In about a month, my book will be turning one year old. Wow! Time flies! Since then I’ve gotten a part time job and now a full-time job thanks to my book, so in a way it made money by giving me these opportunities. I can’t promise regular blog posts these days because I’m working full time and I can only do so many things well at once. I need to relax too and maybe through that I’ll get some inspiration. I’m already getting some inspiration for my next project thanks to the Amazon Prime original series The Marvelous Mrs Maisel. In the series she crosses paths with Lenny Bruce and his story is just one of many I’ll be talking about in the next project and these topics are incredibly relevant as we see the fascist right attacking free speech and censoring works that they don’t like. It’s very true that creating things is resistance in its own way. So to my fellow writers and creatives, keep on keeping on.
Instead of making a bunch of individual blog posts about various bits of coverage, I’ll just post a summary of all the things from the past couple of months.
Some Five Star Reviews of Crime of the Century
As always I want to take time to thank those who have written glowing reviews of my work. The biggest challenge in every field is getting feedback on your work and I want to give a big thank you from the bottom of my heart to all of those who have written reviews or talked about my book on their social media accounts. Thank you so much for your support and kind words, it means the world to me. I’d be lying if I said I purely do this for myself. I want my work to be loved and enjoyed by people. I want to take the time to thank two people, Dominique and Trisha for writing very nice reviews of my work. Here are their reviews:
Dominique called the book “worth every penny” saying:
“As someone who loves classic rock along with a fascination with true crime, this book sounded right up my alley and I was right. This book is thoroughly researched with so much care and detail! There are so many stories and facts in here that I didn’t know about!”
Here’s Trisha’s very nice review:
“SUPPORT SMALL AUTHORS and get yourself this book! I love rock and roll history and this book is FULL of new stories for me! I’m so happy angie made it 🙂 she’s such a talented author and I hope she makes another book!”
Once again, if you’ve enjoyed my book, I would really appreciate it if you leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon. It will be a big help and more reviews gets my book in front of more eyeballs. I also would really like the feedback so I can make the next project even better. Small authors need your support now more than ever before and every review counts and helps. Even just saying you liked it or sharing a couple of things you liked about it is a big help. Even just leaving a rating takes a couple of seconds to do and it will mean a lot to me, more than you think! I’ll even shout you out on social media if you leave a review.
Feature on With It Girl Magazine:
A few months ago I was approached by a well-established online surfing magazine called With It Girl to write a guest post on their website and do a video collaboration for their culture section of their website. I immediately said yes and I got started writing about the journey of writing this book. While I’ve only ever tried surfing once in Australia on my honeymoon and miserably failed at it, I have a big interest in surf culture thanks to watching the Nickelodeon cartoon Rocket Power in my childhood.
You can read the article here.
A quote from the article:
“I hadn’t seen another book like Crime of the Century so I thought it was a cool idea to combine two of my biggest interests: classic rock and true crime. I am particularly interested in celebrity true crime because on top of all the psychology and legal system aspects, there’s also the star power, that glimpse into their life – so close yet so far from us, and that rise and fall story arc. When my mother was pregnant with me, the infamous OJ Simpson car chase was happening so I wonder if that played a role in my interest in celebrity trials.”
And one more quote talking about how this was a distraction from my chronic illness/pain:
“While writing the book I was chronically ill and I was in so much pain that I couldn’t stand or walk without a back brace. I was waiting on a surgery to help cure my chronic illness and so I turned to writing to pass the time and check something off my bucket list. In total, it took me about two years to write and research for the book. Pretty much daily I would be reading books and articles and watching documentaries to research and I wrote the book as I did my research.”
Me in Hawaii one month before surgery: body tea, waist snatched, but feeling like crap on the inside.
Video: Interview on Extra Bulla
My friend Willy (whose show I’ve appeared on a few times) suggested I appear on his friend Warren’s show to talk about my book because Warren likes a lot of classic rock, and like me, he’s from Chicago, so it would make for some interesting conversation. Indeed it was! Very enjoyable and I had a blast! Lots of lore in this one. I was on the show in January and hopefully that won’t be my last appearance on the show. You can watch it below:
Here’s a quote on Velvet Goldmine and LGBT classic rock history:
“I just think it’s so fascinating, just this whole, like, going from one queer generation to the next and this brooch being passed from [queer] generation to generation. I think that’s such a beautiful thing and I’m just really fascinated with LGBT history. A lot of my best known work on my blog is about LGBT classic rock history. So I talk about LGBT classic rockers, I talk about LGBT themed songs, I’ve talked about classic rockers who’ve crossdressed, I talk about androgyny in rock and roll. All those sorts of topics. I find that really fascinating.”
Rock Daydream Nation
Peter from Rock Daydream Nation invited me back after liking my insights on Led Zeppelin. He knows that I’m a big fan of The Kinks, a band he had yet to cover on his channel, until now, and so we decided to talk about one of The Kinks’ greatest albums, Arthur. I love this album so much musically. While I love the theming of Village Green Preservation Society more, musically I prefer Arthur, so many jams and songs with multiple movements and of course, the leftist/socialist themes throughout. Hopefully I’ll be back again on the show to talk more about other classic rock bands!
So that was my book coverage roundup. Here’s to more coverage of Crime of the Century, and hopefully I’ll be getting started writing book 2 in that series.
Liked this blog post and want to support my work and see more? Donate to The Diversity of Classic Rock on Patreon or Paypal or follow me on Facebook, Bluesky or Instagram, buy my book Crime of the Century, click the follow button on my website, leave a nice comment, send your music or classic rock related books for review, or donate your art and writing talents to the blog. Thank you for your support! If you donate any amount of money to my Patreon or PayPal, you’ll get a Crime of the Century ebook, so it’s basically pay what you can! The best deal you’ll get on the book and you won’t find this deal anywhere else! I just want to give back to my readers and say thank you for your support.
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