EDITORIAL | How Planet Scumm Found Its Orbit (and Where We’re Headed Next)
The original concept for Planet Scumm escaped from the mind of Eric Loucks in the distant Earth year of 2017.
Born from a love for old school science fiction, a tantalizing question was posed to OG team members Tyler Berd and Sean Clancy:
What would it take to publish our own little labor of love?
2017: The Conceptual Phase
As we perhaps should have anticipated, we found ourselves immediately overwhelmed—and frankly, baffled—by what we’d taken on. Despite being rich with ambition, the first run lacked, uh, nuance.
We spent a cool several hundred dollars creating a run of twenty-five sins against both typography and DIY book-making. They were ugly, but they were ours and at the end of the day, isn’t that what counts?
We were unprepared, but the lesson to be learned was this: It is A-OK to pursue your passion project, even when you have no practical experience. If you’re excited about a project, make some moves and you’ll learn along the way.
2018: The “DIY” Phase
Never ready to fold to a challenge, we regrouped and took matters into our own hands. We sourced a lovely, affordable, and very patient local printer (we will always love you, East Side Print Co.) to make our handsome covers a reality and then acquired a shiny, used home printer to use for the guts.
With better materials in play, longtime collaborator Alyssa Alarcón Santo could no longer stand by and watch a magazine that could be so great present itself in such shabby clothes. She and Sam Rheaume collaborated to drag us—by any force necessary—into the world of cohesive branding, reluctant marketing, and consistent book design conventions.
This step up in the world demanded a new means of production. Better books meant longer stories, longer stories meant additional pages, and additional pages meant we could no longer force staples to bend to our collective will.
So we borrowed a sewing machine, bought some heavy duty needles, and got to hand-binding. Thanks to our friends at the Independent Publishing Resource Center, we had access to an industrial sized paper-cutter that could trim our book babies down to a manageable size. As you can imagine, this process took an irresponsible amount of time and we quickly realized we needed to take a hard look in the self-care mirror.
The lesson to be learned in Phase 2? It is acceptable and encouraged to spend some money if it saves your body stress.
It might be fun to pull some all-nighters sewing books with your pals, but you never get those hours you spent fighting with the broken sewing machine back. The deadline stress, the costs of human error, and the aforementioned graveyard shifts should all be taken into account when comparing production methods.
2019: The Current Phase
Like all great leaders of yore, we took a leap—one which we hope you’ll continue to follow. In the last year, Planet Scumm grew into something that, by all accounts, deserved to be properly bound as a real, live paperback book. No staples, no sewing, no paper cuts.
We are finally able to present to you thrilling new science fiction wrapped in a beautiful and professional package. (Hell, you can even find us on the shelves of bookstores across the country—just take a look at our store locator.)
We’ve learned a lot since our starry-eyed infancy and we like to think we’ve grown up a lot, too—both as a company and as the people behind the company. Planet Scumm is more mature on the outside, but we’re still the same wild romp through the perils of spacetime you’ve come to love.
2020: The Well Oiled Machine Phase
As our catalogue continues to grow, we’ve introduced a much more convenient way for you to get that sci-fi fix—annual subscriptions. Three times a year, we put out a magazine that connect you to brand new sci-fi by international authors and original artwork contracted just for us.
All the light touches could be yours for an entire year, starting with Issue #8 (coming February 2020).
We’re proud to be in a position where we can help creative people find an audience for their work, and we hope that you, in turn, will be proud to support us.
Learn more about how you can benefit up-and-coming sci-fi writers and artists with a subscription to Planet Scumm.
If you have a story that deserves a better home than your computer’s hard drive, check out our submission guidelines.