Interviewed by J.B. Scott
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JB
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Hi
John Cullen! Thank you for joining us at the newly created
"E-Literate" interview room. It is a privilege and
pleasure to have you as our first guest.
Pick
a comfy position on your own desk chair, make sure you're sitting
correctly, wriggle those fingers and please, now type
away…taking us on a literary voyage of who, exactly, is John
Cullen, the man, the author, the publisher, the webmaster….
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JC
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Thank
you. Boy, what an opportunity to spin a tall tale about a
mysterious shadow who only emerges around two a.m. in the dark of
night to purchase milk at the local convenience store and then,
quick!, back to his dimly glowing computer world...actually, I
lead a mundane life in southern California, happily married these
past 15 years, and the highlight of every day is a half-hour walk
or a trip to one of our many bookstores to check out the
competition.
I
am business partners with Brian Callahan, the brilliant web
designer, in a webplex that includes
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JB
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You
definitely have a great deal of experience in the e-realm with the
above portfolio. Boy, what an achievement!
Each
on their own, are accomplishments in themselves. What inspired you
to get started in the e-realm? In addition, how do you keep on
achieving so much? Do you have any secrets or do you just not
sleep?
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JC
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I
guess it’s the same secret that made me write 17 novels so
far...a lot of work, very little sleep, an understanding wife, and
an insane amount of dedication. You really, really have to want to
do stuff like this or it doesn’t happen. San Diego is too
tempting with its beaches and mountains and deserts...
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JB
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Now,
let us spend some time on your
publishing company, Clocktower
Books….
Where
did the name "Clocktower" come from?
What is the most important component of being a publisher in your
opinion?
Are you proud of where the e-author industry is heading?
You seem to have grabbed the technology component of publishing by
the neck, with your availability of varying formats for your
authors. Has that been difficult?
So much must happen behind the scenes. Please spend a little of
your time now explaining on what goes on behind the scenes when
you wear your publisher hat.
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JC
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Clocktower
Books is a name Brian and I came up with one rainy night in
October 1996 as we were thinking of a way to combine our two
existing websites under one umbrella (The Haunted Village sf/f/h,
and Neon Blue Fiction suspense).
Clocktower
is actually a theme from one of my own novels which at this point
isn’t published yet. Brian is the technological brains behind
the operation, and he has taken us in the direction of cutting
edge XML/database technology that puts us ahead of the curve with
open e-book standard publishing.
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JB
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I
love the title of your Sharpwriter site. It is very catchy. What
motivated you to create this site? It seems to constantly grow
with more information, more elements for the author and reader
alike.
If
I were a new cyber-surfer, and visited your site for the first
time, what would you hope I'd gain from the visit?
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JC
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I
wanted to do a writer’s resource site, and the fact is I use it
all the time myself, so I’m confident it has the essentials that
any professional writer would need. With the review service we
added in 1999, it’s now intended to also embrace an audience of
readers who are looking for a good read. So a cybersurfer could be
looking for one of two things—writing resources, or a review of
a book.
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JB
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What inspired you to start
the very impressive magazine of science fiction, fantasy and
horror in 1998 "Deep Outside SFFH (DOSFFH)?"
Do
you have a preferred element to that magazine? What does DOSFFH
offer to your subscribers?
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JC
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Brian
and I have been active on the Web as writer/publishers since
`1996. We’ve experimented with any number of ways to get fiction
in front of an audience. We were one of the first...maybe *the*
first...to publish serialized novels where you could read a
chapter a week and, if you just couldn’t stand the suspense,
which thousands of readers in nearly 100 countries couldn’t, you
could download the whole book. We saw a real opportunity with a
professional sf/f/h magazine, and we went for it. The term
“professional” as used here refers to the standards of the
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). The fiction
in our magazine is 100% freelance, and we pay 3 cents a word. We
publish monthly from our southern California home base.
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JB
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What
currently is in your "in-tray"? How do you prioritize
all that you have to achieve each day?
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JC
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My
inbox is about three or four feet tall and includes many, many
action items for Clocktower Books, Sharpwriter.com, and Deep
Outside SFFH...not to mention my own issues as a writer, such as
copyright registration for my books. It keeps me very, very busy.
I keep lists and try to prioritize items as best I can. There are
always a certain number of fires that must be fought, which take
priority at the top of the heap each day.
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John's Author Shelf
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JB
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Okay,
I've saved your author role to last…what inspired you to write
"The Generals of October"? How long did this manuscript
stay in your mind? Was it a frustrating and tiring journey along
the road of author?
The
"Generals of October" has everything: danger, action, and passion. Moreover, your characters are very four-dimensional.
Were some based on people you knew?
Now
as a reader, it appeared that much research behind the scenes went
into this manuscript. Is that an accurate assumption on my part?
Do
you have another book in the offering soon?
If
I was a reader that purchased your manuscript and decided to write
a review? What comment from me would be a true pleasure to
receive?
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JC
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I
have been writing genre fiction:
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Neon
Blue
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Pioneers
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This Shoal
of Space
for many years. I decided in the early 1990s that
I wanted to try my hand at a big mainstream thematic novel. I
happened to stumble upon Article V of the U.S. Constitution, which
basically says “If you’re not happy with your form of
government, you can rewrite this document any way you want.” It
thought, and still think, that’s the scariest idea I’ve ever
heard in my life. We could hold a constitutional
convention—which you folks in Australia are familiar with, and
which Venezuela did in recent years—and come out of it with any
type of constitution you can imagine...we could be a religious
dictatorship at the end of the process...depends on who gets the
upper hand. You can go into the convention with the best of
intentions, a limited agenda, but once it opens, all doors are
open. The members have full diplomatic immunity, obviously, so
nobody—not the Congress, not the President, not the Supreme
Court—can arrest them or stop them. It’s a 100% runaway cart.
In fact, most of our law is based on the Constitution (in addition
to common law) so potentially the Supreme Court could pack up and
go home afterwards. We might end up abolishing the three branches
of government, and wind up with one religiously or ideologically
based party. The possibilities are endless and scary. I explore
them all in my novel. One of my next projects is a very, very
scary political thriller based on the U.S. election of November
2000.
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JB
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Okay,
let's get up-close-and-personal…How much time would you spend
reading? I won't say a day…let's go more for a week.
Now,
giving me some latitude here, where I assume your favorite genre
is sci-fi, please explain to me what it is about that genre that
you so like, and why?
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JC
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I
read about 3-4 hours a day, half of it nonfiction, much of it
research for my books. My favorite fiction these days is not SF
but suspense, actually. I’ve been reading the wonderful
adventure novels of Preston & Childs as they come out (Ice
Limit, Relic, Reliquary, etc) and my favorite
detective novelist is Laura Joh Rowland (Bundori, Shinju,
The Samurai’s Wife, etc.). I recently refreshed my copies
of Chip Delaney’s Dahlgren (SF) and Thomas Pynchon’s The
Crying of Lot 49. You may recall that we are the publisher of
Robin Marchesi’s brilliant prose/poetry book A Small Journal
of Heroin Addiction, which I consider to be one of the
literary discoveries of the decade...perhaps the best
justification for my often-doubted B.A. in English.
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JB
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Please
share with us who your favorite author is, and why? How long has
he/she/they been your favorite?
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JC
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I
have many favorite authors... To pin it down to one would do
another thousand injustice. However, I should mention that I think
one of the top SF writers of the 20th Century was Cordwainer Smith
(Norstrilia, You Will Never Be The Same, etc.)
Smith, Tiptree, Delaney, and a host of others...there is a curious
inversion of meaning in the publishing industry. In this
ultra-conservative country, the USA, where imagination and
creativeness have tended to be despised by the mainstream, the
habit of publishers is to take any great work of SF and market it
outside what Dean Koontz once famously referred to as ‘the SF
ghetto.’ The SF ghetto is a creation of US publishing. At one
time, in the US, you had to be embarrassed to admit you read
anything imaginative. Until the 1970’s, every anthology of
SF—and there were many—started with an apologetic and an
apology for the field...why SF wasn’t a bad thing, though its
reading was for many a dirty secret. The larger, real truth,
however, is that all great literature is speculative and
imaginative. The wooden horse in The Iliad is a science
fiction device. Dante’s Inferno is speculative fiction.
Moby Dick, the white whale, is a SF creature. 1984 and Brave
New World are SF novels. Once you start parsing this, it then
is no longer surprising that much of the typical English class
syllabus in a high school or college consists of science fiction
and fantasy. Another example: the spontaneous combustion motif in
Dickens’s Bleak House is a pure sf/f/h device. The
unreflected contempt for imagination still resonates in the term
sci-fi (sigh-fie) that one hears loosely used in connection with
bug-eyed monster movies, usually by people who don’t read.
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JB
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What
do you believe is the most important piece of advice you could
offer to a new, yet to be published author? Especially for those
that have tried, and tried unsuccessfully, to get past the
publisher's front door.
How
about a tidbit of advice for someone who has just received his or
her first contract with a publishing company? After the champagne
and chocolate, and the telephoning of the relatives, is there
anything they should concentrate on?
Do
you have any thoughts on self-promotion?
On
the other hand, do you believe hiring an agent/publicist is the
preferred route?
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JC
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My
advice? if you want to make money, go into sales. If you want to
be frustrated, be an artist. That’s always been true and
probably always will be. In terms of publishers—if you can’t
get your book accepted by the eight congloms in NY, my suggestion
is to self-publish it on the web first and see what you can do for
yourself. Nowadays, you can be your own publisher. You’ll be
joining James Joyce and a whole list of other famous people who
were forced to self-publish because for one reason or another they
couldn’t get past the stuffed shirts. Dickens, for example, was
despised by the academics and printers (publishers) of his day.
Dickens, however, was his generation’s foremost investigative
journalist and he had connections in the newspaper business, so he
got his work published in weekly serial format. There were riots
when editions of some of his books came out, with people fighting
to get copies and find out what happens next. That should be the
envy of any author. My suggestion is to ignore NY, ignore the
academics, ignore the critics, and just publish the best version
of your work after registering copyright ($30 in the US). If you
can make 5 or 50 or 50,000 or 5 million readers happy, you have
accomplished the only worthwhile goal and scratched the only real
itch that a writer ever needs to have (aside from putting bread on
your table, which may or may not result from your writing).
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JB
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What
do you believe is the greatest pitfall today for authors being
published on the WWW?
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JC
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I
suppose some of the pitfalls are as old as the industry, dating
back to clay tablets...it’s very inexpensive to publish books
nowadays. It’s always the most painful and humiliating and
costly lesson to trust the predators and false middlemen (book
doctors, agents, etc. if they aren’t any good, which most
aren’t) and waste your time and money when you could have
published your work cheaply and quickly. As with anything, you do
have to learn the ropes about the business...if you don’t do
your homework, it can be a very costly and painful education.
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JB
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Do
you believe the future is with electronic format? Or, is the old-worlde
paperback still going to be on one's bookshelf for the next
millennium?
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JC
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I
think there is no future for print, period. It’s medieval
technology that drives an ossified publishing industry and
distribution system whose products are too expensive and unwieldy.
When people say “I would rather have a print book to curl up
with” they really have never imagined what life can be with a
full-color, searchable, annotatable, almost living multimedia
appliance like the true ebook will be. On the economic side, as
Brian Callahan once pointed out, once school systems realize they
can replace their expensive text books with ebooks that can be
instantly updated and never become obsolete, and once parents
realize their children never again have to get back injuries from
lugging dead trees around, then the existing print industry will
collapse overnight like a house of cards. The fiction industry
will follow like a small ripple; the last domino. Oh, and
newspapers and magazines will also soon be electronic...why smear
your hands with tomorrow’s fish wrappers, when you can touch
your e-journal and watch a news video in it or listen to a
concert?
I
give print about 5 to 10 years before it vanishes, POD along with
it. We do not yet at this point have a real, valid electronic
reading device. I think it will come out of the laboratory soon,
in the form of “electronic ink” or “electronic paper.”
I’ve addressed much of this in my editorials at Deep Outside
SFFH (http://outside.clocktowerfiction.com), if readers are
interested.
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JB
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Now,
this is where you let your hair down, and offer anything
further…yes a free plug is more than okay…
John,
I would like to take this opportunity of thanking you for agreeing
to do this interview and I wish you well for all your future
endeavors.
Regards
JB
Scott
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JC
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Thanks
a million, JB, for your hard work and dedication at
Sharpwriter.com. You happen to also be a very fine writer, in case
your readers don’t know it.
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