You can
click this link after reading this if you're so inclined...otherwise you may think this is just self-promoting drivel.
P.O.D. is print-on-demand, not that Christian rock band, and in essence it's little more than a vanity press, and there is a whole lot of
awful writing available from those publishing companies...but once in a while real talent surfaces!
Okay, sounds like I'm ego-tripping, but I feel like Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan when they were playing the Cafe Wha? in the Village--they knew they were talented--but because they were complete unknowns playing a dive, did that make them UNtalented?
I saw Patti Smith doing a poetry reading at St. Mark's church years before she did horses and became the toast of the town, but if she never got critical acclaim would that mean she was not one of the most talented poets of MY generation? The same could be said of Kurt Corbain and the whole grunge movement.
Logically, I should have been a rapper, but I was not into the mostly idiotic rhyming that my compeers in Queens was creating at the time...I was more into that "whiteboy music"--the BLUES of Hendrix and Jeff Beck--and more into the semi-lysergic prose of Burroughs and Kerouac...I hadn't yet deciphered James Joyce.
Since I debuted some of my novel on my blog years ago to see how it would fly--when you're doing Coltrane's "My Favourite Things" in a Julie Andrews world you tend to think you may be wasting your time--I would STILL be sending out query letters to publishers and agents if someone hadn't "discovered" me and offered me a stipend and a place to stay as I completed MY bid for the GAN--Great American Novel...I NEVER would have considered print-on-demand publishing...but the people putting up the money wanted to get it out!
Just like MER Records, what could have been considered a "vanity" record company released "Hey Joe/Piss Factory", my Sylvia Beach released Jew Girl under the Shakespeare sans Co. imprint--a nod to Ulysses and P.O.D. publishing--with print-on-demand you really don't have a company behind you!
Those who've read the book have positive comments about it, click the link above and check out <url>http://eminemsrevenge.net</url>, but if you go to one of those alleged "writers" sites, the cliques are ready to cut you down without READING your work!!!
A bunch of little wannabe Matt Drudges running around playing Simon from "American Idol", one of these schmucks posted a review on my Amazon site after reading ONE PAGE of the book...that's akin to listening to two bars of Coltrane and saying he doesn't know how to play "My Favourtite Things"!!!
Since I was a big Stones fan ever since I saw them on the Ed Sullivan Show in '66, one of my older cousins from England sent me Are You Experienced? when it first came out, and at first listening I thought it was pure crap. What CAN expect from a nine year old growing up on pop music?
Three years later I got it though...
I'm NOT asking all of you to go out and buy my book, although I'd have no qualms if you did...just asking that you check out the buzz and go to Amazon and check out the preview [and as with Ulysses, it's NOW in its third printing and still NOT perfect, but far better than the Amazon excerpt].
Now, please hit the links:)