Apex Magazine and Apex Publications Editor Interview: Jason Sizemore
Tags: Andrea Pawley, Apex Magazine, Apex Publications, Jason Sizemore, Magazine Spotlight, Weightless Books
Weightless Books interviews Jason Sizemore, Editor of Apex Magazine and Managing Editor of Apex Publications.
Q: In June 2015, you announced that you quit your day job to work on Apex Magazine and Apex Publications full time. From all appearances, that seems to be going quite well, but tell the truth – is your household eating more Ramen noodles as a result?
Sizemore: In college, I once bought a crate of Ramen noodles at the local Costco. 144 little packets of delight.
After I ate the last one, I vowed NEVER AGAIN.
Your question has made me ill with memories!
Q: Apex Magazine and Apex Publications continue to win awards as do the stories, novels, and collections you publish. Most recently, “This is Horror” named Apex Magazine the fiction magazine of the year and Apex Publication’s Sing Me Your Scars by Damien Angelica Walters as the short story collection of the year. What other awards would you most like to win?
Sizemore: Although I covet and desire any and all awards, the two that I would most like to win are a Hugo rocket and a Stoker haunted house. Most visitors to my house know squat about literary awards, but when you have a big silver rocket or an awesome scary house on your mantle, those will draw notice.
I would love to see Sing Me Your Scars win an award. Damien Angelica Walters’ fiction is widely respected and liked, and I think she is deserving of the recognition.
Q: In August 2015, you published For Exposure: The Life and Times of a Small Press Publisher, your collection of semi-true and sometimes humorous essays about how you became the Apex Overlord. Six of the 13 chapters contain eyewitness rebuttals of your statements, and one chapter includes a separate fact-check. Are you a forgiving Overlord, or will those who disagree with you learn the errors of their ways?
Sizemore: Forgiving? Not at all. I remember every slight and askew glance cast my direction!
That said, I do recognize that my perception of events is open to interpretation. Those I wrote about the most—Maurice Broaddus, Sara M. Harvey, and Monica Valentinelli (to name a few)—I felt it only fair to give them an opportunity to have their side of the tale be told. Do I agree with their versions? Mostly, no.
Q: In February 2016, you kickstarted Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling Anthology. Congratulations on exceeding your funding goal! What can the backers and other readers expect to find in this collection?
Sizemore: Jaym Gates and Monica Valentinelli are dynamic and hardworking editors. They’re also perfectionists. I think you’ll find Upside Down reflects that attention to quality.
Here is a free word association I did for Upside Down in preparation for this question: fun, diverse, thoughtful, subversive, Galen Dara art.
Apex Magazine, a three-time Hugo Award finalist and World Fantasy Award-winning online magazine publishing the best horror and science fiction, is available DRM-free from Weightless in single issues and as a 12-month subscription.
Raised in the Appalachian hills of southeastern Kentucky, Jason Sizemore is a three-time Hugo Award-nominated editor, a writer, and operates the science fiction, fantasy, and horror press Apex Publications. He is the author of the collection of dark science fiction and horror shorts Irredeemable and the tell-all creative fiction For Exposure: The Life and Times of a Small Press Publisher. He currently lives in Lexington, KY.
Playing with the Hydra: Guest Post by Jason Sizemore
Tags: Apex Publications, Jason Sizemore
As a small press publisher, I don’t know what to do with Amazon.
Capitalism is an odd beast. In the short run, capitalism rewards the hardy, the stubborn, and those clever entrepreneurs who find their way through the harsh rapids of today’s economy. In the long run, the little guys are shoved aside while the most successful, such as Amazon, Apple, Walmart, and countless mega-corps go on to rule the world.
This isn’t an indictment of capitalism. I live in ‘Merica, after all. Capitalism is the American way, and for that, I am happy. But it does place the small business owner in a tough position. Do you fight the powerful, many-headed hydra, or do you hitch a ride on its back waiting for one of the heads to reach around and swallow you whole?
In my new book, For Exposure: The Life and Times of a Small Press Publisher, I outline my troubles with the publishing distribution system. Because the returns system is archaic and unnecessary (and certainly not environmentally friendly for a greenie like myself), I elected to turn away from the IPGs and DBDs of the world and opted for the print-on-demand business (POD) model. The POD model is viable due to the force of nature known as Amazon.com.
If you’re not familiar with the POD model, let me give you a brief description. POD allows a publisher to keep very little inventory while maintaining the ability to reach customers via 3rd party vendors such as Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Chapters. Because digital publishing has become an integral part of small press revenues, I lump it into the overall POD model as a subset. Basically, the model has two arms: trade paperback and digital.
And guess who has the easiest POD service to use for trade paperbacks? Createspace (owned by Amazon). And guess who has one of the easiest and the highest royalty rates for eBooks? The Amazon Kindle Digital Publishing (KDP) program.
Both are wonderful services, and I praise Amazon for making them user friendly. Both have enabled the tidal wave of self-publishing to occur which has benefited of many, many authors. But…
What if the hydra wants more? We’ve seen the power Amazon has exerted over the Big 5 publishers by removing various publishers’ books from their online store when they want a better contract. What happens should the hydra want to pay less royalty to the small publishers and authors who used KDP and/or Createspace? If KDP drops the royalty rate from 70% to 35%, then what can we do?
I see a lot of Amazon evangelicals stating with certainty that this will never happen. I sincerely hope they’re right, and perhaps they are, but having the health of your business reliant on the whims of one megacorp strikes me as a dangerous game, toeing a dangerous imaginary line that flickers back and forth.
Two weeks ago, I did some quick analysis on Apex sales figures by all vendors so far in 2015. For all digital sales, the percentages broke down like this:
Kindle 79%
Nook 7%
Direct Sales 5%
Weightless Books 4%
Kobo 1%
iTunes 1%
Other 3%
Even though Apex provides product links to the Amazon, Nook, Weightless, iTunes, and Kobo editions on every product page, a huge majority (a whopping 79%!) still buy our books and Apex Magazine from the hydra.
It’s been pointed out to me by my well-meaning accountant that if Apex focused strictly on Amazon, we would probably increase our revenues. Perhaps that is true, but the thought horrifies me. It would place Apex firmly on the wrong side of “don’t be part of the problem, be part of the solution” equation.
I always tell our customers to buy from whichever vendor they like the best. If pressed, I will suggest buying from an independent vendor, like Weightless Books, or directly from Apex. I realize that Amazon pays the bills, but in a capitalist economy, competition provides a better shopping experience for both businesses and consumers.
As Apex has done, many small press publishers have embraced the multiple independent vendors (though quite a few small publishers are Amazon exclusive). The Big 5 think only in volume and that leaves a lot of quality indie vendors in the cold. Making all titles available over multiple indie market places would be a good start, but not the only answer. Readers need to seek out sites like Weightless Books and, instead of giving their money to a megacorp, consider supporting the hardworking indie folks.
Other than continuing to carry the banner for indie stores like Weightless Books and Drivethru Fiction and choosing to turn to B&N and Kobo for megacorp purchases, I’m not sure what else Apex can do. It is possible that small press and self-publishers have reached the point of no return. We’ve engineered this hydra. At this point, with 79% of our eBook sales going to Amazon, is our only option is to continue to feed it?
From my end, that may just be Apex’s only option, but it isn’t the only option open to the readers. Money, in our society, speaks louder than words. Therefore, might I suggest buying an Apex book or For Exposure: The Life and Times of a Small Press Publisher from Weightless today! That will be a great first step toward helping create a fair market…
On sale: $2.99 all this week!
ABOUT THE BOOK:
For Exposure: The Life and Times of a Small Press Publisher
Apex Publications
182 pages
ISBN: 9781937009304
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Born the son of an unemployed coal miner in a tiny Kentucky Appalachian villa named Big Creek (population 400), Jason fought his way out of the hills to the big city of Lexington. He attended Transylvania University (a real school with its own vampire legend) and received a degree in computer science. Since 2005, he has owned and operated Apex Publications. He is the editor of five anthologies, author of Irredeemable, a three-time Hugo Award loser, an occasional writer, who can usually be found wandering the halls of hotel conventions.
New Prime titles, Lightspeed/Fantasy update
Tags: Apex Publications, haggis, Lightspeed Magazine, Prime Books
Today we had a huge release: Prime Books and Apex Publications are working with us to get all of their titles onto this here tiny mighty site. Prime also dropped the prices on all their titles (apart from Rudy Rucker’s Ware Tetralogy) to just $4.95.
New titles here today from Prime: collections by Sarah Monette and Richard Parks, many anthologies edited by Paula Guran, Heart of Iron by Ekaterina Sedia (Publishers Weekly starred review: “Superbly blends novel of manners, alternate history, and le Carré–style espionage with a dash of superheroes and steampunk.”), and, very excitingly, R. A. MacAvoy’s first book in many years, Death and Resurrection.
Apex Publications tend to run a lot darker, although Lavie Tidhar’s HebrewPunk is proving popular already and Paul Jessup’s Dead Stay Dead looks worth an, er, look(!).
Out there on the internets there is a huge fundraiser for one of our heros: Terri Windling. Please check it out and maybe someone on your holiday list will be lucky, lucky, lucky! (There is so much good stuff! So tempted!)
Also of note: Cheeky Frawg now have a, yes, cheeky new website.
I think all the monthly magazines have gone out. They don’t all go out on the same day: some of them are the first day of the month, some are the first Monday or Tuesday, thank god Michael can keep it straight. Also, with Lightspeed and Fantasy Magazine merging into a one, new, bigger Lightspeed, perhaps you might consider subscribing before Jan. 1, 2012, when the price will go up!
Next week we will be bringing on Mike Allen’s Clockwork Phoenix anthologies as well as his long-running magazine, Mythic Delirium. We’re also talking to more magazines about getting them on board.
And, fingers crossed, we may yet have gift certificates available by the time the holidays roll around. If not then, we should have them by Robert Burns Day—well known in poetry circles as the day to not only share a haggis, whisky, and poetry with friends and family, but also the day to go out an buy an ereader in the post-post-holiday electronic stores sale-of-desperation and fill it with ebooks from indie ebooksites. Mmmm . . . veggie haggis.
New Rifter, New DeNiro, New TK, too
Tags: Alan DeNiro, Apex Publications, Ginn Hale, Something Wicked, The Rifter
What a week we had! I sent off the latest part of The Rifter, only to get a lovely polite note from a reader pointing out that somehow I had just sent out Part 3 labeled as Part 4. Oops. Fixed. Part 4, Witches’ Blood is now available. And, if you’re enjoying The Rifter, you can go say hello to Ginn Hale in the Goodreads What will happen next in The Rifter? group.
This week we’re also proud to release an exclusive short story by one of my favorite writers: Alan DeNiro’s Moonlight is Bulletproof. It’s got a cover by Alan and is only 99 cents. Best buck you will spend this week.
“Moonlight Is Bulletproof”
On the first day of spring, Dispatch awakens me with a case.
“This is a good one,” she says.
We also have two fab new ebooks from Apex:
Starve Better
Nick Mamatas
Starve Better makes no promises of making you a bestselling author. It won’t feed aspiring writers’ dreams of fame and fortune.
Let’s Play White
Chesya Burke
White brings with it dreams of respect, of wealth, of simply being treated as a human being. It’s the one thing Walter will never be.
and nice news for those who love their monthly subscriptions: I’m happy to introduce our latest subscription, all the way from Canada:
Something Wicked Magazine “a monthly Horror and Science Fiction short story magazine publishing some of the great new voices in the horror and science fiction genre.”
While you’re here, please consider signing up as a Weightless Books affiliate. Our new widget generator means you can make author or book (or genre!) specific badges and widgets for your site.
And: we’re hugely excited about one of the new publishers we have lined up to come on board asap: Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s new line, Cheeky Frawg Books.
Jeff sent us an initial list of authors and titles and this stuff is going to blow your mind. There are new books, old books, new editions, new art, new is the new is the news. Just wait!
Sure is nice to have something like this coming down the pike.
Thanks for going Weightless!