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>> Jim Munroe's guide to interplanetary publishing success

by JULIET WATERS

I call No Media Kings Press in Toronto and get this message: "Thank you for calling No Media Kings. To leave a message for the Sales and Marketing department, press pound. To leave a message for the publicity department, press pound. For orders press pound. To leave a message for Jim Munroe, press pound." I leave a message for Jim Munroe, author of Angry Young Spaceman, a kitschy SF novel about an earthling who decides to pay back his student loan by teaching English on a distant planet.

Munroe calls back shortly. Seems he was out getting the name tags for the Teach English on Other Planets (TEOOP) seminar he'll be giving in Montreal this weekend. "They're very convention centre-ish," he says proudly. Perfect for his role as a recruitment officer for the TEOOP program, which he describes as a cross between a Tony Robbins clone and a "supercilious bureaucratic bastard. Basically the role I was born into."

Or basically not. Anyone looking at Munroe's bio would more likely expect a seminar on "How to get with the program--briefly--then get the fuck out." In this case "the program" being not TEOOP, but the established path to successful authorship.

A few years ago Munroe was the fresh new product at HarperCollins. His first novel, Flyboy Action Figure Comes with Gasmask, was a respectable success, doing well in the young Gen X demographic, selling a film option and U.S. publishing rights. But after a year, Munroe, a long time anti-corporate activist (he was managing editor at Adbusters) decided to take what he learned and politely ask HarperCollins to let him out of the contract for his second novel.

Figuring he knew more about how to reach his demographic, and figuring that by cutting out the big publisher he could make more money on fewer sales of Angry Young Spaceman, he decided to set up his own imprint, No Media Kings. He struck a distribution deal with Insomniac Press, set up a Web site to market the book and designed an on-the-road promotion scheme that defies the usually tedious book launch format.

But quirky performance art launches and alternative distribution schemes aren't the only way Munroe is defying the standard sales tactics. He's also giving the text away for free, at least on the Internet. Visitors to www.nomediakings.org can download a free version of Angry Young Spaceman.

Munroe's response to the obvious question "how are you going to make money?" reveals the alternative media mindset at work. Essentially Munroe believes that giving away e-books is not all that different from sending out advance galleys to the mainstream media, except that in his case the galleys are going directly to the people he wants to sell to instead of a media who may or may not be interested.

"I'm not actually giving the book away for free. I'm giving the text away for free in a form that is decidedly inferior to the final product. If I was saying 'put your name in here and I'll send you a book,' that would be one thing. But there's no cost to me beyond the actual time that I took to write it. The way I imagine it will work, practically, is that people will start to read it, either dislike it and trash it, or like it and buy the book. Because no one really wants to buy an entire book online. I mean, some people will, and I have in the past, but I'm a geek..."

As for how well it's working, judging from advance sales, well enough. Out of a 2,500 first printing, Munroe has sold 1,500 copies in advance. Still, just because it's free, don't think that copyright laws don't apply. As he writes, "No part of the publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written permission except in the case of brief quotation embodied in reviews. You know the drill. Make up your own little stories."

Angry Young Spaceman by Jim Munroe. No Media Kings, pb, 244 pp, $20. TEOOP info- session, May 8 at Jailhouse (30 Mont-Royal W.), 9 pm, free