Instar Books
178 pages, ebook, $10

Review by Caitlin Corrigan

Jeanne Thornton’s collection of stories, The Black Emerald, is consistently smart, sometimes quite brilliant, and almost always just flat out fun.
Published in ebook form by Instar Books, this collection of two novellas and seven stories also contains a few illustrations drawn by Thornton, and is available in a variety of formats, including a slick looking emerald shaped flash drive. Instar Books is a new indie press slated to release four titles in 2015, and The Black Emerald, released in late 2014, is their debut effort. With a model that emphasizes transparency in book sales and electronic only publication, Instar explicitly seeks an alternative publishing model for authors and works that fall outside of mainstream tastes. Their website makes public the number of sales figures for each book, and offers Kickstarter-like perks that “unlock” once a certain number of copies have been sold. The first of these bonuses has already been revealed—a bizarro recording of the author singing “Born to Run”—but I’m going to keep my fingers crossed that these cats make it to 50,000 units, at which point they’ll purchase a ship called “The Black Emerald” and host panels and salons in cities across the world. (See? Way fun.) Continue reading →