Vol.13 rides again. I’ve revisited and republished my 13th book from 2016.

Let’s cut to the chase with the Amazon link: https://amzn.to/4e81lyi

For those who don’t remember, this was a book of 20 short stories and flash fiction pieces. It included two things that were in other zines, and three stories that were in my own zine, Mandatory Laxative #14.

Let’s ask the KonGPT what it was about:

Vol. 13 by Jon Konrath is an eclectic, absurdist work that blends surreal humor with societal satire. The collection of short stories and essays addresses a wide array of random yet often connected topics, including pop culture, existential musings, and sharp critiques of consumerism and modern life. With chapter titles like “Mariah Carey Is Punk as Fuck” and “The Kansas City Tofu Firebombing,” the content explores bizarre scenarios filled with dark humor. The chaotic narrative jumps from one vignette to the next, portraying a disjointed, almost hallucinogenic journey through a world where everything is skewed to the point of absurdity.

Konrath’s writing style is frenetic, with a voice that mixes cynicism and wit while layering in cultural references ranging from fast food chains to forgotten celebrities. The underlying tone is rebellious, subversive, and at times grotesque, capturing the disillusionment with American culture in the early 21st century. The stories invite the reader to experience a twisted version of reality where logic breaks down, leaving behind a vivid, often unsettling commentary on the absurdities of daily life .

As I did with The Failure Cascade and Book of Dreams, this re-visit involved a quick edit to fix minor typos. If you already own the book, you’re not getting any new content here, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find some questionable use of commas quashed. This publication was mostly a long-tail effort to get old writing back out there.

The original cover was a play on the Black Sabbath album Vol.4. Back in 2016, I labored to get the font and the look of it right. The curse was the use of “The Picture” which seemed like a good idea at the time, the height of that dumb meme. I won’t get into the exact details, but that meme is dead and I’m scrubbing it from everything possible. There was something great about having a piece of branding like that, but it also very firmly painted me in a corner persona-wise, and I’m happy to abandon it. I like the new cover a lot, and it was neat to make. Finding an icon for each story was a fun project. Is it weird to have this book sort of named after the Black Sabbath album and not have the cover? Whatever.

I previously said I like Book of Dreams like 95% and Failure Cascade maybe 75%. I would honestly say I like Vol.13 maybe 80%. There are a few cringe bits here, and I do fall into some of the same Konrath tropes that I repeat far too much. (Me and Fat Mike go to the 7-Eleven; someone babbling about something at a fast-food restaurant; I’m at a Kroger talking to some weirdo; a military strike in everyday life.) There are certain callbacks that I used to make as part of my “brand” that have been driven into the ground that I can’t erase: Mariah Carey, Lunchables, NyQuil, etc. I’m done (or trying to be done) with writing like that, but I can’t erase all of it.

There are some stories in here that I absolutely love. “The Metaphor of Poundcake” is one of my favorite stories ever, and has two threads that weave together perfectly. “#JustKilldozerThings” has some absolutely fabulous lines and exchanges in it. While most of my flash fiction hovers around 1000 words in this era, there are a lot of stories that stretch out for two or three times that. It’s similar to Failure Cascade (and my next book) in that the stories almost get too long to be flash, but still feel like exactly the right balance between punchiness and story.

Anyway, there it is. Now, on to the next one.

http://koncast.libsyn.com/episode-10-ryan-werner

In this episode, I talk to writer, publisher, musician, and lunch lady Ryan Werner. He is the author of Shake Away These Constant Days, Murmuration, If There’s Any Truth In a Northbound Train, and Soft. He plays guitar in Young Indian and numerous other bands. He also runs Passenger Side books.

Links from this episode:

http://www.ryanwernerwritesstuff.com

https://ryanwerner.bandcamp.com

http://koncast.libsyn.com/episode-10-ryan-werner

http://koncast.libsyn.com/episode-9-timothy-gager

In this episode, I talk to writer and poet Timothy Gager. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and fiction, including his latest book of poetry, Chief Jay Strongbow is Real. He’s also the host of the Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Links from this episode:

Timothy Gager: http://www.timothygager.com

The Dire Reader Series: http://www.direreader.com

Chief Jay Strongbow is Real: http://amzn.to/2zuBVaN

http://lithub.com/the-literary-class-system-is-impoverishing-literature/

The RCA eBook reader: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/REB_1100 Click here to for more details on this new episode of The Koncast

I’ve been obsessed with print lately, which is a real kick in the ass, because I sell almost no print books these days.  I can sometimes get a few people to kick in a buck to look at my stuff on the kindle, but sales of the dead tree counterparts have been absolutely abysmal.  If it wasn’t for the kindle, I’d probably be learning to crochet instead of still picking at this, so that’s a good thing, and I really do like it when people read my books regardless of price or format.  But there’s something about print books that really pulls at me.

I just read this book the other day, by RE/Search, which was essentially a two-hour phone interview of Henry Rollins by V. Vale.  Rollins had some good stuff to say, and it’s always fun to catch up with his projects.  But one of the things that made me really love this project was that it was a pocket book, a little 4x6 inch book, maybe 125 pages, but a little thing that felt good in your hands and just screamed “collectible” even if it was not an ultra-rare numbered limited edition.  There’s a certain tactile pleasure in having a book like this, and I don’t know what it is.  It’s small, and an odd size, not like the usual trade paperback.  Maybe it’s because it reminds me of a diary or a little book you’d get as a kid.  Maybe it’s the fact that it could go in a pocket easily, although I didn’t take it out of the house or bring it on the go with me.  But something about it made me appreciate it more than if it was an industry standard 5.06x7.81” book.  It’s the reason I made the print version of Fistful of Pizza the size it is, although only a couple of you actually have a print version.  (The kindle strikes again!)

There are some issues with doing a perfect little book like this.  Lulu has a pocket size, which is 4.25x6.87.  The problem is that it’s Lulu, which means fulfillment is just a little bit off, and price is higher.  Createspace supposedly does custom trim sizes as small as 4x6”, although custom sizes are only available from amazon.com (which is fine - it’s not like a brick and mortar shop is custom-ordering my books.)  The only issue with that is POD books are always priced per page, regardless of their size.  So if you had a 40,000-word manuscript and you put it in a pocket book, it’s going to cost way more per copy than a 6x9” book with the same font size, since there are going to be more pages in the pocket book due to fewer words per page.

Another thing I wish you could do is have some pages color, and some black and white.  You can make a whole book color, but for a hundred-page book, you’d have to make it $13.99 to break even.  (You can make a hundred-page black and white book $3.99 and you’d still make a quarter per book.)  I would love to have a book that had eight color plates in the middle, but the rest black and white, but that’s not possible with print on demand.

I don’t even have ideas or projects for this crap; I just think of sizes and colors and formats and wish I could do something with them.  Like, I’d love to do either a DVD or a CD that was encased in a book.  I don’t know what I’d put on them — maybe some kind of spoken word experimental garbage.  Createspace has POD CD and DVD offerings, but they don’t have books or booklets.  It doesn’t matter, because I don’t know how to record a book on tape that doesn’t sound like hell, and I don’t know what I’d add to a book in color, other than pictures of my cat or something.  But it always has me thinking.

No, iUniverse isn’t going out of business.   (Well, maybe they are - I haven’t checked.)  I’ve just decided to pull my books from iUniverse.

I’ve done three books with them, and the idea of print on demand radically changed my writing career.  I mean, I have not made millions from it, but prior to the advent of PoD, I thought the only way I’d ever hold a printed copy of my book in my hands would be if I wrote a million agents and publishers and found one willing to print it, or if I payed thousands of dollars to fill my garage with a short print run, or maybe if I went to Kinko’s and printed my own copy.

Someone told me about iUniverse back in 99 or 2000, and this was around the time Summer Rain was close to done.  It was an incredibly revolutionary idea back then, this thought that I could get real copies of my book, and get them in Amazon and other book stores, and even have it so brick-and-mortar book stores (remember those?) could order copies through Ingram.

There were a couple of issues with PoD back then.  One was cost.  Summer Rain was incredibly expensive compared to the per-unit cost of offset printing a few thousand books.  There wasn’t the setup, and you didn’t have to produce a bunch of books at once and then warehouse them, which was awesome.  But selling a paperback book for thirty bucks was never easy.

The stigma was the worst part.  Back in 2000, everyone looked down at PoD as hackneyed and just another extension of vanity presses.  The party line was that real writers don’t self-publish, and you weren’t shit unless you had a book deal.  The irony of this is that the proponents of this attitude are the same people who can’t shut the fuck up about the kindle revolution.  (You know who I’m talking about.)  To some extent, this didn’t matter to me; I had a copy of my book on my shelf at home, and friends could buy it and read it, and people enjoyed the work.  That’s all that ultimately matters to me, but there was still a nagging feeling in the back of my head when the “real” writers talked shit about self-publishing.

I also didn’t have high hopes that PoD publishing would reap all of the rewards that getting a book deal with a Big 6 publisher would.  There was a lot of PoD backlash from people who dumped a book onto a PoD publisher, and then bitched and moaned when it didn’t take off.  I never saw iUniverse as anything more than a printer, and didn’t expect them to do anything more than fulfillment.  But some people thought you would just upload your PDF and your book would suddenly take off like a Dan Brown release.  Truth is, PoD involves just as much hustle as printing off copies yourself and trying to sell them one by one.

So, why am I dumping iUniverse?  A few reasons:

• When I first started, there was almost no initial setup fees - I may have paid some trivial amount, like a hundred bucks, but it wasn’t much.  This fee went up and up, and after my third book, Lulu came on the scene with no setup fee, and that was the end of the line for me and iUniverse.  Now, their most basic package is $899, and the “Book Launch Premier Pro” is a whopping $4499.
• All I really wanted was fulfillment and distribution.  iUniverse tried to differentiate themselves with all of this “value add” stuff that was mostly useless.  I have no need for bookmarks, press releases, book signing kits, or other crap I could get online for a dollar.  (Vistaprint is your friend.)
• Without asking, iUniverse decided they would create e-book versions of my books and price them the way they wanted to price them.  And they made it damn near impossible to remove those versions.  So while I made a new version of Rumored to Exist for the kindle and priced it at $2.99, they made a crappy version and priced it at $3.99.
• The per-unit pricing was too high.  Summer Rain was $29.99 on iUniverse.  The lulu version was $14.99.  The createspace version will be $13.99.  My profit is roughly the same on all three.
• All of the processes at iUniverse are antiquated.  To find out your royalties, you have to wait for the next month’s statement.  To pull a book from publishing, you have to write them a god damned letter.  Ugh.
• One of the things iUniverse had over createspace was that createspace is part of Amazon, which meant you wouldn’t get into B&N or brick-and-mortar stores.  With iUniverse, you could get into anyplace that used Ingram’s database.  In practice, 99.99999% of my book sales are through Amazon.  I don’t know if I’ve ever sold a book through a brick-and-mortar store.

So I wrote a letter to iUniverse and pulled my books.  (Seriously, a letter?)  There are currently only three books on there: Summer Rain, Rumored, and Tell Me a Story About the Devil, which is a journal archive from 97-99 that none of you ever bought.  The first two are already moved to Amazon/createspace.  The last one can die on the vine.  If you’re really desperate to get any of the iUniverse editions before they go away, I think you probably have a few days to grab them.  But the newer versions are not only better, but cheaper.

Next up will be hemming and hawing about what to do with all of my books on lulu, and if they should also get moved.  I should probably stop screwing with all of this and actually write new books, though.