Into E-Publishing

So after years of watching this whole “electronic publishing” thing develop and wondering if it might be good for me as a writer, I’m finally plunging in. Will Jacobs and I are hard at work on the “Expanded 30th Anniversary Edition” of our first book, The Beaver Papers.

       The publisher is Atomic Drop Press. They’re a very new outfit—they’ve only brought one book out before, a peculiar thing called The Max Kleinman Reader—but they’ve got a snazzy look and a lot of ambition. They’ve gotten themselves onto Amazon and a nearly every other e-book vendor by way of Smashwords, and they’ll be adding print-on-demand soon. And they’ve promised us that after Beaver they’ll want to work with us on more: probably bringing back our comic book The Trouble with Girls and launching at least one new project.
       I know I’ve described the conceit of the book before: what if the world’s great writers had written episodes of Leave It to Beaver? With summaries of episodes of the most wholesome of old-style sitcoms as if written by William Faulkner, Yukio Mishima, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Franz Kafka, and twenty other people. We’ll be adding at least ten more scripts to this one, probably more. So far we definitely have Philip Dick, Jim Thompson, Richard Wright, J. G. Ballard, Flannery O’Connor, and the US Office of Civil Defense. That last one is called “Duck and Cleaver.”
       It’s been strange and fun to go back to something I did 32 years ago and do more in the same vein. The gulf from one’s early 20s to one’s mid 50s can seem huge, but I've been astonished at how quickly that gulf can be leaped back over. Apparently that goofy, know-nothing, 23-year old is still very much alive in me, for good or ill. Which I’m glad of. He was an idiot in a lot of ways, but he had an energy and optimism and willingness to throw himself into something just because it excited him that I’m glad I haven’t lost. When this job’s done I’ll be curious to see, not only how the new scripts stack up to the old, but how this unexpected loop-back through my past his affected my current work. (Because I’m pretty sure it will, somehow or other.)
       It’s also been strange and fun to discover a whole new way of getting books to an audience. Where it will lead me or whether it will make me any money almost doesn't matter now. I’ve been doing the published-on-paper-by-a-big company-in-New-York thing for more than half my life, so I like learning what else the word “book” can mean. If nothing else, this e-publishing thing is fast: Will and I are still writing new material in September, but we still expect to get the book out before 2013 ends and it becomes a 31st Anniversary Edition.
       I’ll keep you posted on what I learn.