King Dork

Frank Portman, founding member of The Mr. T Experience and author of the very good King Dork (which just went up as an audiobook on eMusic) discusses the difference between crafting songs for a punk band and writing a book:

With the records — and I love them all as I would my own learning-disabled children — they were deeply alternative in terms of the market, put out on a $300 budget by a very small label. To have a book published by Random House is very different. I took songwriting seriously but there is an inadvertently ephemeral aspect to music. With a book it feels much more significant and permanent.

With anything, you spend your time doing all these things and everything you do leads you to a network of people. Maybe they latch onto one of those things and if it becomes a cultural phenomenon to any degree, it does reinforce the other littler things you’ve done, so I think in the long term, having a successful novel, given that it shares the theme of so many of my songs, will draw attention to them and they will reinforce each other.