Lucid Culture

It’s a given that any contest for anything arts-related is either a scam or a marketing ploy: i.e. Emergenza, the Jagermeister music competition in New York a year or so ago (which in retrospect probably happened without the Jagermeister folks knowing anything about it) or those awful poetry collections named after Moody Blues albums, where your poem could be published for free if you were willing to shell out $80 (plus shipping and handling) for a copy of the book. And let’s not forget the John Lennon songwriting contest, whose hubris rivals the Mormon predilection for converting people like Einstein and Gandhi to Mormonism, posthumously.

It’s hard to figure out what the Media Predict contest is all about: the website seems to have been designed by a non-English speaking dropout from the Parker Bros. trainee program, who probably didn’t make it through the first day there. If you’re ambitious and feel like doing some serious goofing off on company time, you might discover that the site has a contest for authors: the one who gets the most votes gets a publishing deal with Simon & Schuster. The way you vote for your favorite would-be author is to buy “stock” in his or her book. This might seem like a colossal waste of time. But there’s a diamond in the rough here.

Brett Selmont’s novel Lower deserves your support. It’s far from perfect: the supporting characters need to be fleshed out and the ending is a little too pat. But the writing…wow.

What an ear for dialogue this guy has. The book is an absolutely spot-on satire of Lower East Side poseurs and their ever-gentrifying milieu. One by one, Selmont skewers phony musicians, wannabe models, and the myriad subgenre types who surround them. If you’ve ever spent time in New York or Brooklyn, you will recognize in the pages of this book at least one person you wish you never met. It’s a fun read and a valuable piece of history, a chronicle of an era that never should have existed. It deserves a chance to reach the public – and an editor who will take the time to flay it into shape (if its author is anything like its protagonist, he’s a stubborn SOB).

Then after Selmont wins the contest, he can write another novel about the publishing world, its revolving door of sleep-deprived, somnambulistic editors, incompetent publicists and corporate bigwigs whose only interest is squeezing the last nickel out of the bottom line and the last five minutes of unpaid overtime out of their ridiculously overworked employees. All of whom, for reasons of money or lack thereof, couldn’t give the slightest damn about any of their authors.

Here’s how to get Selmont on track to that big advance:

Go to http://www.mediapredict.com

1) Register by clicking the button on the upper right corner. They’ll send you an email with a username and password, which you should get within about a half-hour after you register. You can set up as many user names as you have email addresses.

2) Click on NEW MARKETS on the Media Predict Home Page (toward the bottom right of the main page)

3) Scroll down to middle of page and click on Selmont’s novel Lower

4) Scroll down past the synopsis to the Trade Assistant

5) Click on Chances are Higher Than [whatever] %

6) Buy as much fake Stock as you can in Lower

7) Then Click on Execute

 It’s worth five minutes of your time.