It’s a rare time that I like an art show so much that I’ll buy a catalogue — I find the writing in them does nothing for me. They’re as bad as artist’s statements, usually, which (along with the obligatory reading for authors) I consider to be a cultural convention that is deeply broken. But despite the fact that A Beginner’s Guide to Quantal Strife is a catalogue for a show that I hadn’t even seen yet, I read it cover to cover. It’s a thought-provoking and breezy read.

Sally McKay, past editor of arts magazine Lola and an artist herself, is responsible for bringing together Quantal Strife. I know her and two of the three artists personally but I was still left with lots of questions as to how she managed to pull this off.
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Distribution is one of the toughest nuts to crack when it comes to publishing. There’s a few reasons for this, one of which is that it’s boring. It’s hard to get excited about receivables, warehousing, and invoices. But good distribution has made it possible for me to make a living off my books.

When I started thinking about No Media Kings six years ago I thought through doing distribution on my own. I would have to write letters to all the bookstores in Canada, and ship out the orders myself. Assuming that they took it seriously enough to order, and I shipped out the books, they sold, and I followed up with an invoice, I then hit a snag. My invoice would naturally float to the bottom of the pile: those from distributors representing a number of books and publishers would get paid first. They had the leverage of not shipping out any more of their books (and a collection agency), while all I had was the threat of not sending out any more Jim Munroe books. So I discovered the strength-in-numbers value to being with a distributor.

Over the years I’ve discovered a few more things about getting your books out into the world. Let’s start with some general concepts of the book distribution business.
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A few years back, a bunch of us were playing Trivial Pursuit. Mark Slutsky (of Automatic Vaudeville fame) was reading out the answers at random, and one of the green science answers was “Slackwater.”

Our eyes locked.

“What a perfect name…”

“…for a youth subculture.”

We holed up for a week in Mark’s Montreal apartment and wrote this feature length script imagining what these aristocratic anarchists would be like — destitute but dignified, penniless but proper — and we had a lot of fun doing it. We’ve decided to release it under a Creative Commons licence, which allows anyone to make it into a movie. We’d be happy to see people run with it.

For download instructions and a taste of the script’s characters, keep reading!
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