User talk:John Thomas Cullen

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I hope you enjoy editing here! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will insert your name and the date. If you need help, check out the community portal, or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! Annie (talk) 18:58, 27 September 2022 (EDT)

Clocktower Books

The 2000 in this record came from a book record - we date these entries so that if a publisher location changes, we know when the location was valid (the note had not been touched since 2008). The oldest book we have is from 1998. When was the publisher/publishing company founded? I will rewrite the note based on that. Note that the record is not for the home on record of the person owning the business (I assume that is you?) but for the publisher entity (the company) so if you did not start publishing in 1974, we won't use 1974 in the note. Thus my question on when the company was founded. When we know when and where the publisher is founded, we usually go with something like "Founded in 1998 in San Diego, California, USA" and that implies that the location never changed. Then if it moves, we add a line explaining when we discovered the move (or when it moved if we know exactly). Let me know if you have any questions and welcome again to ISFDB! Annie (talk) 19:05, 27 September 2022 (EDT)

responding to Annie

John Thomas Cullen (talk) 05:08, 29 September 2022 (EDT) Hi, Annie... hope this reaches you. I don't know how to work with this wiki template stuff... sorry... hope to learn...

By the way, I am mixed US/European. I have US and Luxembourg citizenship. US Army brat, born 1949 in Nuernberg, West Germany. My father was a US Army sergeant stationed there. My mother was a Luxembourg national working in FRG after the war. They met, married, and I came along. They separated for a few years, after we had also been stationed in France... so I spent most of my childhood in Luxembourg. My first language was Luxembourgeois, followed by German (we had to study it starting in 1st grade, and FRG was just a few miles across the sovereign, national border. 2nd grade we started learning French. 4th grade my parents reunited and I became an English speaker... Koblentz FRG, then New Haven Connecticut. I served in the US Army myself 5 years stationed in FRG also. I thought you might appreciate this, since you are so international yourself.

You were asking about Clocktower Books. (More info at the Clocktower Books Museum here:clocktowerbooks.com museum fyi index.html also info at deepoutside.com and farsector.com Brian Callahan and I together as C&C Publishers launched two online web publishing sites in 1996.

One was Neon Blue Fiction (mystery/suspense) started April 1996. First was Neon Blue (suspense novel) now Neon Blue: Girl, Unlocked (about a female DEA agent) All my novels are love stories ending in HEA/suspense etc on the other side so not exactly HWA.

The other was The Haunted Village (SFFH) starting July 1996. First novel: *Heartbreaker* retitled *This Shoal of Space* (SF novel)

As it turns out, my novels published there became history's first serialized online web-only novels, starting with Neon Blue. Criteria: (1) proprietary, not public domain so rule out Gutenberg etc; (2) published entirely online, not on portable media like tape, floppy, or CD; (3) published in HTML to be read online; additionally; (4) published in weekly serial chapters, one per week; (5) we had avid readers around the world who often wrote breathlessly they could not wait to read the ending, and asked for the full book, so we let them download a freely available TXT file of each novel. Remember, this is before e-commerce, so as Karen Wiesner and other observers noted in their writings about it, we were doing it for the publicity (and I would add, the fun!).

We published entirely my own fiction on these two sites. By 1998, I had the bright idea to take SFWA rules and create an online only magazine whose title ended up being Deep Outside SFFH. That was launched in April 1998. Sadly, because of the corruption and dishonesty ($$$) in the media industries, we were hated by the print and pulp cartels and to this day have not been recognized by SFWA. We published top authors, some of them as *firstlings* (e.g., Kameron Hurley, now 2 Hugos and probably more on the way; official with Locus Mag; etc) She's just one. Ted Kosmatka is another firstline. We also published two top executives of SFWA. Nothing matters in the money world. That's why I am still struggling today, as we approach the quarter century mark (1996 to 2022 is almost 25 years) to gain any sort of recognition for myself and my team members. However, our work is a matter of public record. No Wikipedia page yet... I'm working on it... we're listed on the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction for example. And I'm happy to see detailed info at ISFDB.

In 1996, anticipating all that was to follow, including that we would publish other people's work, we acquired the domain name clocktowerfiction.com in December of that year. We decided on 'fiction' rather than 'press' to avoid any connection with the print media. Brian, the technical and artistic brain, put Clocktower Fiction together by sometime in 1997. (unfortunately, I lost the domain name, which is still today being squatted by bad people in the Caribbean; long story, not relevant now).

By 2000, we were deciding to change our name to Clocktower Books to include nonfiction, poetry, journalism, etc in addition to fiction. Brian left for other projects in 2001, and I became sole proprietor of the whole enterprise, still working with a wonderful team of volunteers (all authors)... John K. Muir, Dennis Latham, A.L. Sirois, and Shaun Farrell with help & support from many of our authors.

When I took over going in to 2002, I was running the publishing business (Clocktower Books)...we never charged authors a penny, we provided free editing, layout, professional covers, etc... and we always paid them 50% of whatever we earned (net after Amazon or other host).

I renamed the magazine from Deep Outside to Far Sector SFFH and published the short stories on a special Far Sector SFFH page at Fictionwise, which was now also my primary e-book outlet. In those years, I also tried Smashwords and B&N, but ended up finally at Amazon KDP.

That's the main story. Again, there are museum pages at the link above. I also have just finished renovating the broken, ruined pages of Deep Outside and copied some of that museum info there. Also museum info at Far Sector SFFH.

Most important, I think: look at the fabulous array of talented big names we published. It seems clear to me that we deserve recognition as a historic pioneering publisher on several fronts (first HTML novel as I call Neon Blue and other books we published online) (also world's first web-only professional SFFH magazine according to SFWA rules although they refused to ever recognize our existence). I should add: part of SFWA was very sympathetic, but they could not overcome the greed, dishonesty, selfishness, and lack of vision of those in control. There are more ironies buried in all that, but that's for another day. Hope that all helps. cheers//JTC

Weblinks

Hi, I accepted your submission for a date change to 'Agnus Dei' by Maria Alexander, but changed the url to one that directly points to the story -and also verifies both medium and date- by means of the waybackmachine at archive.org. There is no need to supply more links.--Dirk P Broer (talk) 07:16, 29 September 2022 (EDT)