We were lucky to catch up with Ben Shahon recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Ben thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What do you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry? Any stories or anecdotes that illustrate why this matters?
I think the chasm between corporate publishing and the independent sphere is pretty vast, not just in reach or exposure or cash, but in the very art they create. In the past year I’ve read brilliant books by working class folks, folks from outside the U.S., queer folks, and folks of other backgrounds that just don’t get the attention they deserve from big five publishers because their bottom line depends on putting out another Republican memoir or book by an imminently hateable pundit. And sure, I understand that it’s why they’re the wealthy publishers and the indie world is the indie world, but every time I pick up a book by an indie publisher and then read one by a Big 5 publisher, I’m reminded that the real art exists at the margins.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Like most writers, I’ve wanted to work in books since I was a kid, but I never really took it seriously until I was in college at ASU. I took a creative writing class as an elective, but my teachers (especially Jenny Irish) pushed me to work harder, read more outside my range of books that I already knew about, and to edit more ferociously. But snce I added the major late in my degree, I decide to get a master’s degree to push my work further. It didn’t end up as enriching as my time at ASU, but I definitely learned enough and built up the chops to feel comfortable launching JAKE as a literary website almost two and a half years ago now, and as a publisher of print chapbooks a year ago. We just put out our first titles this past April, and are actively in development of more, focusing on experimental writing, writing by outsiders to the mainstream publishing system, and other work that just makes us excited to see it.
How do you keep your team’s morale high?
So, JAKE started as a solo project, but within six months, I already knew I was going to need help. I asked a programmer friend of mine to help me with making the website itself since it was something I knew nothing about, and asked another writer/editor friend to come and help me manage submissions once it got overwhelming to do so myself. And since then we’ve added a bunch of other folks to the mix in an artistic/creative/editorial capacity. I think the most important lesson I’ve learned through the process has been to trust the folks around me to produce great work, even if it isn’t in the fashion I would have done. The magazine has a diverse array of styles of writer in its record, and certainly has folks I wouldn’t have personally fallen in love with. But there was always at least one editor on the team who did, and usually readers who did too. And having that big tent mentality has helped make it a far richer, more interesting site than it would otherwise be.
Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?
We had this grand plan to build up the funding for our first round of print chapbooks, and it sort of worked, sort of didn’t. Because we’re a really internet-focused group, we thought it might be fun to put togehter a 24-hour live telethon stream kind of thing on YouTube in order to fundraise. We stayed up all night, playing games, talking to the writers whose books we were putting out, putting on folks to read/perform their writing, etc.; I think my friend who was running tech for us in CA (I was living in Boston at the time, and none of our team lives in the same city as each other at the time of writing) slept maybe thirty minutes out of the whole thing. But miraculously, one of our authors had apparently been hyping the book up in a major fashion that we weren’t aware of before that date. So, when we set preorders live on Monday, with the stream scheduled on Friday night to Saturday, we were already sold out of what we could afford to make by the time we said the word go. So instead, the stream ended up as this big celebration/victory lap for us as a press, instead.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://jakethemag.com
- Instagram: @publishedbyJAKE
- Twitter: @publishedbyJAKE
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@publishedbyJAKE
