Interview w/ Johne Cook of Raygun Revival — Pt. 1

In our continuing series on indie presses and the ever-changing face of the publishing industry, I’m excited to welcome Johne Cook to deCOMPOSE.  John is one of the founders and editors of Raygun Revival (RGR), a digital mag that describes itself as “a throwback publication that revisits space opera and golden age sci-fi.” RGR features some fantastic stories and incredible artists, some of whose work I will sprinkle along the way. Johne is a technical writer by day and creative writer / editor at night. I’m impressed with Johne’s knowledge of the industry and the passion (and humor) he brings to the discussion.  Johne graciously agreed to answer a few of my questions. I hope you enjoy the first of this two-part interview.

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MIKE: Johne, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us. There’s a lot of debate about the state of the industry and the future of books and publishers. Is it safe to say that indie publishers are booming? And if so, are the factors that have contributed to this a good or bad thing?

JOHNE: Videogames are booming. Indie publishers are flourishing.  But I worry that books themselves (in physical or digital form) are quaint and have to argue with ever-increasing competition. Learning to read is one of the cardinal signs of advancing civilization. Choosing not to read must surely be one of the signs of a falling civilization. But I digress.

There is, of course, a lot of activity in the publishing / reading community, a radical shake-up of the likes of which I have not seen in my lifetime. Speaking for myself, the very factors that are enabling / forcing these changes have created a season of opportunity for anybody with vision, gumption, and initiative.

There are many factors that combined to make this surge possible. The ones I’m most interested in are pragmatic. I remember being a co-founder of an Unreal Tournament clan (read: online videogame club) in late 1999. We experienced some early notoriety because our clan hosted our own broadband server instances where other players could come and play our particular flavor of the game with decent performance. In the era of dial-up and high latency, our six servers were centrally-located in North Carolina and quickly vaulted to the top of the server lists. The difference (and secret) was our early servers were hosted out of a closet of a bank and boasted a Ten MB/s half-duplex connection. We had a connection that players trying to host their own servers off dial-up connections couldn’t begin to match.

We’ve come a long way since then. Personal Computers have gotten faster, cheaper, and more powerful, broadband connections are faster and more widely affordable, monitors are flatter, thinner, and larger, hard drives are now recorded in Terabytes instead of Gigabytes or Megabytes. Rapidly improving technology has made it possible for more people to make their dreams into reality on a limited budget.

I will say that there’s more opportunity for self-made creative types than at any time in human history. For my part, I walked away from hosting videogame servers in 2003, and, with some like-minded friends, started Ray Gun Revival (RGR) in July of 2006, something we could not have as readily done in 1999. At RGR, we focused on publishing space opera and golden age sci-fi stories that might not have otherwise have seen the light of day. We’ve published 57 .PDF issues and four full months of weekly HTML content — that’s positive for space opera. In our case, I’d argue technology itself is neither good nor bad, it’s what you do with it that counts.  When we looked around at the landscape, instead of saying, “Somebody outta do a space opera magazine,” we just did it, and we’ve kept doing it as the entire publishing landscape has changed around us. Technology has helped us to easily adapt while keeping our day jobs and our family lives intact. That’s good for us, and it’s good for our readers.

MIKE: Tell us about Raygun Revival. What prompted you to start it? Are you a natural entrepreneur, did you see a void that needed filled, or do you just love space opera and golden age sci-fi so much that you couldn’t be apart from it?

JOHNE: In one word: Firefly. Add in a dash of kismet, a bash of bitter circumstance, and three genre rebels, and you get a perfect storm of opportunity too good to pass up.

I met Paul online in the mid-to-late 90s on an e-mail list for the Christian rock band Daniel Amos. DA’s always been sort of a black sheep group that Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) never quite knew what to do with. As a bit of a black sheep myself, I like the vibe. It fits the way mere convention never has. I joined another list Paul was on a couple of years later that exemplified that same sort of vibe in the arts; people who enjoyed film, poetry, stories, and novels. While on that list, I learned something interesting about Paul that changed my life. (By now, he probably hates when I tell this story, heh.) While working in the mailroom of a company in Omaha, Paul funded and directed his own character-based film with his cousin, Chad Leahy (keep that name in mind — Chad’s the one who would later design the RGR logo and initial art). When I heard about that, I thought that if he could pursue his creative dreams from such humble beginnings, the only thing stopping me from doing something similarly audacious was my own lack of vision and initiative.

I met Lee King in 2003 over at Deep Magic magazine where I submitted short pieces for monthly writing challenges. Deep Magic was an amazing Fantasy magazine with high production values. At the time, they had the most phenomenal covers in the business. I decided then and there that if I ever became involved with a Sci-Fi magazine, I wanted to follow their example. In 2004, I worked with Lee as Associate Editors at Bill Snodgrass’ The Sword Review. A year after that, we learned that Rebecca Shelley was stepping down from Dragons, Knights, and Angels magazine and was looking for someone to take the helm. Bill asked me if I’d go over there for a spell as Managing Editor, and I agreed, taking Lee King and Selena Thomason with me. As much as I enjoyed my time at DKA, I was never completely comfortable with the explicit Christian focus of the publication. I’ve never understood the utility of preaching to the choir. Lee and I had many conversations about how many Christians still didn’t get F/SF. We felt like we were lost between genres, too religious for mainstream F/SF and too speculative for mainstream Christians. I’ve never quite understanding the insular vibe of a group whose primary marching orders, as I understood it, is to take their Good News to the world outside. I happened to be available when DKA needed an editor, but I came to view my primary focus there as an interim figure. I felt others would likely thrive in the environment where I found myself squirming.

I’d recently discovered Firefly on DVD and in 2004 wrote a 55k word novel for NaNoWriMo that featured a very Firefly-esque vibe, a steampunk swashbuckling pirate story that I always thought would eventually morph into space opera once the story got off-planet.  I’d bought the Firefly DVDs at a Wal-Mart, watched five minutes of the pilot, and was instantly smitten. I consumed the series in great gulps of three or four episodes per night after work. I thought it was cool what Joss Whedon was able to talk about with his disparate characters, including riffing on religion via Shepherd Book. What I observed to be truths about life and belief shared in that environment seemed to be going out to people who could get the most mileage out of it, and that’s where my heart wanted to be.

As it happened, Paul was going through a really rough patch in his life at that point, and we turned to chatting about Firefly on IM I think as a defense mechanism, a way to get his mind off a relationship that was falling apart despite his best efforts. (You can read more about that in the editorial called The Final Proclamation in Issue 57, our last .pdf issue. Brings a tear to my eye every time I read that editorial.) Around the same time, I tested the waters. I’d been talking with Bill about the possibility of doing a space opera / sci-fi thing if we could find someone to take over at DKA, thinking that we might be able to put something together over the course of a year. Instead, things came together in just 24 hours. We asked Selena  Thomason what she thought about taking over at DKA, and she leapt at the opportunity. That freed me up to focus my efforts where I thought they’d be more effective.

While talking with Bill about starting a new ‘zine, and he said another person had been talking with him about a similar idea and said we should get together. Unbeknownst to me, it was my friend and co-editor Lee King. Paul, Lee, and I got together in IM and quickly came up with an idea, a name, and a schtick, and RGR was born. Instead of founding co-editors, we called Ourselves the Overlords, and it just sort of stuck. We loved the quality of Firefly and wanted to take that enthusiasm and share it with a whole new generation of readers who’d never heard of Doc Smith or Miles Vorkosigan.

We also had an idea to resurrect the idea of the serial novel, the ongoing episodic story where you could follow new adventures by the same heroic / tragic characters week after week. That was a challenge because at the time, nobody was doing serial fiction. To prime the pump, each of the Overlords agreed to write a proof-of-concept serial novel, and because we were initially thinking of putting out weekly content, we recruited up-and-coming author Sean T.M. Stiennon to fill out the fourth slot. Sean wrote a classic old school sci-fi adventure called Memory Wipe. Lee wrote Deuces Wild, a space western with a cynical gambler and a space cowboy and their adventures in hostile space. Paul contributed Jasper Squad, a riff on Firefly with his own unique twist, and I resurrected my NaNo novel idea, The Adventures of the Sky Pirate. We published 48 or so biweekly issues, and then reverted to monthly updates. This July starts our sixth year of publication, and we’re back to publishing weekly content.

MIKE: As you mentioned, after 57 issues, Raygun Revival underwent some changes. What were those changes and how did you reach the place to require them? Where are you at in your operations now, both staff and volume.

JOHNE: If it isn’t yet incredibly obvious, I’d like to direct your attention to the name “Bill Snodgrass.” Lee and I knew Bill from Deep Magic magazine, where we were all contributors. When Bill got together with his lifelong buddy Cameron Walker and started The Sword Review, I spent many happy afternoons on my commute home talking to Bill on the phone about TSR and our views about Christians, fiction, and our roles in that world. After starting The Sword Review, Bill needed a bookkeeping entity to keep track of all the non-profit numbers associated with the enterprise, and Double-edged Publishing was born. After Dragons, Knights, & Angels was added to the fold (and later became MindFlights), new zines started popping up at an accelerated rate. Fear & Trembling (Christian horror) was added to the fold, followed by Haruah (a Guideposts-like inspiration / devotional magazine). There was a youth magazine, and talks of others, one dedicated to Romance stories, a Western magazine, another one dedicated to Mysteries. Bill’s wife jokingly referred to DEP as an ‘empire,’ but instead of being the emperor, Bill was behind the scenes for all of it. Instead of Ming the Merciless, think Wizard of Oz. Bill had a true servant’s heart and wanted you to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

But this is how you know how important one man can be — what happens to the empire when that one man is no longer able to do everything he used to do? If he’s just a figurehead, the engine keeps on going. If he’s irreplaceable, the entire thing comes down. Bill was the latter.

After years of indefatigable service behind the scenes, hosting everything, paying for all the stories for all the magazines through a series of donations (and, I suspect, out of his own pocket), the economy went south, Bill’s web hosting company had to close so he started using a new webhosting, and suddenly the various DEP magazines had a choice to make. Bill moved from webmaster to seminary student and teacher, and new owners were lined up to keep the POD arm of DEP running. However, they had no interest in running the magazines, and the various magazine editors got together to decide what to do next. Some of the zines struck out on their own (MindFlights), some found new homes (Fear & Trembling landed with Lyn Perry’s Residential Aliens group), and some folded outright.

And then there was RGR. The Overlords had this idea that we’d transition from a primarily .pdf ‘issue’ delivery system to a more modern blog-based HTML delivery system, but we really didn’t have the technical knowledge to make it happen. After Issue 57, Ray Gun Revival went on hiatus as we grappled with what to do next, but it looked like one thing was apparent — despite our best efforts, we were going nowhere fast. That’s not to say we weren’t putting our best face on it, but our intentions were grander than our abilities.

And then, as they say, the miracle occurred.

While we were thrashing around, I got an e-mail out of the blue from Jordan Lapp, founder / editor of Every Day Fiction. We knew Jordan, and had published him twice in the pages of RGR. He’d heard about the dissolution of DEP and wanted to know what our plans were. We hemmed and hawed but it must have been clear that we had nothing going that we couldn’t be talked out of. Jordan approached me in September of 2010. He said he really respected RGR and liked what we were doing and asked if EDF could help out. As we talked, it quickly became clear that they had everything we needed without asking for any editorial restrictions. It was a dream deal. Basically, their pitch was to host RGR, provide admin and technical support, pay semi-pro rates for stories of up to 4k words, all with the goal of eventually becoming a publication worthy of a best Semi-Pro Hugo nomination. And Jordan repeated that they basically intended to take an editorial hands-off approach and let the Overlords do our schtick and continue to find and publish space opera and golden age sci-fi stories with a fun and adventurous pulp feel.

To make a long story short, that’s exactly what they did. We Overlords are arrogant and imperious, but we’re not complete fools. We leapt at the opportunity, and went live again in February, 2011 after a hiatus from August, 2010.

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Please check back in later this week for Part Two of my interview with Johne Cook.