Archive for the ‘News’ Category

“One day in 1971, Ozzy and Tony Iommi took 47 hits of acid and just outside of Newark, New Jersey accidentally found the giant tablets of gold from which the Mormon religion was founded.  They decided it would be wise to melt it into a giant bong and take it on the road with them in a converted tractor-trailer.  With the aid of an early prototype of the first Apple computer, they hired several technicians and wrote a text-based video game based on the works and philosophy of John Locke, where you used the paddle controller to navigate corpuscles through a maze drawn with *’s and %’s.  However, in the course of developing the first video game, they sold all of the gold plates to fund the venture.  And after another acid bender, Ozzy had a vision of Locke arisen from the dead.  He sold his Apple computer to buy thousands of gallons of pure, artesian water for the mammoth bong that did not exist.  Ozzy went insane, and in a few years, Ronnie James Dio was trying to sing ‘Iron Man’ to clubs full of disgruntled Sabbath fans.”

-from section 99 of Rumored to Exist

Paragraph Line Books is proud to announce that Jon Konrath’s second novel Rumored to Exist has been released as an eBook in the Amazon Kindle store and via Smashwords.  It’s now available for only $2.99, in a new revised edition.

Rumored to Exist is a collection of 201 vignettes or flash fiction pieces, loosely tied together into a non-linear narrative about a protagonist attempting to find meaning in a bizarre near-future world. It’s a densely packed stew of ideas flashed together, morphing between dreams, emails, conversations, and action. It’s a novel in the style of Naked Lunch, written for today’s short-attention-span hypertextual world.

Influenced heavily by Burroughs, Mark Leyner, Raymond Federman, and Hunter S. Thompson, Jon Konrath knit together the dense patchwork of fiction over a seven-year period in a half-dozen cities across the US.

It’s also still available in its original print edition from iUniverse, but why spend $15.95 and wait a week to kill another tree, when you can spend under three bucks and check this out now?  There’s also a free preview available on both Amazon and Smashwords, so check out the first part for free.

More info

• Rumored to Exist page
• Facebook fan page

Buy it now

• From Amazon.com (print)
• From Barnes and Noble (print)
• From Amazon.com (kindle)
• From Smashwords (eBook, online reading, Epub, PDF, LRF, or Palm Doc formats)

Details

• 264 pages (print)
• ISBN: 978-0595234769 (print, iUniverse)
• ISBN: 978-0-9844223-1-9 (eBook, Kindle)
• ISBN: 978-1-4581-0977-4 (eBook, Smashwords)

Paragraph Line alum John Sheppard has a new book out called Loner, which is a collection of short stories originally published in Air in the Paragraph Line, plus a new one that’s new to the book and absolutely incredible.  It’s available on lulu.com here:http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/loner/11784165 in both paperback and downloadable format. They’re also having a summer sale with free postage for orders over twenty bucks, so do yourself a big favor and pick that up along with his other books In Between Days and Tales of the Peacetime Army.  Or check out any of my other books at http://stores.lulu.com/jkonrath, as long as the shipping’s cheap/free.

I’m proud to announce that Air in the Paragraph Line #12 is now available for free download from our web site.

Released in late 2007, this issue’s theme is “Weird, Paranoid, Insane”. It contains fact and fiction by Grant Bailie, Keith Buckley, Tony Byrer, Joshua Citrak, Kurt Eisenlohr, Rebel Star Hobson, Stephen Huffman, Jon Konrath, R. Lee, Dege Legg, Erin O’Brien, John Sheppard, Joseph Suglia, Todd Taylor, and Richard K. Weems. It also includes a cover and lots of interior art by Matt Pazzol.

You can download all 236 pages here. It’s a 2.2 Mb PDF file.

And yes, it is completely free (of cost – it’s still copyrighted) – all we ask is that if you enjoy it, consider buying the paper copy, and tell your friends!

Ever since I published my first book, I’ve used Print-on-Demand publishers, starting with iUniverse, and then Lulu.com.  For those not familiar with POD, how this works is you upload a digital image of your book and your cover to a publisher, then they zap it to Ingram, who puts your info in a database so Amazon and other booksellers who use Ingram as a wholesaler list your book.  When someone orders a copy, Ingram feeds your PDFs into a giant machine that then spits out a perfectly bound copy of the book in a couple of minutes, and sends it off to the customer.

POD is great because you’re printing one book at a time, and not sitting on thousands of copies that you had to pay for with thousands of dollars up front.  The downside is that the per-book cost is higher, and there’s a huge war on about whether or not POD is “real” publishing, or whether it’s a vanity press method, which is a dirty word to some people in the writing community.  Yes, a seven-figure book deal with Random House will get your book out there and make you money and pump your ego more than a book published on iUniverse that only seven people buy.  But to say that only commercially viable writing deserves to be put to paper is bullshit.  It’s the reason I started doing Paragraph Line.

My big problem with POD is that every publisher out there is using Ingram’s POD arm to fulfill books, and then adding a variety of value-add services on top of this.  All of them bundle different things together to make life easier for first-time authors, and pass the costs on in the form of set-up fees and publishing packages.  Some of this is good if you are doing one book and don’t know much about computers; upload your Word document, and have someone else design your cover, format your text, and print you matching business cards and postcards.  But I lay out my own books, design my own covers, and would rather deal with the details myself, instead of being stuck with however the publisher does it.  And I want cheaper books.

To that end, here’s the big announcement: Paragraph Line Books has switched to using Lightning Source, the Ingram POD division, for book printing and fulfillment.  This basically means we’ll be cutting out the middleman, and going direct to LSI with our books.  The books will be the same exact quality as the current books we publish on lulu.com – in fact, they will be coming from the same place.  And they will still be available from Amazon and the other places.  The big difference is that our wholesale cost will be half as cheap or more, which means lower prices and more money to reinvest in new titles and authors, improvements to books, better artwork, and more.  And review copies won’t cost us as much, so we will hopefully send out more.

Another big plus is that with Lulu, we were limited on what sizes of books we could distribute to Amazon and others, which meant all of our books were 6×9″.  Now, there will be more options, including a 5×8″ book, which I really want to use for a future project.  And did I mention the books will be cheaper?  I am really psyched about that.

This change will only affect any future book releases, with the first title probably being Air in the Paragraph Line #13. Yes, there will be a new issue soon.  And yes, we’re planning on other books in the future.  More on that later.  Until then, all of the prior books will be on lulu.  When I’m certain that the process is flawless, I will be moving old titles from lulu, but the priority will be new titles.

And that reminds me, we’re always looking for reviewers.  If you have a blog or write for a book review site, please get in touch – I would love to send you some stuff to read and review!

Hello everybody, and welcome to the Paragraph Line Books blog! This blog will be an attempt at publishing news about our books, zines, and authors in some kind of standard format (instead of hand-editing a bunch of HTML pages.)  You’ll be able to read this in RSS too, if that makes it any easier.  (I know it does for me – I wish everything in the universe had RSS feeds, so I could check if my car needed an oil change from my web browser, for example.)

I also hope to get some of our authors on here to talk about writing, and do some other fun stuff.  And look for some mentions to books, readings, and appearances by some of the friends of the press.

But first, I need to figure out WordPress a bit, so this page doesn’t look so stupid.  More soon!

Air in the Paragraph Line, A Literary Journal of outsider and absurdist fiction, announces their new issue – #12 – themed “weird, paranoid, insane.”

(PRWEB) September 16, 2007 — Paragraph Line Books editor Jon Konrath has announced issue #12 of literary journal Air in the Paragraph Line (ISBN 978-0-6151-6314-7, 240 pages, $14.95).

The theme for the new issue of the journal of absurdist and outsider fiction is “weird, paranoid, insane”, and includes 23 stories by 15 writers, including Grant Bailie, Keith Buckley, Tony Byrer, Joshua Citrak, Kurt Eisenlohr, Rebel Star Hobson, Stephen Huffman, Jon Konrath, R. Lee, Erin O’Brien, John Sheppard, Joseph Suglia, Todd Taylor, and Richard K. Weems, plus art from Matthew Pazzol.

“I created Air in the Paragraph Line to offer an excellent collection of out-of-the-ordinary writing that fit my tastes and didn’t have a market,” says Konrath. “Most literary journals are associated with universities, writing programs, contests, or major publishers. I wanted something without those agendas and their required filler, that would be enjoyable to read from cover to cover.”

Air in the Paragraph Line is available at http://www.lulu.com/content/1151437 and from Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, and other online booksellers. Previous issues are also available free for download at ParagraphLine.com.

Paragraph Line Books, formed by Jon Konrath (Rumored to Exist, Summer Rain) and John Sheppard (Small Town Punk, Midnight in Monaco), in addition to AITPL, publishes books with a similar focus. Their next release will be Sheppard’s Tales of the Peacetime Army. Visit ParagraphLine.com for more information.

Lulu.com: Lulu.com is the premier marketplace for digital content on the Internet, with over 300,000 recently published titles, and more than 4,000 new titles added each week, created by people in 80 different countries. Lulu is changing the world of publishing by enabling the creators of books, video, periodicals, multimedia and other content to publish their work themselves with complete editorial and copyright control. With Lulu offices in the US, Canada the UK and Europe, Lulu customers can reach the globe.