Beginning to End - Dark Factory: Publisher: Publicity & Marketing, Tricia Reeks
Dark Factory is Kathe Koja’s wholly original “immersive” novel that combines her award-winning writing and her skill directing immersive events, to create a story that unfolds on the page, online, and in the reader's creative mind.
A near-future dance club, Dark Factory is three floors of DJs, drinks, and customizable reality, everything you see and hear and feel. Ari Regon is the club’s wild card floor manager and Max Caspar is a stubborn DIY artist, both chasing their own vision of true reality. Rogue journalist Marfa Carpenter is there to write it all down. Then a rooftop rave sets in motion a fathomless energy that may drive Ari and Max to the edge of the ultimate experience.
Meerkat Press released Dark Factory on May 22, and will follow up with Dark Park, in 2023. For our next Beginning to End*, Spine follows the project through author, agent, publicity, and design.
*And since the project hasn’t actually “ended” (thus the asterisk) we’ll finish with a creative collaborator bringing a version of Dark Park to virtual reality in 2023.
Next up: Design, Tricia Reeks.
The first time Kathe Koja mentioned Dark Factory to me was in 2019. It sounded intriguing—immersive fiction, a story that goes beyond the printed page, blurring the lines between fiction and reality. Who wouldn’t be excited. She continued to drop bits of info on the project regularly, but it was September 2020 when I received the first draft. The contract was signed in October, starting a creative journey with the author that exceeded my wildest dreams of what storytelling could be.
This wasn’t Kathe’s first rodeo with immersive fiction or immersive shows, as she says, “Stories need an audience to be fully alive … and when I work, I’m always considering that audience, its shared energy and engagement with the story I’m working to tell: otherwise it’s just words in a row, props in a room.” But it was mine, so we spent a good deal of time brainstorming exactly what Dark Factory could and would be.
Dark Factory is a novel. But it is also a website and social media, where fans can engage with the story in a multitude of ways. That can be as simple as getting to know the characters, Ari, Max, and Marfa via the content they share weekly. Or actual interaction through contests, sharing art and music, contacting the characters and Kathe Koja. Even getting interviewed. And in 2023, with the release of the novella, Dark Park, fans will be able to share their own fiction, and even visit and interact with a virtual reality version of Dark Park.
The challenge: although people know what a book is, they don’t know necessarily know what “immersive” means in this context. We knew what we wanted to do but had to figure out how to articulate this to the world.
We started by identifying target audiences based on the content, as it would appeal on so many levels: readers, the club scene, art and artists, the AR/VR scene, liminal worlds, LGBT fiction lovers (did I mention that my favorite part of the book is the love story of Ari and Felix?).
Since the story would exist on multiple planes and appeal to multiple interests, we needed to get the word out in a variety of ways. If we wanted to blur the lines between fiction and reality (or better yet, erase them) we had to have the “world” of Dark Factory exist long before the book did. By release time, we’d had a website and social media up with a year’s worth of content, an online store selling Dark Factory merchandise, and had run a successful preorder campaign with SWAG that screamed Dark Factory to the rafters (a VIP badge, stickers, glow-in-the-dark condoms) and an amazing Mask contest.
We did the usual book stuff, too, sending the initial round of ARCs, press kits, and pitches five months ahead of the release, landing glowing reviews or mentions in the typical places: Booklist, Publishers Weekly, LARB, Locus Magazine, the TOR blog and others; and we had endorsements from some of the finest writers of our time: Alma Katsu, Daniel Kraus, Cory Doctorow, to name a few. But where in the past we would have only pitched the book and the author to book related outlets, now we were pitching interviews and features with and by the characters and hitting not just the book scene but music, technology, and art scenes as well! We ended up with real people interviewing characters in faux club magazines, characters interviewing real people in the music, AR/VR and club scenes. Ari out sharing his favorite drink recipe at The Next Best Book Blog, Max being interviewed at Vol. 1 Brooklyn. And all the while, Dark Factory features on blogs and other media outlets from Boing-Boing to the Outer Dark to X-R-A-Y to The Metaculture.
You would expect that with “immersive fiction,” the launch would need to be pretty special, and so did we, with two IRL launch parties. The first, in Atlanta, was at Blue South Music Studios and was livestreamed on Twitch, and the second was a dance party in Kathe’s hometown of Detroit at an abandoned warehouse complete with a live DJ (and lots of lights and bubbles).
Did we achieve our goal? As one reviewer on Every Book A Doorway put it: “it blurs the lines between fiction and reality even more than a good book usually does, leaving you with brief flashes of uncertainty as to whether Ari and the rest are really real or only fictional—and is there a difference, really, when experiencing fiction affects you as much as a ‘real’ experience would?”
Kathe once called Dark Factory a narrative mixtape. The exciting part is that we’re still adding to that tape all the time, and 2023 picks up where the novel Dark Factory ended, at an event called Dark Park. The end is the beginning is the…
See more on Meerkat Press’s website.
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.