"If you’re yearning to read the good shit, check us out, and if you’ve got the good shit, send it our way": a conversation with Jacob Everett
Jacob Everett is the editor-in-chief and the publisher of APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, “a literary journal obsessed with the underworld”. He's gonna tell us how he built this.
Jacob Everett is the editor-in-chief and the publisher of APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, “a literary journal obsessed with the underworld” established in 2021. He’s also the co-host of podcast Resident Life Enjoyers.
We speak over e-mail in the weeks following SUB ROSA, the journal’s first big fundraising event in Portland, Oregon.
TOPICS INCLUDE: how to build and grow a literary operation from a single tweet, the importance of putting together a publishing team, hosting local, in-person events vs. fundraising and promoting a business online, the possibility of APOC CON giving birth to a hundred local chapters, getting together in Portland, Oregon, a cool literary journal as “that dive bar where your favorite band played their first show”, low lives and high strangeness, “trying to stay away from anything that’s too Internet-y”, the pleasure of working with other people, and the single best decision Jacob made in all of this.
Enjoy.
It's been very fun to learn APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL started out with a jokey tweet in late 2020, And then you went ahead and founded the magazine. This is the best. Walk me through those eggnog-spiked days and the process of actually creating a journal / small press.
I’d always wanted to be a writer growing up, whether a screenwriter, novelist, columnist, whatever. I went to college for journalism and frankly that experience killed the desire in me. Not that it was beaten out of me, necessarily, but because it made me realize that I just don’t have the discipline to sit down and write. It did, however, get me interested in the publishing end of things. I graduated in 2013, so I went to J-school during the height of “print is dead–long live digital!” discourse. But everywhere I was seeing these bespoke magazines– Monocle, to name one – that were distinctly anti-digital, and served as a kind of artefact to their loyal readership. So initially, my hope was to do something like that. Granted, APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL is a web magazine (though we do have two books out/soon to be out) but I think our attention to detail, visual identity, and specificity (especially with our special presentations) is informed by that earlier desire to do print.
So I had that knocking around in my head for about a decade until finally it just hit critical mass in my cranium and I said, Fuck it I’m gonna do it, thanks to some eggnog-drunk bravado. I was working from home due to the pandemic so I had additional freedom to get it going. Our first year, it was just me (and the countless number of contributors). But fortunately I was able to attract some people who wanted to get in on the action (Max, Dawson, Tom, Hermes, and Brendan), all of whom were contributors that first year and are avatars of our weird-beard concoction of underworld, hardboiled, pulp, occult, and speculative themes.
What worked for you? What did you learn?
The single best decision I’ve made with APCON is putting together the team, and giving them wide berth to shape the vibe of this thing of ours. A part of it is self-interested: 1. You gotta grow if you wanna grow, and 2. I just didn’t have the time to read all the submissions we were getting. And it just feels better to do something with others. Oftentimes, they have ideas that I didn’t know that I didn’t know I had, and that collaboration has been crucial to our success. I didn’t want it to be “Jacob Everett’s APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL”.
This year, we were joined by four new members of the team: Tully as editor-at-large was essential in getting our merch hookup (our store will be open soon); Will is our books editor and he’s basically our one-man publishing arm (for now). I kinda threw him in the deep end with that because he has no prior publishing experience, but he was a contributor from YEAR ONE and I always fucked with his sensibilities, aesthetic and literary, so he seemed like the right guy, and he has been (here’s a great interview with him via BRUISER mag). Rachael is our director of operations. She has a solid background in event organizing and fundraising, and was indispensable in putting our SUB ROSA event together. Our newest member is Eitan (@natienoizy on Twitter), our essays editor. We’ve published some phenomenal essays in the past, but to be honest, it was always the straggler section compared to poetry and fiction, which bummed me out because I initially conceived of APCON as more of a journal of criticism and theory. Don’t get me wrong, I’m overjoyed by the shape it took, publishing fiction and poetry, but I’d always wanted us to be known for our essays as well. Eitan shares that vision, so I’m stoked that he agreed to join us.
Are you physically close to the people you make APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL with?
I live in Portland, and so do Tully and Rachael, and it’s nice to be able to meet in person with them and talk shop. Plus, a big goal of this year has been to make APCON a Portland, rather than web, based publication. The other members are scattered across these United States, making us truly a national media endeavor.
You've just fundraised in Portland with a brick and mortar event. Would you recommend hosting local, in-person events vs. fundraising and promoting a business online ? What's been working better for you?
(I'm familiar with the duality here – organize a live event and risk having maybe six people showing up; make a lot of noise online and it might create a painful illusion of relevancy if people don't read the magazine, buy the books, and so on. I'd like to know how you've been calibrating your efforts, since they obviously paid off.)
I would 100 percent recommend doing in-person events. Obviously both are ideal, but there’s an energy to getting together IRL that’s unparalleled. And SUB ROSA was only the beginning. We have plans for future events here in Portland, but also events elsewhere across the country, and even internationally. We aren’t satisfied with just doing readings down the block. We seek nothing less than a global presence–one world, undercover–and it’s going to happen. Low lives and high strangeness are everywhere, from Alberta to Zanzibar, and we’ll be there.
Taking a cue from "low lives and high strangeness are everywhere, from Alberta to Zanzibar": imagine that someone reaches out to you as a reader of the magazine, an aspiring author or both, and they want to host an APOC CON event in their own city. Would you guys be amenable to that? Would you want them to follow certain guidelines? How protective should you be, considering it's a template you established?
I think we would definitely be open to that sort of thing down the road. We’ve only just done our first event, so there’s not much of a template to follow yet, but after we have a few more under our belt, “franchising” out APCON/SUB ROSA events would be a cool idea. And the benefit of having team members across the Lower 48 means we could have someone on the team at the event and serve as an emissary of a sort.
"Growth" manages to be a necessity and an incredibly sore spot when it comes to writing-focused projects. I'm glad you're being frank about this side of the work. Like you said, "you gotta grow if you wanna grow". The issue is, you can't spend five minutes online without crash-landing in some "get rich quick!" salt mine, complete with ugly MLM vibes, and most of the "growth" advice is either generic hustle advice or a poor fit for someone who wants to cultivate a writing presence. And then there are the usual DEMONS: "I don't really want to get noticed unless it's the biggest agent in the world picking me from the bunch", "anyone who gets any traction is bad and a sellout" (lol), "I liked your project better when you had 19 readers". You're SOMEHOW striking a balance. What made sense to you?
Well I want to clarify that growth is only a metric that the biz/ops side of our magazine (ie, Rachael and me) should be concerned with. I want the editors to only focus on selecting submissions of high quality that fit within our vibe. Because at the end of the day, none of this would be possible without the incredible writers who have published with us, and the goal is to eventually be a paying market, as a signal of our seriousness and our appreciation of the hard work of writing. I’m not sure when that will happen, but it’s something I think about.
I also understand that some writers are allergic to self-promotion. We of course love it when our contributors shill the hell out of their work, but if that’s not their style, fortunately APCON is a well-oiled juice machine and we take care of that for them.
The question of growth is a tricky issue for individual writers and I’m not sure how to address it on that basis. What I hope is that they see APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL as a growing venue for their work, one that will help people see their work and get them additional publications elsewhere. One of my favorite things about running this magazine has been publishing authors for the very first time, and seeing them go on to get bylines at other places due to the strength of the work they published with us. An analogy I like is that APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL is that dive bar where your favorite band played their first show, and as we do expand, my hope is that we never lose that sensibility.
The official APOC CON Twitter bio still calls the magazine a "psyop sleaze rag". I get it, it's a joke, still the overlap between art and extremely online language / reasoning has become so big, I don't even try to explain what's going on to sane people anymore. (It would take me an hour to explain why on Earth a web magazine would be labeled "a psyop".) How do we break this loop? More: is there a positive fallout when it comes to the actual writing people are getting done ?
“Psyop sleaze rag” was something that a past contributor referred to us as, and as a kind of in-joke, I put it in the bio and it’s stuck. I like the alliteration of “psyop sleaze,” and to be honest I like the misdirection. You read “psyop sleaze” and think the things we publish with be extremely outre or incoherent info-hazardous scribblings, but then you give the site a read and it’s all gorgeously written prose and poetry, obviously within our pulp sensibility, but still, gorgeously written.
Other than that, though, we try to stay away from anything that’s too, I don’t know, Internet-y. Maybe that means we lose out on some zeitgeist juice, but I want APCON to be apart from time, rather than within it. Of course, if we get a submission that’s well-written but very contemporary, we won’t reject it. My preference, however, is that we publish work that Jim Thompson or Charles Olson would find recognizable.
I had good non-writer friends who benevolently dunked on me because of the names of journals running my early stuff, and that was BEFORE Apocalypse Confidential entered the picture. Anything to declare ?
Other than our genius?? Nothing in particular. The name is a portmanteau of Feral House’s groundbreaking essay collection, Apocalypse Culture, and James Ellroy’s LA Confidential, and I think that reflects our sensibility. We’re a bit of a feral publication focused on low lives and high strangeness, pulp and hardboiled and speculative. If you’re yearning to read the good shit, check us out, and if you’ve got the good shit, send it our way.
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