The fifth dimension
Is ours the only inhabited planet?
Books are magic because they change our relationship with time. Reading, time streams by outside the bubble of the story, which holds the reader separate, englobed. Writing a book also transforms time. It breaks hours into temporal units of words-per-minute. The long, desolate stretches of waiting stretch time into an agony. The rush of inspiration makes time go too quickly for many writers. If only the feeling of enthusiasm would last forever. If only the story would never end.
When we started Moonstruck Books, it was with the intention of changing our own relationship with time. Ursula LeGuin: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” Publishing, for us, is a way of shaping this resistance. It is a way of pushing back against capitalism and the dehumanizing ugliness its systems feed on. The first step in uncoupling ourselves from this was to allot sufficient time for brilliant and meaningful writing to flourish.
The simplest way to do this is to lengthen the timelines for submissions and publication.
When we announced our first call for submissions, we deliberately made the window longer than many other contests or anthologies. From July 2023 to December 2023, we decided, would allot sufficient time to read and parse through the short stories people sent us. It would give us time to curate a collection that we were proud of. Common practice in publishing, including indie publishing, is to focus on known quantities. How many anthologies are simply collections from a single clique, or friends-of-friends? How many are the result of popularity contests that exclude unknown or outsider authors? How many have such rigid guidelines or “what we’re looking for” that they eliminate any real creativity and feel more like writing prompts than organic suggestions? Rather than fall into that, Moonstruck Books chose to cast a wide, wide net.
To date, we’ve received more than 1,300 short story submissions for Nightmare Diaries from authors around the world. These stories truly run the gamut; finding shared images, pacing, and other binding threads takes time. An anthology is more like a mixtape than a breakfast scramble. We knew that we would also need time to take the stories and shape them into a coherent whole. In a strong anthology, stories often talk to one another. (Some people call this hegemony.) Some of our favorite anthologies offer deeper insights and provocative juxtapositions of ideas about gender, race, identity, accountability, and more. The only way, we decided, to make a book of this caliber is to allot sufficient time to the process.
One of our press’ core ideals is connection; in our experience, finding people whose values sync with our own takes time. One-offs, instant gratification, and transactional relationships are counter to our values. By extending the call to as many writers as possible, with no reader fee and email-only submissions, we are able to meet writers, reviewers, artists, and creators with whom we want to build long-term creative relationships. We believe that the publishing industry, especially indie publishing, can best sustain itself by investing time, energy, and money into nurturing writers. The examples of this tend to be a century old: think F. Scott Fitzgerald and his stalwart editor, the legendary Max Perkins. Toni Morrison worked with Knopf editor Robert Gottleib for the duration of her phenomenal, world-changing career. We believe that reviving this type of connection is beneficial to readers, writers, and publishers alike. It breaks the capitalist idea that people are disposable and that chasing exposure, sales, or trends is more important than creating enduring art.
The writers we select for publication are people we genuinely like; whose values align with our own; and who offer both talent and ability to the world. They are writers who are creating stories that are surprising, unnerving, and boundary-pushing. They are people we want to support in their labor; people whose successes we are thrilled to celebrate. By putting character ahead of analytics, we are exiting the industry model of selecting authors for the size of their social media following or their “platform.” Every writer begins as an unknown. We are grateful to support ours and be a witness to their progress.
Aside from connecting in meaningful ways with authors, Moonstruck Books also chooses to allot sufficient time to our publishing process. This is also counter to the capitalist approach to publishing that many other presses espouse. (While pulp, or cheaply printed, quickly produced books, is a cornerstone of genres like horror, science fiction, and thrillers, in an era when anyone can publish themselves, we find that adhering to pulp conventions only increases the number of titles without expanding the possibilities of genre. Some incredible authors started as pulp writers; due to marginalized identities or social statuses, some remained pulp-only.)
We’ve observed that it is all-too-common for smaller presses to pump out book after book, chasing after revenue and volume instead of focusing on quality. Rushing cheats the reader and the writer; it creates a shoddy final product, even if the original material was promising. Shortening time means the publisher cuts corners on editing, cover and interior design, publicity, and other essentials. Instead of following this profit model, we chose to commit to only two or three titles per year and dedicate our resources and undivided attention to them.
Valuing growth over sustainability and creating a false sense of urgency reflects white supremacist ideals that are embodied in capitalism. It deliberately excludes people who need more time, such as people with disabilities, or people who are short on time because of social inequity. This includes Black people, Indigenous people, and historically exploited workers, the kinds of folks we welcome to submit as non-traditional writers. You can read about white supremacist culture and its characteristics here. There’s a chart.
To allot sufficient time is to push back (slowly!) against white supremacy and capitalism. We all need and deserve time. Moonstruck Books is dedicated to moving with intention and respect, and we seek to collaborate with people who feel the same way.
Our next post will describe that process and how it reflects our press’ ideals for publishing, books, and ourselves.
