Month: February 2013

Since the 1950s, Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital has treated the Mid-South’s youngest patients, refusing to turn away families no matter their financial status.

Now a group of Memphis musicians are making sure the hospital receives some good karma for its philanthropy. Through the Musicians for Le Bonheur project, artists are banding together to create a compilation album in which all proceeds benefit the hospital.

The project is being spearheaded by Justin Jaggers, owner of Angry Nerd Productions, a one-stop audio production shop that handles everything from professional band recordings to voiceover work for radio stations. Jaggers hopes to bring more awareness to some of the city’s independent artists through the project as well.

“These kids are being taken care of and, in a lot of cases, for free if given certain circumstances,” Jaggers said. “I want them to be able to enjoy this. Music has a healing factor.”

Although Memphis is synonymous with rock-and-roll, Jaggers said the CD will feature local artists from genres across the spectrum, including rock, soul, blues, alternative, and reggae.

“Everybody has seen that Memphis is rock-and-roll. It’s Elvis. It’s blues. But I have so many different genres of musicians coming to me saying, ‘We want to help. We want to put a song on the CD or play at an event for the fund-raiser,” Jaggers said. “It’s interesting to see this group of people who want to help, and they’re coming from genres that you really don’t think of when you think of Memphis.”

Original songs from Star & Micey, FreeWorld, Deering & Down, Kaci McAnally, the Bo-Keys, and many others will be included. Jaggers said some participants have had family or friends who have been assisted by Le Bonheur in the past.

Despite the long list of artists already involved, the compilation album will be a double-disc that boasts more than 30 tracks, so Jaggers is still accepting material.  The album is slated to be released in September and will be available at artist showcases, musiciansforleboheur.com, iTunes, and Amazon. An alternate version with additional tracks will also be available online. The double-disc compilation will cost $20.

Several live music showcases will be held at venues that include Newby’s, The Brass Door, Otherlands, and the Hard Rock Café throughout the spring and summer to raise money to create and print copies of the album. The first shows are scheduled to take place in April, but patients at Le Bonheur will have a private performance in March.

Stephanie Rainey, special events coordinator for Le Bonheur, said it feels good to know Memphis artists are contributing their time and effort to raise awareness for the children’s hospital.

“I know a lot of Memphis artists put their time and effort and their creative abilities into this,” Rainey said. “We’re very honored that they want to use their talents toward helping Le Bonheur.”

Rainey said Le Bonheur hasn’t decided how the money will be utilized, but she said in the past, fund-raising revenue has gone toward purchasing medical equipment and assisting families who can’t pay for their child’s care.

This isn’t the first event Jaggers has put together to benefit Le Bonheur. In 2010, he created a CD that featured tracks from 18 artists and raised about $1,700 for the hospital. Another event, a battle of the bands, which featured six competing bands and a headlining band, raised another $1,200 for the children’s hospital.

“I want to change a broken industry. It’s been broken for a while. I’m not just someone trying to start a business to make money.”

So says Memphian Richard Billings. The broken industry he’s referring to is book publishing. And the business he’s starting is called Screwpulp, which is designed to bypass existing business models and that includes traditional paths to publishing and self-publishing.

“The idea for Screwpulp began once I started writing a book, but after I had 10 to 20 pages written, I thought if I’m going to spend the next six months to a year doing this, how easy is it going to be for me to get published?” explains Billings, a 38-year-old self-described “idea geek.” “In the traditional publishing model, you’ve got professional readers at publishing houses, and they’re the ones who decide what books will make it to the next step: the editor’s desk. Is it worth publishing this way? Because of all the people involved, including marketers, in the end you the writer are going to end up with anywhere from 5 percent to (if you’re Stephen King) 14 percent of the sales.”

And as for self-publishing? According to Billings, “It’s still your problem to market your book.” And as for an agent to shop the book to publishers, that’s a whole other problem.

“If you publish with Screwpulp, there are no upfront costs at all, anyone can publish with us,” Billings says. “We don’t do any editing on the front end. The first 100 readers can download the book for free. But in exchange, they agree to give the book a review or rate it on a scale of one to five stars and mention the book on social media.

“After those 100 people have done the rating, the book goes automatically to costing 99 cents to download. If a book has only a one-star rating, nobody’s going to pay 99 cents for it, so we protected the buyer. If it gets five stars, people are going to grab it, and why not? It’s only 99 cents.”

As for editing: Where does that figure in this process? According to Billings:

“There are a lot of editors out of work. Editors can read a Screwpulp title and say, ‘I’m willing to bet on this book.’ There could be a bidding war between editors. Those editors who apply would get in a queue, and as an author you could look at the stats of the editors and samples of their work, and Screwpulp could broker a deal between the writer and editor.”

Billings and his co-founder Will Phillips Jr. have partnered with Richard Batt of Memphis and Patrick Cooper of Tampa.

Screwpulp — the name is a combination of the screw press (the earliest printing press), the movie Pulp Fiction, with a little “screw the publishing industry” philosophy thrown in — has won the Amazing Risk competition for first-time entrepreneurs, which earned the company $10,000 through Launch Memphis. It was also chosen to participate in Launch Memphis’ 48-Hour Launch last June and the 2013 Seed Hatchery.

This week, Screwpulp is competing against 30 other contestants in a YouTube video contest sponsored by Everywhere Else, a business conference for startups that will take place in Memphis from February 10th to 12th. Contest participants submit a video describing their startup, and viewers have until February 8th to vote on their favorite. The grand prize is $10,000.

“I just want to make sure authors get paid, that readers get what they want, not what publishers think they want,” Billings says of Screwpulp. “Fifty Shades of Grey: That’s not something I’d want to read but obviously a lot of people do, and those people … they should get what they want.”