When I began working on Jester Prince, shortly after retiring from the Flying Karamazov Brothers after my 34 year run, I just wrote everything I could remember, for several years. It turns out my memory is better than I expected: that first manuscript was enormous. I employed an old college chum, David Stanford, who had been laboring in the publishng industry while I was onstage Karamazoving for multiple deccades, to act as editor. He managed to discard about two thirds of my original, using his gimlet eye to dispassionately eliminate verbiage I was too attacthed and too close to to have any reasonable judgement about. Long diatribes, rants and digressions that nobody really needed to know about were simply erased. I closed my eyes... David had enormous counter-cultural cred: besides having been a celbrated cartoonist at our odd hippie college campus (UC Santa Cruz), he had gone on to edit cultural icons like Ken Kesey, Ken Babbs, and Gary "Doonesbury" Trudeau. I hoped his stellar connections would get me an aggressive agent, who would find me a killer publisher, who would do all the work of promoting and marketing the book; self-promotion has never been my forte, which is why Paul is the only reason the Karamazovs ever got any gigs anywhere. I was hoping to get his agent, who was not only Kesey's agent, but Kerouac's agent - but in his mid-nineties he decided, at last, to retire. Agents I did approach loved the book, my voice, my style, my characters - and said they could not possible sell a book this long, to anybody. Also, nobody is buying memoirs - certainly not of some guy that was sort of famous twenty years ago. So after several years of banging my head against that wall, and against the fortress walls that surround any publisher one attempts to cold-call, I followed the advice of my childhood bestie, much-published polymath Steve Bratman, and just self-published it. It seemed like cheating, but in this modern world there is apparently no shame in rushing in where publishers fear to tread. I've approved the final galley proofs after numerous back-and-forths with the design team at BookBaby, and now am waiting for them to turn it into an ebook. After so long climbing this hill, I'm a little giddy and light-headed to be so near the summit...
