wacom tablet, and then maybe I'd blend it with one of the textures I'd made.
But I will say that like several Mythos Media projects before, it began with an open call to the internet, as well as to those I've worked with before, in terms of you know, here's a new project we're working on, here is the concept, do you want to collaborate? So there's always an opportunity for new blood. And it starts there...
