The Happy Place is Overjoyed to Unveil the Title, Premise and Cover of Our Next Book! — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

When Scribner, who published my 2009 memoir The Big Rewind as well as its 2010 follow-up My Year of Flops and finally 2013’s You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me, rejected a proposal for a book on what eventually became my The Simpson Decade column, along with all other major publisher, I assumed that my career as an author was over.

I had a pretty good run, all things considered! I got a six figure advance for my debut, although I should probably mention that that six figure advance was 100,000 dollars. If I might humblebrag a little, I did get a six figure advance (brag, brag, brag!) But as far as six figure advances go, it was as modest as you can get (that’s the humble part).

With My Year of Flops I became the first A.V Club writer to write an officially The Onion/A.V Club-branded book by myself.

My childhood hero “Weird Al” Yankovic asked me to write his 2012 coffee table book Weird Al: The Book. That was amazing in its own right but has led to two (or more!) books in The Weird Accordion to Al, The Weird Accordion to Al: Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Edition, The Weird A-Coloring to Al and finally The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition.

But that’s not all! In 2013 I published the aforementioned You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me, a book about Phish, Insane Clowns Posse and the spooky mental haunted house that is my cracked mind that got four stars in Rolling Stone, was named one of the magazine’s 20 best music books of 2013, changed the way people saw Juggalos for the better AND got me invited to speak to the 2017 Juggalo March on Washington.

Pretty impressive, huh? I sure wouldn’t mind getting into bed with a resume like that, particularly if it was augmented by 18 years as a writer at The A.V Club, two years at The Dissolve and just under five years as the founder, editor in chief and main writer of Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place, my own personal website and a wonderful incubator for book projects.

My shockingly successful 2020 book The Weird Accordion to Al began life as a surprisingly unpopular column here at the Happy Place. Felipe Sobreiro and my similarly successful 2021 coloring book The Weird A-Coloring to Al has its roots in the website as well.

Most recently I collected the best pieces from this website about the worst in entertainment and life for 2021’s The Joy of Trash: Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place’s Definitive Guide to the Very Worst of Everything.

My plan going forward is to publish a Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place-rooted book every year, or every other year that will be financed through Kickstarter and then Backerkit, published through Amazon and sold through that evil but very useful corporation’s website and the store of this gorgeous, considerably less evil website.

I’m about to do it again! Today I launch the crowd-funding campaign for my next book, The Fractured Mirror: Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place’s Definitive Guide to American Movies About the Film Industry.

It’s the literary adaptation of The Fractured Mirror, a column about movies about movies that ran on TCM Backlot from 2015 to 2021 and here for the past few months.

I plan to spend a year writing about EVERY American movie about the film industry. All of them! That’s hundreds of movies but I’ve already made a lot of progress, in the sense that I have a hundred entries in the book ready to go because I already covered them for TCM Backlot or my site.

That leaves a hundred or a hundred and fifty movies left to go, so the year ahead will be full of Fractured Mirror pieces that already ran on TCM Backlot and pieces that I will write for the book.

I want to maintain a nice balance on this site, however, so a lot of the new pieces that I will be writing for The Fractured Mirror I will share with people who pledge to the Happy Place Patreon or who pre-order the book through Kickstarter rather than running on the site.

That means that the Patreon is about to get EVEN better! I’ll continue to write and post secret blog posts every weekday there but I’ll also be publishing at least one patron-only Fractured Mirror piece a week via Patreon and Kickstarter.

It’s going to be a huge amount of work, which is why I’m giving Felipe and myself a solid year to finish the book. Oh, did I mention that my frequent collaborator Felipe Sobreiro will be creating 60 to 65 original illustrations for the book?

Because he will! I’m kind of burying the lede in that respect. The Fractured Mirror book will be way better than the column in no small part because it will extensively feature Felipe’s amazing artwork.

I’m looking at my own The Weird Accordion to Al and Mike McFadden’s Teen Movie Hell as models for The Fractured Mirror book but hopefully it will share a vibe with those wonderful Leonard Maltin’s Film Guides as well.

The Fractured Mirror will be an alphabetical exploration of pretty much every American movie about the film industry that’s available in any way, so I won’t be writing about silent movies lost forever to the ages because I can’t.

Otherwise I plan to write about everything, including documentaries like American Movie.

If there’s a movie you particularly want me to write up for the book let me know along with your pledge and I’ll make sure it makes it into The Fractured Mirror.

Where do you come in? Well, I would LOVE it if you would pre-order the book through Kickstarter. I also would love it if you shared news of the campaign’s existence and tweeted, re-tweeted and/or shared posts about my NINTH book.

Today is probably the single most important day of the year for me professionally. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the first day of a crowdfunding campaign.

By tomorrow morning I’ll know whether people are loving the idea of a 500 or 600 page The Fractured Mirror book documenting a fascinating aspect of American entertainment and are excited to join me on my epic journey or if the idea doesn’t connect with my readers or the general public.

Help me make The Fractured Mirror a roaring success! I promise you won’t be disappointed! I couldn’t be prouder of The Weird Accordion to Al, The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Joy of Trash. With your help, The Fractured Mirror will keep my winning streak going strong!

Be the very FIRST person to pre-order the book here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weirdaccordiontoal/the-fractured-mirror?ref=project_build

The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s first non-"Weird Al” Yankovic-themed book is out! And it’s only 16.50, shipping, handling and taxes included, 30 bucks for two books, domestic only!

PLUS, for a limited time only, get a FREE copy of The Weird A-Coloring to Al when you buy any other book in the Happy Place store!

Buy The Joy of Trash, The Weird Accordion to Al and the The Weird Accordion to Al in both paperback and hardcover and The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition signed from me personally (recommended) over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop

Or you can buy The Joy of Trash here and The Weird A-Coloring to Al here and The Weird Accordion to Al here

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace We just added a bunch of new tiers and merchandise AND a second daily blog just for patrons!

Alternately you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al, signed, for just 19.50, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here.

I make my living exclusively through book sales and Patreon so please support independent media and one man’s dream and kick in a shekel or two!