More Book Covers!!

  Rather than add anything particularly useful to the internet, I have instead opted for the crowd-pleasing fodder of more book covers, including a magazine cover.
  First up, yet another offering from our dear friend "Dr" Jeremy Nascimento, who  lends his voice to the self-help genre.  I honestly don't know where he finds the time to  write all these books.

 

  "Dr" Nascimento (who holds an esteemed laureate chair at Wassamata University in Moosylvania) continued his servitude to the general public with his  next tome, in which he compiles and distills  all of his  homesteading wisdom into an easy-to-read guide for anyone who 's not afraid to take the very real risk they will starve to death.

 

Soon afterwards,  yours truly found himself the subject of much scorn following a real 'hit job' expose in a once prestigious magazine that arose over what was really a very innocent misunderstanding. The bottom-feeding paparazzi will never rest until they get the incriminating , out-of-context photo that  is a  key feature in their livelihood. It is included here not to give any free press to my critics, but rather to give you, my loyal readers, some idea of the muckraking that passes for serious journalism these days.

 

   As they say though, there is no such thing as bad publicity, and I'm sure my  opponents were astonished  when all the  brouhaha  catapulted my latest work  to the bestseller list.

 

  Just a few days  later though, I found myself being misquoted in a popular  entertainment  magazine. These chuckleheads can't even properly spell cannibalism!!

 

  Fortunately, being the unflappable work-aholic that I am, I  pressed on with some ghost-writing, dipping into the biography realm with a man that is  practically a household name.

Let this be a lesson to you young writers out there. work is always the solution.

Mostly Imaginary Books and Other Diversions

  Now these may be a lot less funny to the public at large since you don't know the players involved, but I thought it turned out pretty well, all things considered. You see, my friend Jeremy Nascimento has been working on a book for quite some time now, and I was bored, so I decided what he needed was a cover for his book. I made one, on a lark.

  I am pretty sure you can  put "Dr" in front of your name as long as it's in quotations.
  I then got creative and decided to do some covers for books that Jeremy MIGHT write in the future.

  Now Jeremy and I disagree on some key tenets in his  book, so I felt  that after it was all over he might write a book about how to deal with disagreements among the brethren.

 

  I emailed  Jeremy and he thought they were hilarious. He sent them to his wife and I can  just picture her eyes rolling.   His wife and my wife are  cut from the same strip of cloth. About that time I decided I needed to prove I wasn't above poking fun at myself.

  By now Jeremy was having lunch with his brother in law David and I was beseeched to make a book for  David.

  Now I was on a roll, so it was obviously time to take myself down a notch or two, lest I get the 'big head'.

     It's all a matter of perspective, right?  Oddly enough, I would sit down and read any of these books! Wouldn't you?

 By the way, there is a Part 2 to this.

Lesson Learned

  When I first published SWINDLED, and was beginning to get some recognition, I was approached by a well-known author.  This well-known author was actually a key component in my economic re-education, and he had an idea.  Several of us had written books along a similar theme, and he thought it would be mutually beneficial if we reviewed and promoted each other’s books.  I agreed , and a couple of other people agreed.  We all exchanged copies, virtual and otherwise of each other’s work.

  I was pretty excited to be working with and receiving help from somebody who I looked up to in certain areas. I told this story to a friend of mine and she warned me not to get my hopes up. She said that when she had first started out she had been similarly solicited, and in the middle of her flattery of being noticed and taken seriously, she agreed to a great deal of work that was never reciprocated.  She reminded me that the author in particular that had arranged this deal was an atheist with some pretty horrible opinions on the issue of abortion.  Her parting advice on this was “I hope it works out, but remember that he isn’t in the business of helping you, he’s in the business of selling books, and if you help him do that, he’ll use it.”

  Regardless of her advice, I took my end of the commitment very seriously, and I  plowed into the books. I took notes, and within a few days began compiling my review.  I tried to be honest, but fair. I finished all the reviews within weeks of receiving the books, and posted them everywhere I could. I sent links to the reviews to the other authors, and got busy with the rest of my life.

  As of the time of this writing, I am the only one of that group to keep their commitment.  A few months went by and I contacted the   ‘idea man’ for this venture and tried to gently remind him of what the arrangement had been. He assured me that his review of my work was coming out any day now.  I am still waiting.  I spoke to one of the other authors over the phone and he told me that he didn’t know if he would actually get around to what he had committed to. He apologized in advance if it didn’t happen.

  So what are the lessons here?  One lesson is that you should do the right thing, and keep your commitments not because of what it will earn you in return, but because it is simply the right thing to do. I cannot control the actions or work habit of anyone else, and if they  entered into a deal with no intent on following through, that is a reflection on their character, not mine.  This famous author continues to write and lecture, receiving accolades for his smartness. At the end of the day, I got a couple of free books out of it, and an invaluable education.

 I also reaffirmed within myself that if I ever make it ‘big’, I’m going to bring as many people with me as a I can. My inspiration from this is director Sam Raimi who made movies and let all his friends be in them, plus his car. Danny Dileo did the same thing. Make a note of this; the time to be nice to me is now.

  This incident confirmed yet again that Mrs. Becky Akers, in addition to being a great writer with amazing hair, probably gets migraines from being so brilliant.