BY PAUL ISAACS
September 5, 2004
Jim Munroe, the self-proclaimed gutter-culture novelist, professional computer nerd, sometime corporate media scourge and biweekly eye columnist was feeling a little off his game last Friday. On Thursday, when he left his first message on my voicemail, Munroe spoke with a high, excitable drawl. The small press reading tour he organizes, the Perpetual Motion Roadshow, was loping into town that evening for a performance at Holy Joe's on Queen.
The next day, however, when I met Munroe at the Green Room over coffee and avocado sandwiches -- they have to be vegan -- his eyes were watery, the nose sniffley, the thick brown hair somewhat lank, and his previous chipperness had been absorbed into a thick, throaty baritone. "I've got this summer cold, so it was difficult to enjoy the show," he says. "I hope I didn't offend anyone."
That seems unlikely. The Roadshow, which Munroe describes as the "bastard child of a vaudeville show and a punk rock tour," brought in about 30 attentive punters to Holy Joe's tiki-themed, fairy-lit lounge -- not bad for such a small venue with a line-up of as-yet-unfamous underground poets and cartoonists. "If there's only 20 people who are interested and engaged, that's fine," says Munroe. "You don't need a stadium or anything."
The whole atmosphere seemed pretty mellow and informal. As local artist Willow Dawson concluded her "improv drawing" recital -- pencilling a live comic strip onstage to audience suggestions -- one of the other speakers, San Franciscan poet Bucky Sinister, took a quiet yawn-and-stretch on a sofa at the back. Sinister's fellow performers have given him the touring nickname Roadkill. "This has been a lot of fun," Sinister says. "It's like the cheapest road trip ever."
Munroe came up with the concept for Perpetual Motion while promoting his third novel, Everyone in Silico. (Like all but the first of his novels, EIS was self-published by his own imprint, No Media Kings.) That tour, spent gigging at bars and crashing on friendly floors across the US, made life on the road pretty sweet. So from April last year, Munroe decided to use his expertise and cross-country contacts to organize the Roadshow, a tour circuit and PR vehicle for up-and-coming or otherwise ignored indie artists.
The idea is simple: shove three or four performers, Monkees-style, into a car together and shuttle 'em across a half-dozen venues around the northeastern US and Canada. The crew have to live, drive, perform and piss together for a week; money for gas and grub comes from pass-the-bucket audience collections.
"There's a quintessential complaint of the Midwestern author who works for a large publishing company: 'No one's paying attention to me.'" says Munroe. "It's because they don't make enough money to justify the infrastructure that could send them on a 20-city book tour. You have to book an Indigo or Chapters, pay for hotels, for food, for a publicist in each town -- it's very costly. I'd be lucky to get a launch in my own town."
Perpetual Motion, then, is an organic, web-led antidote to the corporate, Chapters-in-every-city sort of book tour. As the tour's Svengali/promoter, Munroe helps to arrange venues and find sleeping-spots for the artists. Most of this is done via internet contacts and his website, www.nomediakings.org. The site, which features a blog, a resource guide for wannabe self-publishers and an Adbusters-style parody (Munroe used to be the magazine's managing editor) called Monopoly: The Media Edition, has built a large and profitable net community for the author. When he announced the publication of his latest novel, An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil, to his email list of 1,800, Munroe made nearly $1,000 in online sales within a day.
Munroe's beef with major publishers is longstanding: his first novel, the anti-corporate superhero fantasy, Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask, was published in 1999 by HarperCollins; subsequently Munroe has remained independent, and bought back the rights for Flyboy.
"Publishing isn't rocket science," Munroe says, "I'd been doing zines since I was 17, and I didn't see why I couldn't try books either."
The HarperCollins problem started with stickers. "It was more than just Murdoch himself, although there was that," Munroe says. "I had to bully the staff into helping me -- and it wasn't like I had these outrageous requests. For example, I wanted to do a promotion for Flyboy, like giving out stickers or something. I knew that people who liked the novel would like stickers, but what to do about it, you know? I didn't like being stuck in a power dynamic where I had to force people to do what I could do fine on my own. Without any support, I was like, 'Why am I here?'"
No Media Kings gave Munroe access to a different sort of community, he says. "As soon as I became independent, I had all these new people that wanted to help. The readership has grown -- people are a lot more interested now."
Munroe is marketing Unspeakable Evil with his usual combination of net-savvy and old-fashioned schtick: the author promoted Everything in Silico by namedropping as many corporate brands as possible within the text (Hershey's, Gap), then invoicing each company for a $10 product-placement fee.
The new novel follows the adventures of Kate and Lilith, two artsy Toronto gadflies, the latter of whom may or may not be a demon (its working title was Hipster Hellspawn). The book is written in the form of a blog named www.roommatefromhell.com and Munroe has begun posting one section per day from the book into a real-life blog with the same address. He's also certified the book under a Creative Commons license, which means readers are free to riff off the stories with their own fictional works (so long as they're not-for-profit).
"The same creativity I put into the books, I also try to put into getting the books out into the world," Munroe says. "It's not for everyone. I'm not interested in having employees come to help me out. I don't want No Media Kings to grow. It's a not-for-profit company."
"Actually," he adds, "it's more like an anti-profit company. And I only call it a company for fun."
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