Jonathan Face is a computer programmer by day and the author of Catharsis, a horror novel set in a small New Hampshire town, which has over 28,000 downloads on Amazon. He’s also the author of The Remnants Part I and II, and most recently, Odd Tales, a collection of short fiction. We grew up in the same small town of Warner, New Hampshire, and he graduated from the same high school as me a few years before I got there. We met for the first time when I was back in the state and sat down at his parents’ dining room table to talk about minimum wage jobs, self-publishing, job security, and being open with your coworkers about your writing life.
I. It’s Not a Lot, But It’s Gas Money
But I Also Have a Day Job: So tell me about your goals—what does being a writer mean to you?
Jonathan Face: I don’t know if I have a good answer. It’s something to do for fun—I don’t have, really, goals. It’s either this or play video games for me, and at least with this I have something to show for it at the end. The last couple things I’ve written I haven’t even sent to publishers. I probably will again someday, but with the last couple of things I’ve just decided to put them directly to Amazon myself and whatever happens, happens.
BIAHADJ: What made you change your mind about traditional publishing?
JF: Well, with this most recent book, number one it’s short stories, and I feel it’d probably be very hard to market that, especially if you’re an unknown person. When have you ever bought a short story collection if you don’t know who the author is?
BIAHADJ: True.
JF: It’s hard enough just selling a novel on someone who’s unknown, so I was like, well, probably no one’s going to be interested in a bunch of short stories, so I’ll just put that out as an extra book and see what I can learn from the process. If you spend time on internet forums devoted to independent and self-published writing, everyone’s talking about marketing, and they’re almost all really awful writers—they should be spending time talking about how they can not be bad writers.
BIAHADJ: Yes! [laughs]
JF: But those writers would rather be talking about things like, well, if I tweet this now and I get this Goodreads thing going here, and I’m just like, ugh…I don’t really want to be involved with these people. [laughs]
BIAHADJ: Why?
JF: It’s embarrassing to me to market—I feel like I’m trying to trick people. And from reading books by a lot of these other self-published authors it seems like they’ve never even read a book, let alone written one. How is your ego so big when your book has spelling errors? That turns me off to the whole community of being an independent writer.
On Amazon, there’s a way you can sort by only self-published books [shudders] and if you look at only the most recent from this month, it’ll be like 100,000 entries, most of which are pornographic looking, and I’m just embarrassed to be associated with these people because they don’t really take it seriously. They’re just…I don’t know if they’re just in love with themselves and think people want to know what they have to say about bondage and domination, or what.
BIAHADJ: But you mentioned that you’d like to publish a book with a traditional publisher someday?
JF: I’m working on a couple of things right now that are probably going to be full-sized novels, and I may send those out to agents. I’ve done that before, like with Catharsis I tried to find an agent for a long time, and sometimes I directly solicited publishers. And sometimes people would be passively interested, but never quite enough. One publishing house was really interested, but then they went bankrupt or something.
BIAHADJ: Oh yikes—what was that experience like?
JF: I sent the novel to this publishing house that had a lot of similar books that were kind of horror-y, offbeat type of fiction on their website—it was some publishing house out of Tennessee, I think—and they said they really loved it, and they sent it to their tier three editors or whatever, and they kept coming back with positive things, and then there was just radio silence for six months, and then I got impatient and Googled the company name and they were out of business, so I was like, OK…
BIAHADJ: Was it a big disappointment?
JF: No, because they weren’t a big-money publishing house—it would have been something like a credential to put on my resume, like, “Officially Published Author.” It was a little disappointing, but it wasn’t the end of the world because I still do make money with Amazon—it’s not a lot, but it’s gas money, and I think that’s probably the healthiest way to look at it because most people just simply aren’t going to make it, no matter how good they are, even if they’re amazing writers—in fact, awful writers are oftentimes successful, you know?
BIAHADJ: [laughs] Unfortunately…
II. It’s Been Pretty Easy Street for Me Without a College Degree
BIAHADJ: What did you study in college?
JF: I was a writing student—I didn’t finish, but I was a creative writing student.
BIAHADJ: How was your program? Did you get a lot out of it?
JF: I think it’s kind of a hustle, to be honest. I mean, it wasn’t a waste of time, because at least where I went you workshopped stuff, where one week you would write a short story and the whole class would read it and then give you feedback on it. But this was in the late ‘90s, and today you can just go online and find people who’ll read your stuff. I think to really get decent at writing you kind of just have to live and observe things and read a lot. If I had to go back I probably wouldn’t have gone to college, or I would have gone for something else, because I can do the writing anyways. I got more out of the literature classes because they teach you how to analyze and look for patterns that maybe aren’t on the surface of a novel, and that helped me to write.
BIAHADJ: What made you want to study writing in the first place?
JF: I’ve always liked writing stories since I was a boy. I wrote a novel when I was eleven or twelve—I mean, it wasn’t a good novel, but I sent it to TSR Books, which is now Wizards of the Coast. It came from that feeling of being a little kid and thinking you can do anything.
BIAHADJ: Did they respond?
JF: They responded and said this is not for us, but it was kind of cool because back then you had to print out a manuscript and mail it in, and I could see that it had been rifled and someone had read through it, and I was like, “Wow!” and that alone made it worthwhile to me.
BIAHADJ: When you’re a kid, that matters.
JF: It’s almost encouragement, even though it’s a rejection.
BIAHADJ: Yeah! It teaches you how to be a part of that adult world of writers and sending things off and engaging with books and publishing, and that means a lot to kids. But to backtrack a bit, what was life like for you right after college?
JF: Well, I dropped out of college. I never finished.
BIAHADJ: What was the reason behind that?
JF: I stopped going to classes, I started playing Baldur’s Gate 2 too much. I had nine a.m. classes and I just didn’t want to go and I hated school and I didn’t really feel like it had a point. I dropped out but they were going to expel me because I had missed so many classes. So then I started working minimum wage jobs. I worked at a convenience store, I was a security guard at a mall, I drove a taxi…
BIAHADJ: What was it like doing all those different kinds of jobs?
JF: Miserable! I mean, there’s always interesting people you meet, but you’re making minimum wage and having to pay for an apartment, with no money for fun.
BIAHADJ: Where did you live?
JF: Manchester [New Hampshire].
BIAHADJ: No kidding—I used to live in Manchester, first on the west side, then on Beech Street.
JF: I lived on Wilson Street. You know where Vista Foods is? I don’t even know if it’s still there. [Editor’s Note: It isn’t.] This was maybe 2000, 2001. I didn’t really mind it, but we had an awful apartment, the ceiling leaked, and the landlady just never did anything. I would call her to tell her that it was raining and that there was a river in our living room, and she’d be like, “Yeah, I don’t know what to tell you.”
BIAHADJ: So what got you out of there?
JF: Well, at the same time I got interested in technology and started learning how to do computer programming, on my own and with a friend, on the internet and stuff. And this was in the time when the internet was starting to boom and I could actually get an office-type job and not have to do this kind of life anymore, so I just did. Since then it’s been pretty easy street for me without a college degree—no one cares, as long as you have work experience in technology.
BIAHADJ: I’m told that’s the way it is in that industry—as long as you can prove you can do the work, they’ll take you.
JF: Right, you have hard interviews where you have to do exercises and math problems, so they can be stressful, but overall I’ve never had to worry about job security, and if I lost my job I could get another one tomorrow because I get enough queries on LinkedIn. So that allows me to be a half-assed writer.
BIAHADJ: Don’t say half-assed! That’s disparaging—I certainly won’t put that in the interview.
JF: I mean, not in a full-time, this-is-what-I’m-doing kind of way. I have a child and I have a career, and the writing is kind of in that hour when everyone’s asleep.
III. I Don’t Hide It, But I Don’t Announce It
BIAHADJ: When is your writing time?
JF: Generally about 9:00 to 11:00 at night.
BIAHADJ: And what time do you go to bed?
JF: Around 11:30 or so. Then I get up at 7:00. So it’s kind of a grind, but it’s getting easier now because the kid’s a little older and it’s not constant exhaustion and getting woken up in the middle of the night. I actually find that I do more writing now that I have responsibilities compared to all those years I spent single and could do whatever I wanted and I would just watch movies and do anything but the writing. Now it just seems like it’s more urgent.
BIAHADJ: So was this a gradual change, or did it happen quickly?
JF: It was pretty instant. As soon as the kid was born, once I realized this was going to take up all of my time for the next two or three years it just became easier. Now I’ll actually write on my phone sometimes, in the middle of the day at work or something. If I have some free time I’ll just open a Google Doc on my phone and start typing. I won’t do it in front of my coworkers, but…
BIAHADJ: Why not?
JF: Because I’m supposed to be working. [laughs]
BIAHADJ: Is your workplace strict in that regard?
JF: I mean, probably not. I could always say I’m working on something or come up with an excuse, but generally I’ll go out to the car at lunchtime and start typing.
BIAHADJ: Do your coworkers know that you’re a writer?
JF: [answers immediately] No. Well, they might, I don’t know—I don’t advertise it, you know?
BIAHADJ: Why?
JF: You know it’s…I’m kind of embarrassed, I guess.
BIAHADJ: Embarrassed?! What does that mean?
JF: There’s kind of something shameful about it, don’t you think?
BIAHADJ: [aghast] In what way?
JF: You know, I don’t know. I think I just feel kind of douchey being like [adopts a dreamily pretentious voice] I’m a very delicate artist and I need my writing time…
BIAHADJ: But you’re not! You write throwback pulp fiction from the ‘50s and cool horror novels that take place in New Hampshire and have characters getting shot and disemboweled.
JF: I don’t know, my instinctive reaction is to wait until something’s really successful and then brag about it.
BIAHADJ: OK, so let’s say that Odd Tales sold a half million copies…
JF: Yeah, I’d probably say, “Hey guys, I’m quitting!”
BIAHADJ: Just because you were quitting, or because you wanted to share with them that you were a writer?
JF: Both, but I’d probably rub that in and be like, “By the way, I’m better than you.” [laughs] I’m just joking, but if I sold whatever amount was enough to be comfortable for a little while, I’d quit to just focus on the writing. For now, I don’t hide it, but I don’t announce it.
BIAHADJ: What would you do if one of your coworkers stumbled upon your writing online and was like, “Jonathan, is this you?”
JF: That’s what happened at my last job, actually. I think they had Googled my name when I interviewed just to make sure I wasn’t a criminal or something, and said, “Oh, I see here that you write” and I had to be like, “Oh, yep, I self-publish this stuff here and there,” and downplayed it as just something I do for fun. They asked me what it was like and if I liked doing it, and that was the end of it. It really wasn’t bad.
BIAHADJ: Do any of your coworkers do anything creative?
JF: [thinks] Not artistic, but a lot of them do craft stuff. I work with a bunch of engineers so they’re always building something weird, like one guy I work with is building a video game driving rig so he can drive cars on his computer.
BIAHADJ: Do they feel comfortable talking about those things?
JF: I had to get it out of them, so maybe not. They weren’t secretive about it, but it just came up when I asked them about their weekends, and that led to a conversation about it. They didn’t announce it up front or anything like that.
BIAHADJ: You’re bringing back all these memories of times when coworkers asked me about creative things I was doing and I didn’t have a lot of confidence in them, so I either denied or downplayed them, or talked about them with embarrassment.
JF: There’s like a name for that, imposter syndrome, and I think it’s pretty common in creative stuff.
BIAHADJ: But I’m also wondering whether people who work in software engineering with a bunch of guys who make things have an easier time talking about constructing physical objects they’re working on, even if they’re just to play video games.
JF: I think it’s definitely easier to talk about tech geek things, because you’re surrounded by people you just know will be into it. I don’t necessarily know if people I work with would even read books. I used to live in New York City and there’s tons of creative people there. There I would feel much more at ease saying, “Oh, I’m working on this book,” because everyone’s working on a book.
BIAHADJ: What kinds of people were you meeting in New York?
JF: Lots of bar people, aspiring actors, aspiring songwriters, aspiring playwrights, and they’re all waiters and bartenders.
BIAHADJ: How did they present the aspiring aspect of their work?
JF: Pretty brazenly. Kind in a shocking way, where I’d cringe a little bit. [again speaks in dreamily pretentious voice] I’m great at this, and you should understand that someday I’m going to be…in lights.
BIAHADJ: I feel like I’m the kind of person who will often be suckered in by people like that—like, I’ll be convinced the person is a great actor, and then maybe I’ll actually see them act and find out that they’re not. [JF laughs] There’s a certain kind of person who’s very good at talking the talk and puffing themselves up. I think in a lot of those communities there’s a lot of pressure and everyone’s trying to one-up each other, even though they’re all just beginners. So instead of being honest with each other and behaving like we’re all in this together, they feel a need to puff out their chests.
JF: Maybe that’s part of what contributes to the idea that if I don’t shout about who I am like they do I’ll stand out from the pack and just create my own success. I really think that for people who are good at any kind of creative thing, good work will find its way. Maybe that’s totally naïve and stupid, but I can’t help but think that.
IV. Maybe That’ll Help Me in Some Vague Way
BIAHADJ: Do you give yourself deadlines for your writing?
JF: Unofficially. I have this zombie series called The Remnants that I just kind of do for fun, because the zombie stories are weirdly popular, and I’ve been doing this thing where I put out maybe one hundred pages at a time and sell it for like, three bucks, which is the lowest you can sell for on Amazon and still get the 70% royalty. I don’t really give myself a deadline, but I like to be timely. Right now it’s every six to nine months—but every single time I’m like, “Oh, I’ll do the next one and it’ll be done in like a month,” and then, no. [laughs]
BIAHADJ: Do you interact with fans at all?
JF: I used to put my email address on my About the Author page, but I stopped because I started getting too much email, and some of it was weird. Sometimes I could tell it was a kid writing to me, like this one kid who’d read Catharsis, and he was like, I just figured I’d email you, and I liked this book, and what do you recommend next? And I responded and talked to him for a bit and told him what I was working on, and he’d be like, what’s it about, and I said, it’s about this and this, and he’d be like, what about this? And finally I just had to stop answering. And then people would just want to talk to me about their kids, or about their families, like this older woman who emailed me one time to say that her son also writes, and he’s done this and that, and she was telling me about her whole life, and I had to tell her OK, thank you for enjoying my book, but I don’t have time to correspond.
BIAHADJ: That must be very hard to deal with because you’re a busy person, and you also had to figure out the best way to respond.
JF: I would always just try to say thank you and be polite and cordial, but it’s hard to have a whole back and forth with someone I don’t know.
BIAHADJ: Have you been enjoying being on Twitter?
JF: Not really. I find it kind of stressful.
BIAHADJ: You’re more active on there than I am.
JF: Well I try to be, just because I feel like I have to be, like I should have some kind of presence. I don’t want to write a blog or anything, so if I think of something I think is funny, maybe someone will notice it and I’ll get more followers or whatever, and maybe that’ll help me in some vague way that I don’t really understand. But otherwise I don’t read Twitter, I don’t usually look at other people’s stuff. It’s too hard to know what’s going on. Half of it seems to be ads.
BIAHADJ: [laughs] Yep, that’s accurate.
JF: But if nothing else, that’s where I’ll go to say there’s a new book out by me, go buy it here.
V. Now I Take It Less Seriously
BIAHADJ: I want to go back to you as a twentysomething in Manchester. What was it like working minimum wage jobs and teaching yourself coding?
JF: At the time I was doing the coding really for fun. Minimum wage jobs stink, but I guess I sort of knew that if I kept either writing or working on the software stuff, surely I could get something better than this.
BIAHADJ: So were you working on both writing and coding at the same time?
JF: Writing much less, but yeah, a little bit. I had these two threads, and I could go either way—this one seemed kind of thin, but maybe there’s some pull…
BIAHADJ: So how did it pay off?
JF: I mean, learning computers is a whole lot easier than breaking into publishing.
BIAHADJ: True.
JF: My roommate had been to school for computer science, so the two of us were kind of nerds and into that stuff. And then he moved off to New York City for a girl, and I decided to follow him. I just thought, why don’t I move to New York? There’s no reason for me to stay in Manchester, New Hampshire when I can get another eight-fifty-an-hour-job anywhere.
BIAHADJ: I have nothing but admiration for people who make those kinds of decisions.
JF: Right, and it banked. I moved there, and I had no experience, so I had to take what I could get. This company in Harlem, they had an ad on Craigslist or something—I’d interviewed at legit places and gotten nothing, but this company was like, if you come fix our websites for us, we’ll pay you, I think it was like 500 bucks a week, in 2008, and I was like, REALLY??!! I just thought that was fantastic.
BIAHADJ: And it wasn’t security guarding anymore.
JF: Exactly. I was finally feeling like I could pay my rent and go out to eat and do whatever I wanted. I did that for about a year, and after that I got a legit day job at an advertising company making online ads, a company called Doubleclick. And then they got bought by Google, and I ended up working for Google. And ever since then it’s been easy for me, because if you have Google on your resume people will just give you the benefit of the doubt. [laughs] So that was probably the best decision I made, just leaving New Hampshire to go somewhere where there was work for me. Because now there’s technology work in New Hampshire, but at the time there wasn’t really anything like that.
BIAHADJ: Did you feel scared when you made the move?
JF: No, because I could always go back and live with my parents again if it fell through. I’d have to skip out on my rent or something, but…
BIAHADJ: It’s like me going to Japan after I finished college—you’ve got nothing to lose. And that made it easier, because if you’re in a position where you have a job that you KINDA like, or if you’re making $31,000 a year or something, you might be afraid of losing that and might not feel comfortable taking the risk.
JF: Right. And that period, when I was in New York and I first started getting real jobs, that was when I started going back into writing more, because I was kind of established and had a good job and I could pay all my bills. That was when I wrote Catharsis. I think the first time I published it was 2011, and I wrote it over probably nine months, but the first version of it was very different. In the two years after I published it I went back and edited it again and added new chapters, and parts of it that were weak I revised. The one that’s out now, I don’t think I’ll go back to it again. Originally I spent three or four months trying to see if I could publish it somewhere, without getting too much. So after a while I thought I’d just try putting it out there on Amazon, and I did. Then I figured out how to game it to make it free because I was making no money on it, and no one buys someone’s book when they don’t know who they are.
BIAHADJ: This is true…
JF: So you can’t set a book to be free on Amazon, but if you put it on a competing site and make it free, and then you tell Amazon that it’s free, they’ll do a price match. I told them that this book by some other guy who’s not me was totally for free on this other website, and can you match the price? So when that happened, one day I looked at it and it said that 20,000 people had downloaded it, and I thought, “Oh, I’m rich!” and then I remembered, “Oh, it’s free.” [laughs] And that worked—it got me lots of good reviews.
BIAHADJ: What was the reasoning behind making it free?
JF: Just that it wasn’t selling, and maybe if I could make it free, people would probably take something free, so maybe if I could do that I could get some momentum going. That sort of worked, but I didn’t have anything to follow it up with, so I squandered the opportunity. I probably should have waited until I had something else to then put out for money.
BIAHADJ: But you had the right idea, because if someone puts some of their stuff out there for free and then people get interested in it and start to really love it, after a while they might be willing to pay for a hard copy or contribute to the Kickstarter or support them on Patreon or something.
JF: I don’t regret it. I mean, it would have just been sitting on my computer, so at least now it’ll be read, and hopefully enjoyed.
BIAHADJ: It means a lot for real people to actually see something you’ve written.
JF: Yeah, that’s a big one—like, wow, strangers are actually seeing this, so maybe I can do this.
BIAHADJ: Would you say that your mindset about writing has changed since then?
JF: Yeah, now I take it less seriously. When you’re a kid everyone encourages you, even if you stink—at least your parents do, if they’re good, I guess—and I always thought I was going to just be a writer someday, and I would have all this money and everything would be paid for and it would be this easy life. Now I don’t ever expect it to be like that, and I’m totally fine with that. I’d say there are some benefits to having a regular job and just kind of not caring about the writing, because if someone gives you a bad review or something, it might hurt, but also, who cares, it’s not your job. I think it’s just a healthier mentality to not take yourself so seriously and to think you have to be successful at this, or nothing.
You can find more about Jonathan Face at his website, his Amazon page, or follow him on Twitter (even though it’s kind of stressful for him…).
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