I had an idea I wanted to test – that business texts and self-help books are written by people who are sufficiently compelled to do so. Here’s the principle: we keep going with our humdrum lives until we reach a point we don’t want to do it any more, for whatever reason. Some of us reach a kind of crisis point – which we emerge from, sometimes feeling all the better for it. An even smaller subset exits from this stage thinking, “Eureka! I’ve worked out the answer!” and feels sufficiently compelled to write a book about what they have learned. On occasion the book gets extremely popular and a new “guru” is born.

Now, I’m not going to say whether this is good or bad – but I thought I would test the idea. First I looked at the ages that people tend to hit mid-life crisis: this chart comes from a “2008 Gallup phone survey of 340,000 Americans” cited here:

As you can see, the “happiness slide” starts at about 34 and troughs at about 50. Now let’s look at the ages of a few popular “gurus”, and when they published what is generally seen as their seminal work:

I didn’t restrict this list in any way – if I thought of someone (or they were suggested for me), and I could find their date of birth, they they were in. There’s a question on Richard Carlson (Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff), rest his soul starting so early – as he was in the psycho-analytical game anyway – but then so was M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Travelled).

I’m not saying that everyone has to fit – after all, it’s just a theory; there’s also the question of whether one needs 40-odd years’ experience before anyone, including publishers, would take you seriously. But it certainly would be interesting to know the back-story on some of the authors.

Well that worked! Experiments and a bit of homework with various electronic book mechanisms led me to Smashwords. As an experiment, I’ve uploaded the text from a short story I wrote a few years ago, and it’s been converted into a variety of formats which is pretty cool. While I’ve made it a paid item, you can read the whole thing here.

I’ve also recorded the audiobook version, for future experimentation – notably with Podiocast.com. Watch this space – and click here to listen!

As mentioned previously, I’m delighted to announce that Rush-Chemistry is now available in paperback. This book first came out in hardback in 2005, but is only just becoming available as a soft-cover due to the sad death of my friend and mentor Sean Body, who ran the publishing company Helter Skelter. The book has been re-proofed and all of the typos, inaccuracies etc. (as listed in the addendum) have been fixed.

UPDATE: If anyone wants buy directly from me (signed or otherwise), I have ordered a number of copies from the publisher so let me know by comment below or by emailing/Paypal to jon-at-joncollins-dot-net. I will send the books out as soon as they arrive!

Prices including P&P for are as follows:

• UK – £11
• Western Europe – £15
• US/Rest-of-World – £18

Rush – Chemistry is the complete history of the world’s favourite Canadian rock band. The book follows Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart from their schoolboy days right up to the global success of their thirty-year anniversary tour.

Here’s the official text:

Against a background of disinterest from the media and a refusal to compromise their music, Rush’s success was by no means guaranteed. Since the beginning, only the determined efforts and downright stamina of the band members and those around them were sufficient to counter the wall of silence. Sharing a single-minded determination to take on the system and win, Geddy, Alex and Neil have never rested on their laurels. Pushing themselves to achieve technical excellence, never avoiding the challenge of taking on new musical influences, through huge changes of fashion and major personal tragedy, the entity we know as Rush has endured. Thirty years on, the band is still creating new music and packing arenas and stadiums around the globe.

Meticulously researched over three years, Chemistry draws on over 50 new interviews with those closest to the band. As the most detailed biography of Rush ever written, this book pulls together the threads and investigates the reasons that have enabled this band to succeed against the odds.

I hope that you enjoy the dime

I hope you enjoy the dime.

You can only imagine my surprise when… OK, that’s a lie. Here’s a little something I was writing last summer, based on the few snippets suggested by the liner notes to what was to become Porcupine Tree’s earliest releases Tarquin’s Seaweed Farm and The Nostalgia Factory.

It’s also given me the opportunity to have a first foray into e-books. This one is in ePub format.

If you missed the link, here’s Beyond the Seaweed Farm.

The full http is http://www.joncollins.net/wordpress/wp-content/BTSF.epub

And you can also read it online here.

Enjoy!

The cover is William Hogarth’s The Cockpit. It seemed appropriate.