Jason
J. Marchi made his first professional sale, a poem,
to Amazing Stories magazine in 1988.
Since then, Mr. Marchi has sold over 900 articles, stories, poems, and essays
to magazines and newspapers, and won over a dozen awards presented by the Association
of American Publishers (a REVERE Award), National Federation of Press Women,
Connecticut Press Club, and the Society of Professional Journalists.
In November 2010, Mr. Marchi’s first collection
of poems, Ode on a Martian Urn, was
published as a chapbook, and a year later his first picture book, The Legend of Hobbomock: The Sleeping Giant,
was published in hardcover. Hobbomock
is a perennial seller to elementary schools and summer reading lists. Hobbomock was also noted as a Barnes
& Noble regional bestseller in the first few years after its publication.
During the 16 years that Mr. Marchi worked for
McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, a higher education publisher, he founded and managed the
not-for-profit New Century Writer Awards (NCWA) contest that operated for six
years in close association with Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story magazine. NCWA awarded over $65,000 in cash
prizes to several dozen writers. Mr. Marchi is also credited with discovering
the early literary talents of Joseph Hill (Heart-Shaped
Box, Horns) when the NCWA presented Mr. Hill with its first Ray Bradbury
Short Story Fellowship in 2002.
Mr. Marchi was closely mentored by Ray Bradbury
between 2000 and 2009 after the two became pen pals during the 1980s and 1990s.
Mr. Marchi and Mr. Bradbury maintained their extraordinary friendship until Mr.
Bradbury’s death in 2012 at the age of 91.
As an editor, Mr. Marchi launched Automobilia, the first book in the SpeKulative Stories Anthology Series, published in January 2024. He is also a
30-year Active Member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association,
Inc.
Mr. Marchi works from his boyhood home in Guilford, Connecticut.
Question: What kind of books does OmicronWorld publish?
Answer: Under our Fahrenheit books imprint, which, upon the suggestion of a writer friend I named in honor of my mentor and friend, Ray Bradbury, I’ve published writers whose work I like but who have been unable to break into traditional publishing and don’t want to assume all the work of self-publishing.
I’ve published both fiction and non-fiction by individual authors, but I’m currently moving away from single-author titles to focus on my love of short fiction and poetry in the form the theme anthologies.
I started as a micro press—more of a boutique publisher, really—meaning I published just one or two titles by select authors each year. But I hope to grow into a small press publisher focused on thematic short fiction anthologies (which include poetry) for the foreseeable future.
Novels are more popular among readers and tend to sell more copies than short story collections (stories by a single author) and short story anthologies (stories by multiple authors). But I loved the short story more than any other fictional form. And my first professional sales as a writer were poems to science fiction magazines back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. So, I’m focusing on those two literary forms for the next several years—short stories and poems.
Question: Can you tell readers about what’s involved in your work as editor/publisher?
Answer: Excitement and the mundane—those are the two operative words in answer to this question.
It's exciting to think of a new anthology theme idea—something I consider striking, like the Automobilia anthology idea, where automobiles are featured in each story. And it's fun to get word out that you're looking for submissions from writers. Then it's a real joy to see how many people respond and start sending you their work, hoping to sell their words and see their story printed in a book. It's also a joy to read through all those stories and see what really stands out and needs to be published that hasn’t been published anywhere yet. That’s a wonderful discovery process. And I like to reprint stories I like, because so many times a writer has written a good or great story, but it only gets printed in a magazine or anthology once and is never read again. A good story should be reprinted and find new readers through the years.
This is all part of the exciting process. And it's especially fun to accept a work and pay the writer on acceptance. I never liked the idea of publishers that pay on publication. Writers should be paid immediately. That’s a pet peeve of mine. It's a real joy to cut a check and pay a writer up front. I find that immensely satisfying even when that money comes out of my own pocket, and I might never earn that money back.
Then the mundane work begins. Assembling the book takes some time and becomes rote, although working with a professional cover designer is always fun. And then comes the arduous process of going through the book looking for errors once it's typeset. Sometimes no matter how many times you and others look at a manuscript, there's always some errors that sneak through, but you try to minimize those as much as possible.
So far I've only been using the Amazon KDP print and digital publishing platform which I think might limit sales to bookstores and the like, but with online marketing and with online book buying—and getting to the proper book influencers through TikTok and other social platforms—a book can still sell pretty well without having to be in physical (known as brick and motor) bookstores.
I've been thinking of also issuing the books through the IngramSparks system, but I’ve found that technically more difficult to do than through the Amazon KDP system. But brick and mortar bookstores don’t like to buy and offer books from Amazon. Amazon is a bookstore’s competitor. Bookstores like to work with a wholesaler, like Ingram and their huge supply-chain system.
Selling books is difficult, no matter what, unless you have a big staff which means big overhead and a bigger level of stress. My ultimate goal is simply to break even on the expense of every book I publish, to cover all the upfront costs of the permission fees for the stories for the anthologies, and then there's also the cost of the cover designer, and sometimes the cost of additional book cover artwork, and then there is a cost to print advance reader copies for proofing, and the contributor’s free copies to have for their own permanent bookshelf at home.
With all of that said, it's always a joy to put a book together, and like anything else, the middle of the process can get bogged down with a lot of boring housekeeping. But then you get your energy back again when the interior and cover files for the book are finally ready and you get them up to the publishing platform website and you get the marketing for the title going and before you know it you have another book out in the marketplace.
I find the single biggest challenge is getting enough word out about each title to try and drive sales as far as a book can sell. I learned a long time ago that only the big publishers with deep pockets can pay for ads for huge named authors, but for most writers you have to try and market your books by word-of-mouth. You try and market the book and let people know about the book as much as possible without spending any money (only time) because it's gonna be very hard to get that money back in book sales down the road.
Acting as an editor and publisher is mostly a labor of love at this point. If a book takes off and sells well, that’s the icing on the cake. That financial success paves the way to take a financial risk on future books.
So far, I’ve had only one book sell well beyond its $12,000 production cost and earn a profit to compensate for the losses on other books. That book was my own, the children’s book The Legend of Hobbomock. Twelve years later it still sells a few hundred copies a year. Not a wealth-maker, but a steady survivor in the book marketplace.
Question: What
are you working on now?
I'm also trying to work on my own writing and getting some of my own books out there, I'm mainly a short story writer, as I mentioned before, and I’m almost done writing the stories for three different theme-linked story collections.
I’ve tried to write novels, and I still might finish one or two yet, but I really love the short story. As I mentioned before, Ray Bradbury was my mentor. I first wrote to him when I was 19 and he made the mistake of writing back. So, over the next 20 years we became pen pals, And then we became close personal friends during the last 13 years of his life. Bradbury was mainly a short story writer. He wrote very few novels in his career. So that's why I fell in love with the short story, and then I fell in love with the short stories of Ernest Hemingway and Shirley Jackson, and many others whose stories appear in those college fiction anthologies.
Thus, I've decided to spend most of my own time writing short stories, while also finding short stories by others to include in each forthcoming thematic anthology.
Like the Automobilia anthology, I've already got a number of famous writers whose stories I have for the train tales anthology. I love placing new writers side-by-side with classic/known writers. I think that’s a cool thing to do for writers alive today who are trying to get their work and their name out there.
Question: What made you start working as an editor/publisher?
Answer: Several different or disparate things coalesce into my interest in becoming an editor and publisher.
I started out selling poems to Amazing Stories and Weird Tales magazines. And then I sold a few more works and then short stories to some small magazines.
About that same time, I started working for a division of a small higher educational publishing company that became part of Times Mirror and then McGraw-Hill towards the end of my 16-year career there. The company was small in the early years, and I was able to see books developed from the very start—from acquisition of articles and manuscripts all the way through the typesetting and printing/binding of the books, and then the marketing and fulfillment. I paid close attention to what was going on—and I had directed access to the president of the company at any time—so I fell in love with the idea of producing books and developing books as much as I loved holding books in my hands and reading books.
Later, when I learned how difficult it is for many really good writers to break into mainstream publishing because the competition is so fierce, I decided that maybe I could help some of those writers end up with a book in their hands because their work was good, and they deserved to have a published book.
You see, I was rejected more times that I can count. My first two children’s books were rejected by every publishing house. The manuscripts would win in contests, the judges loved the stories, but editors and publishing houses said, sorry, not for us. I was also told by some editors and publishers that a book like The Legend of Hobbomock (a Native American myth legend story) would never sell.
I got so tired of hearing NO I took the advice of other accomplished writers who loved my Hobbomock story, and that was to “publish the book yourself,” they said, which I did, under my own start-up press, Fahrenheit Books. I took all I had learned from the educational publisher over 16 years and applied it to starting my own press. That book, by the way, ended up becoming a regional best seller in Connecticut in the first three years after its publication. It was an immediate hit. So much for the editor who said it would not sell, huh? Sometimes you just HAVE to believe in yourself and work against the naysayers.
Having experienced so many blockades—which I still hit to this day with traditional book publishers and all of these newer, on-line literary magazines—I was driven to try and help other writers as much as I can.
I can only help a few, but it’s very satisfying to give new writers a chance. It’s far too easy—and I think lazy—to say NO to every creative idea that does not fit the current cultural narrative. Visionaries ignore current culture and pop-culture, and invent the future. Not that I’m a visionary, but those are the types of people I most admire and would like to emulate, In my case, I hope to follow the beat of a different drummer through micro-press publishing.
Lastly, by publishing Automobilia I have had the great pleasure of meeting new, wondrous writers, such as yourself, and a few of these new people have become close friends. This is an added benefit of editing and publishing books. It’s not all about me trying to get my own writing out into the world. I loved to help others just as much if not more.
Question: What advice would you offer to those who are currently writing and want to be published?
Answer: The unique thing about writing is that you can do it in just about any place that you can get your words down on paper, or onto a computer, or even recorded onto a voice recording app on a smartphone.
I often “write” to my phone recording app when hiking trails on preserve lands near me. I transcribe the stories when I get home, also through an app that turns my spoken words into text, thus saving a lot of time not having to type. I mentioned this only because no matter where you are and when you are you can write something down that hits you and not lose it forever to the ether.
As for general publishing advice, study every print and on-line magazine market you can find, and send out your work.
Robert Heinlein, the great science fiction writer of the mid-20th century had five rules of writing. The are: 1. Write regularly. 2. Finish what you start. 3. Market your work promptly. 4. Rewrite to editorial demand. 5. Push your work until it is sold.
I live by this, even today. The last three are key.
I also suggest that fiction writers try to expand their world view and write non-fiction in the form of articles. For a long time, I found it very difficult to sell my fiction, even though that’s what I loved to write the most. But when I started writing non-fiction for newspapers and magazines, I started getting published each week, saw my name in the byline for each article, and got paid for it! My writing also got better due to all the regular wiring I was doing for the newspaper, which later turned into assignments by editors at bigger, glossy regional magazines.
For 16 years I wrote for a weekly newspaper group and made an okay living from it. I was able to pay modest bills. Things have changed in the newspaper business as they have lost advertising sales revenue over the past several years and slashed freelance and staff writing budgets. But if a writer really needs to see their work in print, and be paid money for that writing, news reporting and magazine article writing is very satisfying, while you continue to work on your fiction.
And keep sending your work out to editors an agents, like Heinlein said.
Thank you, Jacqueline, for inviting me to answers these questions for your readers. Happy 2024 to you and all your readers and writers!
Question: Where
and when will readers be able to obtain your latest published anthology
AUTOMOBILIA?
And, if your readers are interested in some of the other books I have published through Fahrenhiet Books, please visit the OmicronWorld website at: https://www.omicronworld.com/fahrenheit-books
Comments and
questions for Jason are welcome here.
Very interesting interview.
ReplyDeleteThanks for commenting.
DeleteExcellent interview. Best wishes to Jason and Fahrenheit.
ReplyDeleteGreat interview! Very informative and interesting! I look forward to reading The Legend of Hobbomock.
ReplyDelete