death egg

in early september, i published Death Egg by nathaniel duggan via back patio press. this was the first back patio book since sad sad boy, which i published in March 2022.

background and editing

i had maintained a loose email correspondence with nathaniel starting sometime in 2020, i think based on him sending me a poem for the quaranzine. we talked about our lives and poetry and indie lit drama for a while after this. i had given him editorial feedback on various poems during this time and encouraged him, i think, to make a collection.

looking at my email, on february 3rd, i gave him editorial feedback including "these are just great. great poems", a suggestion to change the name to death egg, and general praise such as "i really really find the thematic preoccupations and imagery compelling. the deployment of sci-fi intergalactic, video game, deep see, apocalypse imagery all mesh well, different hues of a perfect purplish blue. i think it's perfectly executed - the video games are not reddity wining or pop culture genuflection but are used as something to comment, i feel, on the larger cultural fuckedness, the integration of escapism into the despair pondering that feels subtle, effective, and non-clichely contemporary -- video games as the 'television of today,' etc. i can't say praise right, ever, i sound insane saying nice things, but i hope this makes sense[...]thank you for letting me read it. whoever publishes it won't do it justice." he did not pay me for these edits; i have also edited various versions of his short story collection manuscript, which i think a bigger publisher should put out, because it's very good.

after back patio fell apart in 2021/2022, and after i published some books unrelated to back patio, i felt more confidence in restarting the press mostly without cavin, and asked nathaniel to publish his book. before this i had suggested another limited-run book like orz, but then felt like trying something new/normal. cavin gave me his blessing to reopen the press in may. i reached out to duggan in june, i think, over twitter DM, to confirm my interest in publishing it as a back patio book.

once he agreed, i edited the book some more over maybe 3 rounds of edits, and then later 2+ minor edit rounds to clean up formatting and stuff. most of my edits were about sequencing, minor punctuation changes, a couple additional lines (partly through talking over DM and misremembering things from the poems, which he thought were good changes/ideas). some edits include "what about an exclamation point at the end of the first line?" and "recommend replacing last period with ‘, etc.’"

i only later learned that death egg is also the name of a spaceship or something from sonic the hedgehog. i do not know if this was intentional when he wrote the poem/lines about a death egg. i think it's a good, evocative, hard-to-say title that made the book feel unique. the sonic connection is mostly funny, and resulted in some good riffing online.

design

i did the inside layout and cover design. i used ms word and ms powerpoint. we iterated on the cover, manically, for like two weeks, before settling on the general cover we ended up with. stylistic themes to drive this work included bear parade/classic alt lit minimalism and anime. for a while there was a cracked egg on the cover, but this was eventually scrapped.

he wanted it to be yellow because he liked gg rolland's book on clash, which is mostly yellow. some versions accidentally used the same pink and yellow and font as my band's cassette three trucks, which was funny, but unacceptable to me, but, frustratingly for nathaniel, one of his favorite versions.

early on he had shared with me an image of an anime title card that he liked the look of. this is what influenced the final typography on the cover - the mix of japanese and the severe all caps serif font. another source of inspiration was the dvd cover for FLCL, with its bold yellow and black. i did not have the budget or interest to get a custom-drawn manga-style cover. i remember struggling with recreating manga-style 'beam attacks' using a free picture of a satellite with powerpoint for a while, then giving up.

the drawing on the final cover is from the public domain, i think from some lost in space comic, or something. i used similar pictures for interstitial art in the quaranzines. i get most of my free graphics from publicdomainvectors.org

the japanese on the cover is mostly from google translate, but some of it is the direct translation used from sonic the hedgehog for 'death egg.' i don't know much about japanese. an early ARC version we sent out had a 'pretend bad translation' synopsis that was embarassing, and which i thought i didn't include in the ARCs i had printed. the arcs were, additionally, very poor quality paper-wise and had a lot of formatting errors, and made me laugh a lot.

we decided on sans serif fonts on the inside to evoke classic alt lit aesthetics, because of the lineage of the poems/style and our shared appreciation for early alt lit. these aren't alt lit poems in any classic sense but have many shared reference points. i imagine someone more engaging than me could write up a better analysis.

i think the final product looks good and am proud of how it turned out.

promotion - ARCS/blurbs

i asked duggan for a list of potential blurbers and reached out to folks on his behalf. everyone had kind things to say, even if they didn't end up blurbing in time for the final printing. i enjoyed corresponding with people that i think/assume dislike me to this end. maggie nelson responded, unexpectedly, and gave me an address to send a book to, but clarified she didn't really do any blurbs anymore.

i also sent ARCs/final copies to people who do podcasts/reviews, but so far we never heard from anyone about these, although one person posted a picture of the book on twitter. i included a small press release, which i confided to josh sherman as "embarassing to write," not because of the book, but because of the vapid futility of writing press releases for small press books. i sent an ARC to the heavy feather review, but it was returned to me because the editors moved/changed. i also sent a free copy of the book to ~3 authors who i just thought would enjoy it, without expectation of promotion.

Promotion - local media

i reached out to several local maine venues for promotion, including duggan's alma mater university creative writing program to organize a reading. i was ignored by all of these leads except one daily maine-based blog, who requested a physical copy. one of the venues, a local tv channel, automatically blocked my email address.

Promotion - piss

the back patio twitter account reached out to several internet sex workers asking to send them books to pee on, as a promotional video effort, but this corresponded to the same week, or possibly day, that twitter made DMing people a bluecheck option only by default, so it's possible no one ever got the messages. this also includes dasha, a podcaster i don't know anything about. but we didn't ask her to pee on any books; we just asked if she'd like a copy, because she had posted about the same anime that inspired the cover design.

we also tweeted asking for folks to pee on the book if we sent an extra copy. i had forgotten who replied to this/was unsure how serious anyone was and only sent out one extra book, to coleman bomar, who peed on it and posted a video. later someone else from tennessee ordered a book and asked for some of coleman's pee, which i do not have access to. i am unsure why pee was a central theme for the book promotion, but it worked out well, i think, and made me laugh a lot.

Promotion - preorder bundles

we also offered a bundle of a shirt, magnet, and book. the shirt making has been a shitty, still unresolved saga, wherein i tried to have them made locally to support local businesses and save money on shipping. but i ended up working with perhaps the shittiest shirt printer in the state, who would ignore my emails, ghost me, forget to email me, argue with me, etc. currently the shirts are in a store location i cannot access until friday, and they will likely not be open on friday. i regret not going through the florida-based printer we used for the liver mush shirts, who were professional and easy to work with. i opted to send the books/magnets separately from the shirts, losing ~$70 on redundant shipping costs. i ordered only 40 shirts after announcing 50 bundles, based on the total sales (~14), and will keep one for myself and send one to nathaniel. the shirts will ultimately, i feel, be a net loss, and i will probably eventually offer them for sale at cost just to not have them in my closet anymore.

Promotion - misc.

i posted links to a few excerpts from other magazines from the book via the back patio account. none of these resulted in the original publisher promoting the book or, seemingly, liking the posts. we later made tweets tagging magazines that hadn't published the poems, saying they published them, in an attempt to trick the publication into promoting the book for free and/or make people laugh. only one publication liked their corresponding tweet, but didn't retweet it.

i made a new website for back patio to collate the press/reviews materials and book descriptions. i then reached out to kevin at powell's who asked for just such a list, so i secured a small order of back patio books, including five copies of death egg, resulting in a small section of shelf space dedicated to back patio books. the tweet about this got high engagement. i should reach out to more cool stores.

i placed a quarter-page ad for the press, including a highlight for death egg, in maggot brain magazine, a print magazine published by third man records and edited by the guy who wrote the 33 1/3 book about loveless, which should be out around now. this cost me $187. i would be surprised if it ends up paying off, but it seemed like a fun thing to do, and i like the magazine a lot (i also get a free copy of this issue, apparently). some of the other ads are for punk/diy record labels based on bandcamp, which is cool, in my opinion.

josh sherman invited me and nathaniel, and other people, to read at his chapbook release reading as part of misery loves company, which we hijacked, to comedic effect, i think, to promote death egg. nathaniel did a good job reading and i posted the order page a few times when people were talking about josh's book, which made me laugh. we got ~3 book sales during the reading. we've also scheduled a back patio mlc reading for 9/29, which will include, nathaniel, cav, dan, graham, kurt, tj, and troy.

i regret not reaching out to more internet and irl places early on for reviews/interviews. however, this time period corresponded to a family crisis which resulted in me taking time off of work and not doing anything much aside from acting in 'crisis mode' for my family for over a month. i spent ~1-2 hours/week during this time working on death egg. to this end i feel guilt about not being able to do more for the book/nathaniel.

finally, we opened the magazine for web subs just prior to announcing the book. this was a partly cynical/manipulative move to drive up engagement for the press and potentially sell more books. however, i am unsure this resulted in any sales we wouldn't have otherwise gotten. but overall it was good for everyone. we all enjoyed reading and editing the pieces we got and we have published, and will continue to publish, some really cool writing. i'm glad we reopened and we will probably do it again in january. i owe kurt a lot for taking on a lot of this effort when my life fell apart in august.

sales - preorders

we announced preorders sometime in august and i shipped the preorder books around september 7th. there were 62 preorders at the time, 12 of which were for tshirt + book bundles. we have since sold a few more of each.

the free promotional stickers for orders included random mixes of black and white stickers ("i love shitty poetry", "alternative literature", "death egg cover", and "back patio press logo"), glitter stickers ("back patio in barbie font on a gun"), holographic stickers (misc. "cyberwriter" series, featuring sebastian, derek, bram, and nathaniel), and a bold yellow (but small) "ask me about the death egg" sticker. i used sticker guy for the black and white stickers and sticker mule for the fancier ones. sticker guy is very cheap but slow, and their website is difficult to navigate. sticker mule can be expensive, but offers interesting products and has frequent sales.

only 3 of the death egg orders included other books/items: one person bought my book bundle, one person bought liver mush, and one person bought good at drugs.

i sent free back patio books to ~10 random orders, and gave free art or bonus stickers to people i know/like from online. as far as i can tell this resulted in ~3 promotional twitter pictures and one goodreads review for non-death egg books.

around september 7th i sent nathaniel $301 in royalties.

sales - amazon

around when i started shipping books, i sent nathaniel all the raw book files and manically worked with him to set up the book on amazon kdp as a print and ebook. amazon kdp/ebook setup is a pain in the ass and required several different types of files and arbitrary changes. for the ebook, i had to manually add page breaks (instead of using the keyboard shortcut, for some reason) to get them to register. we set up the amazon book using his own account such that he'd by default receive all the amazon royalty payments. this approach was modeled after sebastian castillo's book SALMON and inspired by the fact that it's a huge pain in the as to do amazon royalties (especially after taking over for cavin - setting up a new bank account, etc etc). in exchange nathaniel gets a smaller royalty split on the books that i sell. since being put on amazon, we've sold 2 copies of the book through flat dog distro but seemingly many on amazon. i hope nathaniel considers the money aspect equitable.

the book peaked at #53 in the contemporary fiction (books) category on amazon, spurred on by duggan's manic promotional tweeting and "post weird twitter" networking. he had also purchased twitter blue in anticipation of the promotion cycle, which he claims de creased his post engagement, ironically.

nathaniel says he's sold 45 copies on amazon since we uploaded it, which is impressive, i feel.

sales - conclusion

so far we've sold a little over 100 books during the first few weeks and gave away ~10, which is, in my opinion. very good numbers for indie poetry that doesn't take institutional promotion tactics very seriously. incidentally, unrelated, i saw that clash had sold over 12,000 copies of some stupid looking horror novel during this time. i hope that people who may or may not be seething about the death egg hype cycle, its participants, and its aura of success consider this disparity when subtweeting/shittalking those involved.

i anticipate the book selling more copies over time, especially if we see continued press interest from local or online avenues, and natural interest in the book as people talk or post about it. it currently has 3 amazon reviews and 8 goodreads reviews.

thank you to everyone who has purchased the book.

tshirts

i cleaned out my tshirt drawer to make room for sweaters and socks that were in a different drawer to make room for towels in the former sock drawer (we don't have a linen closet). it made me think about tshirts. writing about tshirts helped me remember more about tshirts. this is a blog post about my personal relationship to/with tshirts throughout my life. i've enjoyed seeing this post get bigger, as i write it.

Age 0-10
i only wore tshirts that my parents or family bought for me, or which were free from sports events, or something. i remember wearing shirts of every color, including white. i think, in the 1990s, it was more common/stylish for tshirts to have large logos on the back, and small logos on the front, as opposed to today, where i feel like most 'stylish' shirts only have logos on the front. i remember having a large (on my body) green shirt with some large logo on the back and a small logo on the front. in photographs of me as a child, my tshirts look really baggy, i think because i wore many 'free' tshirts from events, like soccer tournaments, which came in limited sizes. i do not remember having a favorite tshirt.

Late Elementary/Middle School

i first started caring about tshirts around, i think, the age of 11, when i got into skateboarding, thanks to the popularity of the tony hawks' pro skater videogame. this level of interest in tshirt was based on trying to look like a skateboarder and buying shirts that had interesting designs or logos from brands that i (arbitrarily) aligned myself with based on looking at the CCS catalog probably every day for a long period of time. i remember liking Zero, Birdhouse, and Spitfire brands. i think I also owned Osiris shoes. i was thin and i mostly wore baggy tshirts of various dark colors with logos. sometimes i wore long-sleeved tshirts underneath. i did actually skateboard, but i was never good. i was probably the worst out of all my friends.

around the age of 12, i started getting fat, and i learned about how black tshirts were better at hiding the shape of my torso than other colors. i pivoted to mostly wearing black skateboard tshirts. my favorite was a Zero branded shirt, which i liked because of its association with the smashing pumpkins. i wore it to a physical with my doctor at some point and was asked very delicate questions about my mental health, whether i 'often felt like a zero,' etc. my parents tell this story fondly, in a 'such a rascal' way, and recalling how they told the doctor, on my behalf, 'no, it's just a skateboard company logo,'  like to insinuate that the doctor was an idiot. but, what i have since come to accept, and maybe they haven't, is that i did actually feel bad most of the time, and the Zero iconography did, i felt, represent my outlook on life, to some degree.

Jr High School

i remember my mom getting frustrated that i only owned black tshirts around the time i was 13 and offered to let me pick out and buy several tshirts from the internet. i was less into skateboarding by this point and become interested more in bands. i remember buying a bright yellow tshirt for the band LIARS which i wore exactly once. i remember, still, how it felt, seeing myself look really bad in such a bright yellow tshirt. i remember feeling frustrated that i hadn't thought about what it would look like to wear a bright colored shirt over my torso. it was printed on an american apparel tshirt and had a kite-based design. i remember my mom expressing frustration with me about my tshirts with some amount of frequency, i think, in retrospect, because i would wear black tshirts in the summer, and the summer is usually when we'd visit extended family, and my mom is very sensitive to being 'judged' as a parent by our extended family, i think. around this time i started wearing long-sleeved shirts (button downs, hoodies, and track jackets) almost all the time, including in the summer. i remember at some summer camp it becoming a 'thing' that i wore a track jacket so much, which i justified because i was doing the 'movie making' track of the camp, and spent most of the week indoors, where it was air conditioned.

High School

in early high school, i remember wearing black tshirts of various sizes. i remember having a black tshirt from the high school drama department, for some reason, that was too tight, but i wore it all the time. i had a bright eyes tshirt from their digital ash tour (glow in the dark ink on black) i also had a brown tshirt with a cartoon on it from toothpaste for dinner. at some later point in high school Threadless became popular and i spent my own money on $10 tshirts, including some that were dark blue or dark green. i still mostly wore black tshirts, at some point wearing a generic skateboarding tshirt (possible tony hawk brand) from Kohl's, but inside out. most of my clothing during my sophomore to senior year, i think, was tight fitting, including the tshirts, which on retrospect was counterproductive re: wearing black to hide my body shape. i remember wearing tight pants often and overhearing my friend comment to another friend that my pants were too tight, at some point, because he had to sit next to me in class. i also owned a pair of tight pink khakis i bought from a goodwill, because i liked The Unicorns at the time, but i'm pretty sure my mom threw them out (my siblings and i each have one story of our mom throwing out an article of clothing she deemed unacceptable - mine were the pink pants, i assume because of an appeal to gender/sexuality norms).

by my senior year of high school i had lost weight and had grown a beard and so felt more confident in my appearance. i remember it was around this time that i became more aware of american apparel and how it was the default shirt for band merchandise. i was in a band and had a lot of band shirts from bands we'd play with, or from concerts i would go to, or which sometimes i would order online. i remember wearing a baby blue modest mouse tshirt and a size small, black, modest mouse cotton track jacket a lot, for example, and i remember a dark blue tshirt for a band called The Nobility, who we played with once, and a brown Toads and Mice shirt. i remember giving my size-large tshirts that didn't fit me anymore to my bandmate josh, who later died i think ~5 years after the band broke up. i remember, at the time, being surprised that he wanted to wear my old shirts, because i remember him otherwise being very aggressive/dismissive toward/about me in a general sense.

around/after this time i found out about etsy and other websites where people sold screenprinted tshirts. one was a website called reckon.ws, which sold shirts with pictures of musicians and authors on american apparel tshirts. from them i purchased a black shirt with Nico printed on it, and some others, but the Nico shirt fit the best and was my favorite. i also purchased shirts from an etsy shop called "blackflag317", i think, which had anticapitalist and anti-imperial slogans/images on them, including "resist, don't enlist" (on olive green), "ningún ser humano es ilegal" (on slate), and "capitalism kills" (on red).  i felt good about my body and wore tshirts without longersleeved shirts over top during this period.

i find it interesting that 'high school' is the longest section in this post.

College
my friends and i considered getting into screenprinting our own shirts, inspired by these other stores, which was mostly a failure, but in the process we found a website that let you 'bulk order' american apparel tshirts for bulk prices, but for any number of shirts. this meant i was able to buy orders of 2-3 american apparel tshirts for ~$6 each before shipping. for most of my first year of college, i wore these $6 american apparel tshirts and the above shirts from etsy. i mostly had blank black, grey (slate), green (forest), and blue vnecks (blue was my least favorite). my friend james, in my head, from this time period, exclusively wore pastel american apparel (deep) vneck tshirts and nice pants. there was an american apparel store near where i went to college but i don't remember ever buying anything from there, refusing to pay the price the charged, after having purchased so many $6 shirts on the most-likely illegal website.

at some point i moved away from blank tshirts and wore other shirts from etsy with art/slogans on them again, or shirts i'd buy secondhand, including a black REM tour shirt (i do not listen to REM) and a forest green gilden shirt from etsy that was printed with some kind of bold futurist slogan about nature, which i wore ironically. i think this coincided with american apparel becoming less fashionable. i remember people using 'alternative apparel' for a while, for band tshirts, and then most moved to making shirts on the shitty thick gilden tshirts. i regret not buying more shirts from before this change to gilden (however, i have put on weight, and would not fit in any of the shirts i used to own, i think, anyway).

Grad School
i started buying blank vneck tshirts from old navy, which you could/can get for ~$6. i also attempted to 'dress nicer' for a while, wearing button-ups, and sometimes a sweater vest. during this period, most of my tshirts were from old navy or were free shirts from the annual career fair. i would go to the career fair simply to get free tshirts and other free, 'useful' things, sunglasses. most of the tshirts were for technology companies or had some kind of computer programming references on them that i didn't understand/care about. people in public would try to talk to me about the references and i'd say i got the shirt for free from the career fair and didn't understand the references. i also owned a pair of yellow snapchat branded sunglasses which i wore sometimes, a some other, less colorful sunglasses.

eventually i stopped giving a shit about my appearance/self and stopped dressing nicer, and started wearing just tshirts or tshirts with flannel shirts. i believe this coincided with me becoming more depressed/accepting my depression. i also started wearing/buying more black band tshirts that usually came with record preorders, i think, or which were gifts from my friend brent, who lived in seattle and would go to concerts i recommended to him, and he'd buy me merch to mail me. i remember having a Whirr tshirt and 2-3 Nothing tshirts, and blank old navy vnecks. i remember the bold, dark band shirts felt like the reflected my inner turmoil or outlook on life, in a juvenile, but therapeutic, maybe, way.

i do not have any of the technology company tshirts from this time period anymore, or any of the (black) band tshirts i did splurge on, or get as gifts, mostly because i have since gained weight, or lost the shirts.

Present Day

today, my tshirt collection is, again, mostly black. i briefly experimented with wearing lighter-colored vnecks from old navy, such as a blue striped one and a cream/grey one, but when looking at pictures of myself wearing them, i feel grossed out/ashamed. they are now worn by my wife as pajama shirts.

i do own and wear one cream-colored shirt, because it was a gift and i like the design - it is from Chop Suey Books in Richmond, VA (and it is a vneck - i have few vnecks anymore, since old navy changed their tshirt sizing some years ago), but i try not to look at myself in the mirror when i wear it. i have also moved back to wearing hoodies/over shirts, specifically, now, flannel shirts, when the weather permits, which is maybe 8 months of the year. most of my tshirts are band tshirts on bad quality material (gilden) and/or bad cuts (tight crew necks), but i also still wear a tyrant books shirt (nicer quality) and hobart buffalo skulls shirt (good quality, kind of formfitting) with regularity. i own 3 horse jumper of love tshirts but only wear one regularly. i also have an orange Snowing shirt and a light blue/acidwash(?) Kindling shirt with a blue logo on it that my toddler likes to point at and say "blue". i wear maybe 5-6 shirts on a consistent rotation, the others feeling too thick and uncomfortable to wear frequently, including the bootleg tyrant books shirt from steve anwyll (canadian tshirt crewneck neck holes are noticeably tighter than american tshirt crewneck neck holes, in my experience, based on buying ~3 shirts from canada, including my 'no future' tshirt from choplogik, which this blog is named after). i think maybe the majority of my tshirts i own have dogs on them, maybe ~4 dog tshirts, 2 cat shirts, one buffalo shirt, and one lemur shirt. the hjol shirt i like also has a mouse on it i think.

most of my tshirts have holes near the front bottom hem due to my belt buckle, i think, which has a sharp square corner. most of my shirts are also faded and in some cases 'lobsided'.  i am currently wearing my tyrant books tshirt. i just looked at myself in the mirror and i look like total shit.

i briefly googled 'what happened to american apparel' and learned that they went into bankruptcy twice, and there were a lot of issues/accusations about their founder/ceo/?? being a misogynist republican. i don't know anyone who wears or talks about american apparel. i don't have any american apparel shirts left. i held onto my Nico shirt for sentimental reasons, but it has a pretty bad hole in the armpit, and is two sizes too small.

i just wondered if tao lin's Joy Williams tshirt was from reckon.ws. that seems likely. this is the shirt:

Tao Lin's Joy Williams Shirt. I think this is 'eggplant' color from american apparel

the blackflag317 etsy shop no longer exists. i saw someone make a joke(?) about threadless on twitter recently, but haven't looked at their shirts in ~10 years, which i think was maybe the joke.

i have also spent some unknown amount of time uselessly looking for nice quality band tshirts printed on vnecks. if you have any recommendations on cool tshirts printed on black vnecks, please contact me. thank you.