Meet Jason Marchi | Writer, Editor, and Publisher

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jason Marchi and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jason, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
I’ve always had an independent streak. When I was a kid, my mother used to say that I walked to my own drummer. Right after college I started my stint working for others in a small textbook publisher. I learned quite a bit about how to run a small business because I had direct access to the three men who started the company. When it was time to do my own thing, I wanted to take a stab at doing something similar. I’ve always admired entrepreneurs. I started out as an entrepreneur when I launched the New Century Writer Awards back in 1998. With the help of my business partner, Mike Timm, we soon had the blessings of Francis Ford Coppola and the editor-in-chief, Adrienne Brodeur at Zoetrope: All Story. Coppola liked my business proposal and allowed me to use his name to attract writers to our writing competition. Out of that we were able to help dozens of writers. I’m also proud of the fact that the New Century Writer Awards (NCWA) was the second organization to discover the tremendous writing talent of a young Joe Hill. Joe won first place in the NCWA Ray Bradbury Short Story Competition in 2022. It wasn’t until later that I learned that Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son. I learned that because Joe became ill during the trip and his dad had to chart a flight to get him back to the states for proper medical treatment. If that had not happened, I would not have known who Joe Hill really was until years later, as his writing career took off. Joe is a great writer. It’s hard to put one of his books down. That’s why he won the contest that year with his short story “20th Century Ghost.” Around the same time, Mike and I started getting calls from production companies in Hollywood looking for access to our writers. We had many meetings in Los Angeles with both studio and indie producers, but unfortunately, we were never able to sell a story or a film script to film development. We ran the competition for a total of six years and then decided to close it down to pursue more of our work: Mike’s filmmaking and my writing. After New Century Writer, I launched the second phase of helping writers, and that was to start Fahrenheit Books, the publishing imprint of Omicron World Entertainment LLC, which is my company. I don’t think I’m quite as successful in publishing others as I could be because part of the reason for starting my own company was to publish my own work that was not getting published. My early professional sales were to Amazing Stories and Weird Tales, and later more poems and short stories to other professional markets. I was also getting a tremendous number of rejections, which is normal. So, I realized that for the stories I couldn’t sell, I’d start a small boutique publishing company to publish my own work. And then, to help my writer friends publish their good stories (because they were also getting too many rejections), I started to publish others. So, to fully answer your question, I was exposed to small business operations early on, just out of college, and in the process of seeing how many writers, good writers, good stories, get rejected again and again for completely subjective reasons, I decided maybe I could help a tiny bit by publishing other writers through my own micro press.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
In high school, I had a teacher who taught a geology class. I’ve always loved the idea of the planet Earth, other planets, and outer space. And I love nature. I’m a huge gardener. I love hiking in the woods. I’m very pantheistic. If there is a God, I believe that God is really in nature more than anywhere else. That early influence in high school made me want to become a geologist. So, I went on to Northeastern University to earn my Bachelor of Science degree in geology, but while I was in college because of the influence of starting to read Ray Bradbury, I realized that I really wanted to be a writer, a storyteller, more than anything else. Fiction can be so magical. And the more I began to read the more I realized that there is so much good you can do for the world through writing even just a few good stories. I thought that being a writer might have a more positive effect on my life than becoming a geologist pounding rocks or finding a new oil deposit. So, I added a second major and that was English, with a focus on creative writing. I probably would have made much more money had I become a geologist, but I’ve done alright in life. I can get by. And there’s another reason why I picked the artistic writing life. I read a long time ago and I forget who said it, but this person noted that writing was the only thing that when she was doing it she didn’t think she should be doing something else. I understood that immediately and completely. Only when I am writing do I feel I’m not misusing my limited time on Earth.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
My high school creative writing teacher, Joan Hayes, inspired my early love of storytelling, While in college I discovered the brilliant and beautiful stories of Ray Bradbury, and 20 years later he became my director mentor and a close friend. These two people, worlds apart, gave me a permission slip to fall in love with writing and the business of publishing.

Website: https://www.jasonjmarchi.com

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-marchi-275a5b1/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jason.marchi.3

Other: https://www.omicronworld.com

Image Credits
Photos courtesy of OmicronWorld Entertainment LLC