SPUN: The Tale of a Successful Brooklyn App
March 2009: At Zaytoons on Vanderbilt Avenue, Andy asks Scott, “If this were an action movie and an atomic bomb were to detonate in Manhattan, if we fail, what would we do?” They write a business plan and raise $50,000 from a group of people crazy enough to believe that a literary magazine may one day be profitable. Over coffee, they get Michael Cunningham (Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Hours) to convince his agent and publisher to take a risk and contribute. Andy drives to rural Williamsburg, Massachusetts in a rental car to solicit a story from Jim Shepard (which he pulls from consideration from The Paris Review).
May 2009: EL adopts the slogan “Reading that’s bad for you,” and shoots an ad campaign in downtown Brooklyn capturing pictures of young people smoking cigars, eating donuts, drinking 40s and licking toads. At first they put the toad-licker on the front of the magazine, but Michael Cunningham says, “I will not appear in a magazine with a girl licking a toad on its cover.”
June 2009: Hopes are high. Two hours after Electric Literature’s launch, one literary blog writes about them. Then another. “It’s starting!” says Andy. But it’s actually the end—no one else cares. In the first week, EL sells 30 copies. Andy is up at 3am Googling ”how to deal with failure” and reading FailBlog until dawn.
July 2009: Scott says, “Remember those stop-motion animations MTV used to run in between videos? We should make those for EL.” Andy quotes Jasper Johns: “Take something. Do something to it. Do something else to it.” Scott says, “We could animate one sentence from each story we publish.” Single Sentence Animations are born and more than 200,000 YouTube views result (eventually).
August 2009: Andy and Scott realize that all the time they thought would be spent discussing literature and attending book parties is instead being spent relentlessly hustling, marketing and promoting EL. Somewhere, a single tear is shed.
