Interview with The Magnus Archives about releasing their first book: From The Library Of Jurgen Leitner

The Magnus Archives is the biggest fiction podcast in the world. It’s a horror fiction anthology examining what lurks in the archives of the Magnus Institute, an organisation dedicated to researching the esoteric and the weird. 

In this article Callum Dougherty (Chief Commercial Officer at Rusty Quill) spoke to us about From The Library Of Jurgen Leitner, the first book from the world of The Magnus Archives. He also discussed the impact The Magnus Archives has had since it launched 10 years ago and what else Rusty Quill has coming up. 

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The Magnus Archives are releasing a book! It's called From The Library Of Jurgen Lightner and it's released on October 27th. What else can you tell us about it?

From The Library Of Jurgen Lightner is an official prequel story to the Magnus Archives. It takes place before the events of the podcast and it includes, as something of an antagonist, the character Jurgen Lightner who appeared in the podcast and has become a fan favorite character. He has this private library of books that do scary things. 

But in this story we'll also meet two new characters who both have their own roles at the library. One of them is Hugh Franklin. He is a research assistant who works at Jurgen Lightner's library. He is using his translation skills to translate all kinds of exciting texts. On the other side of it we have Sebastian Everett who's an acquisition specialist. So he's buying books into this collection. But he's actually there to indulge his own interests in the esoteric and the arcane and is only really pretending to care about Jurgen Lightner's mission to keep the world safe from these very dangerous books. 

The novel poses the question of can these two characters get out of the situation they're in or will the library consume them first?

The book itself is co-written by the Aurora and World Fantasy Award-winning writer Premee Mohamed and the creator and writer of The Magnus Archives Jonathan Sims. 

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The Magnus Archives is such a huge universe, full of amazing characters. Why was Jurgen Leitner chosen as the subject of the first Magnus book? 

Jurgen Leitner is a fan favorite character from the podcast and his story hadn’t been expanded upon until now. Some of the actions of Leitner have had meaningful consequences for what happens in The Magnus Archives podcast and… slight spoiler for the podcast… but his story may have been cut short in the original tale, so people want to know more about him. Also the framing of his library and these books that he has captured a lot of people's imagination and are very emblematic of the fears that exist within the podcast.

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The podcast has such a distinctive feel, how did you go about capturing that for the book? 

The Magnus Archives is an epistolary and has this found footage kind of vibe. That exists in the podcast as a device that's used as part of the storytelling using the framework of tapes. It's these tapes that have been found and you're hearing them distributed by the podcast. And the recording and listening of the tapes has important repercussions for the plot. 

So when Magnus goes to another medium it should try to do that,  we should try to deconstruct the literary form in some way. Premee is a fantastic writer to be doing that because she has done those things in her other works. It's very Magnus to have a book that is about books in the same way that there was a podcast that was about recorded tape stories.

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The Magnus Archives turned 10 years old earlier this year. Did you ever envisage it having the impact that is has had? 

To borrow a phrase from Alex (J Newall), our founder and the director of The Magnus Archives, nothing at Rusty Quill has ever happened by accident. So we always planned for this. I always wanted Archives to be a novel and a range of other IP things. I always hoped that if we did the right things and built the right community that these things would be possible. But I am always surprised by the sheer passion of our fans. 

I was in Edinburgh for a meeting and while I was there, I thought I have to go and take a photo of the novel at Fish Market Close (a key location in the podcast). While I was there, I bumped into three separate groups who were all there just to see that location. It was really nice to see them and just have that chance encounter and, I wish I'd had more on me, but I was actually able to give a copy of the novel to two friends who were there.

The book is a chance to give this hungry fan base another thing that they can enjoy. 200 episodes of the original show isn't enough for them. 

The Spotify Wrapped analytics always surprise me, it's always something wild like someone listened to 1,500 minutes in a day. That's actually impossible, but they clearly listened at like 1.5 times speed for 20 hours, and that's amazing.

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I found a fan comment saying they had listened to the entire thing eight times. So I did the maths and it would take 40 days and nights without stopping to do that. 

That is incredible. It's insane the level of interest. And I say that in the most positive way. We have people who are experts, who have written essays about it. The fan fiction and fan art is amazing. That creates a secondary community. 

We did a Kickstarter for The Magnus Protocol (the prequel to The Magnus Archives) and raised £718,000. That is a dizzying amount of money and that was game changing for Rusty Quill and continues to be a world record for a podcast. 

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What would your advice be for someone looking to start a fiction podcast? 

Podcasting is a format that is still developing and I think there are a lot of different avenues and styles of podcasts to be explored. One of podcasting’s strengths is immediacy.

It's a great medium if you want to tell long engaging stories and you can get it in front of audiences and you are more likely to be able to reach a small consistent audience through podcasting than you realistically could with a lot of other avenues of media.

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What else can we expect from the Rusty Quill network over the coming months? 

We have a bunch of new shows coming out. For the next 6 months we'll probably see more activity in terms of brand new show launches than at any period of the Rusty Quill network. 

As of October 27, the second Magnus Archives book is now available for pre-order. It’s called Work Your Fingers To The Bone and written by Christopher Ruse. Believe it or not, it's a horror financial thriller, maybe the first in that genre. It will follow the story of Elric Capital, a company that features in The Magnus Protocol. 

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From The Library Of Jurgen Leitner is available now in book and audiobook formats. Special edition versions are available from Waterstones and Queens Park Books in the UK and The Poisoned Pen in the US. 

The first chapter and the prologue will be available to listen to on The Magnus Archives podcast feed on October 27 and November 12.