When the fandom cries, it screams—for Red Gaskell, a former SF-now-NYC inhabitant, his Kanye West inspired book has reach a sickening level of popularity overnight.
When Kanye revived his Twitter account, the internet went wild—so wild, in fact, that the fandom couldn’t keep up. Drawing conclusions left and right about his one-sentence updates, the cryptic messages have been strung into various realities and possibility of the rappers return to the major market. For (super fan) Red Gaskell, he decided to pull the inspiration into digestible reading material.
If your foresight is incredible Stay stubborn to your vision
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) April 24, 2018
An except from Red’s debut book states, “Kanye has waxed poetic about life, creativity, and more on Twitter recently and what better way to immortalize his tweets than by turning them into a book paired with illustrations,” he writes, “It was an easy parody of Milk and Honey given the short nature of tweets and my simple yet refined illustration style.”
But of course, we had to ask—Why? “I just thought it’d be funny,” Red tells us over email, “I made the cover and a few pages before going to sleep and posted on them on my twitter and IG story. When I woke up it didn’t blow up, but enough people liked it that I wanted to figure out how to make it an actual book.” The demand was high; for Red, the best option was to throw the illustrated reading onto Amazon’s self-publishing platform.
“Amazon lets you self-publish fairly easily,” he tells us, “they own a company, createspace.com and it basically guides you through the whole publishing process for books, films, etc. I wanted to get this out as fast as possible and there’s no better place than Amazon.”
The way we live in social media truly transcends a typical publisher/book deal—with Red’s strong community of like-minded creatives, he hopes to create more works that revolve around this concept. “This is my first time, but if I can make career out of projects like this that would be amazing.” The goal is to pay the entirity of his student loans and buy a Tesla.
// Purchase yourself a copy of his book and let him know on Instagram what you think.
