ABOUT THE AUTHOR GERARD JONES

GERARD JONES had a typical fifties upbringing in Michigan in a solid, nuclear family. His family moved to California in 1960 where Jones became friends with the title character, Ginny Good, Elliot Felton and Melanie. Ginny Good was one of the irrepressible, irresistible and ultimately tragic muses at the epicenter of the decade of the sixties in San Francisco. The four of them became more and more intimate as the sixties moved inexorably into the seventies among a supporting cast of characters that included Neal Cassady, Steve Gaskin, Ken Kesey, Gordon Lish, Courtney Love, Hank Harrison, Charlie Manson, Sufi Sam, Jerry Garcia, Pigpen, Sandy Good and a host of other equally colorful people and places and things nobody ever heard of...until now.

Jones began writing Ginny Good in 1986, put it away, wrote it some more, put it away again and wrote it some more again until he finished the first draft in 1996 and began to show it to agents and editors without success. Undaunted, he rewrote the book a sixth or a seventh time and began submitting it to more agents and more editors until the number times the book had been rejected was in the low thousands. Finally, he gave up and wrote some more books. In the summer of 2002, still trying to sell Ginny Good, along with the new books he'd written, Jones created his "hilariously blunt" and utilitarian website, Everyone Who's Anyone In Adult Trade Publishing, which contained not only Jones' correspondence with some of the top agents, editors and publishers in the US, UK and Canada, but also a free online directory to aid other writers looking for representation and publication. The website included many hard-to-find contacts, "the cream of the crop." Visitors to the site could not only find highly coveted information, but they could also see something of the editor or agent's "personality."

Articles began to appear about the site. The Observer reported that the site had "New York literary types bedeviled and amused." Literary guilds and industry resource guides began to recommend the site as an invaluable tool for authors, and publishing people of all stripes began to use the site in increasing numbers both for its considerable entertainment value and for the ease of its search engine to uncover hard-to-find or otherwise costly contact information. The site was soon generating upwards of fifteen-thousand hits a day and Jones was becoming a cult hero to rejected writers everywhere. Not everyone was pleased with the site of course, especially those who did not want their letters to Jones posted on the site. A website called Nettle.com observed that the site was the "web equivalent of Michael Moore taking on the publishing industry." Mr. Jones subsequently wrote a guest column about the site at MobyLives (which according to the Complete Review, "towers above all other literary weblogs" And he and Ginny Good have been mentioned frequently by Robert Birnbaum at identitytheory.com.

After several months, the publicity about the site was picked up on by the newly launched Monkfish Book Publishing Company who subsequently made an offer to publish Ginny Good. When the book came out in April 2004, much as Jones had predicted, it was broadly ignored by literary critics though articles, reviews and commentary appeared in numerous publications including The Bookseller in London, The Oregonian, Independent Publisher, January Magazine and others, which were effusive in praise of the book.

Mr. Jones, in characteristic style, has responded to the literary world's silence by posting open letters to prominent book critics on his site and other "guerilla marketing" tactics which have been described variously as "delightfully obnoxious," "gonzo," "maverick," and "one of the most fascinating, idiosyncratic bursts of common genius to come across the Internet yet." Given that Mr. Jones has spent the last eighteen years getting Ginny Good written, rewritten, rewritten some more, represented and finally edited and published, and that he has been willing to turn the publishing industry on its ear in the process, it is unlikely that he will abandon his efforts to see his work reviewed, read and enjoyed. The next thing he seems determined to do is to get Ginny Good made into a movie. "Take heed, Tinseltown!" he says.