George Case's Blog, page 14

One of my most popular books (relatively speaking), Here’s To My Sweet Satan was conceived as a way of bringing my Led Zeppelin-related credentials to a broader social history of the occult boom of the 1960s and 70s.  I had read a 2011 title, Jason Zinoman’s Shock Value, about the same era’s horror movies, and I […]

After authoring three published books on classic rock and contributing to others, I was eager to branch out into another area of popular culture, and I developed a proposal for a monograph on a classic film, Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove, or:  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.  The […]

Like other Goodreads authors with modest readerships, I've noticed a flurry of recent 1-star ratings for some of my books listed here. Apparently this is a common problem: fake or bot accounts artificially lowering a product or service's public reputation by "review bombing" with numerous negative reviews. Some writers whose books are on Goodreads have reported being approached by mysterious users who offer to delete the bad ratings in exchange for a payment.

Whatever the rationale behind review bombing - mercenary or just malicious - I encourage the Goodreads community to assess all the ratings and writeups given to my books by a range of genuine readers. Fake accounts may have generic names, no avatar picture, and don't offer any original critical insights. Not every real review or rating is favorable, and that's fine with me; but a sudden rush of hostile, deliberately manipulative entries (especially for books released ten or fifteen years ago) looks pretty suspicious. There's no accounting for taste, but some tastes should be taken with a grain of salt. Thanks for reading.

Following the releases of Magus, Musician, Man and Out Of Our Heads I continued to pitch music-related proposals to my US publisher Backbeat, but the one they settled on was an entry in their FAQ series, intended to be a go-to line covering various rock artists, film and television franchises, and other entertainment.  While I […]

Like other Goodreads authors with modest readerships, I've noticed a flurry of recent 1-star ratings for some of my books listed here. Apparently this is a common problem: fake or bot accounts artificially lowering a product or service's public reputation by "review bombing" with numerous negative reviews. Some writers whose books are on Goodreads have reported being approached by mysterious users who offer to delete the bad ratings in exchange for a payment.

Whatever the rationale behind review bombing - mercenary or just malicious - I encourage the Goodreads community to assess all the ratings and writeups given to my books by a range of genuine readers. Fake accounts may have generic names, no avatar picture, and don't offer any original critical insights. Not every real review or rating is favorable, and that's fine with me; but a sudden rush of hostile, deliberately manipulative entries (especially for books released ten or fifteen years ago) looks pretty suspicious. There's no accounting for taste, but some tastes should be taken with a grain of salt. Thanks for reading.

After a few rejections by traditional publishers, I elected to make my short manuscript of Dumbing Down Dissent available on the print-on-demand platform of CreateSpace, owned by Amazon, in 2011.  Since the publishing industry was and is being transformed by the Internet, it seemed an option worth pursuing:  rather than invest in producing hundreds of physical […]

Riding on the relative success of 2007’s Jimmy Page:  Magus, Musician, Man, I was offered further writing contracts by the publisher Hal Leonard / Backbeat, and the editors and I settled on my idea of chronicling the Beatles’ smoke-filled first meeting with Bob Dylan but expanding it to cover the broader topic of rock ‘n’ […]

The collection of autobiographical essays which I compiled into Arcadia Borealis were written over many years, going back as early as 1988, some twenty years before the book was released by a small regional press from Sudbury, Ontario.  Like a musician with a collection of songs around a similar theme that add up to a […]

I must admit that my most commercially successful book to date owes its popularity to the subject – a legendary rock star who’d long been an enigma to fans – more than the author.  In 2005 I had been shopping around a general overview of the classic rock genre for some time, but a Canadian […]

Written in 1995-96 and published by the independent Vancouver house of Arsenal Pulp Press in early 1997, Silence Descends was my first book and one of which I’m still proud.  It’s a brief exercise in “imaginary non-fiction,” constructed as a global history of the next five hundred years from the perspective of what is, to […]