I’ve been unhappy for a while with Smashwords. The ebooks they provide to other services aren’t particularly well formatted, and they have a variety of other problems. So over the course of the next month, I’ll be pulling all my ebooks from their service, and re-uploading them to Draft2Digital/Books2Read, which allows authors more control over ebook formatting, and which also has some other features (like an email signup link, sample chapters from other books with purchase links, and so on) which I find very useful.
This means that if you have those books in a Smashwords library, you *may* find that they disappear (I don’t know how Smashwords copes with access to deleted books). So I’m giving a little notice now to download them and back them up. I’m going to start deleting books tomorrow, starting with low-sales ones so there’s minimal impact, and uploading reformatted versions to Draft2Digital. There will be no changes to the text of those books, with one exception.
That one exception is Monkee Music, which I’ve thought for a while could do with a new edition. I did a Kickstarter for that a while back which didn’t work out, but I’ve decided to just do it anyway. I’ll be pulling that from *everywhere* and replacing it with an updated version of the text — the entry on Pool It! will be completely rewritten, and there’ll be entries for Good Times!, Davy Jones’ first solo album, the early Nez solo singles collected on The Monkees Super Deluxe Edition, the Dolenz, Jones, Boyce & Hart album, the new bonus tracks on the other Super Deluxe Editions, and Micky and Davy’s cast recording of Nilsson’s The Point!
That should *hopefully* be done by the end of this month, but it may take a few extra days on top of that, and there’ll be new paperback and hardback versions as well as the ebook.
Once all this is done, I’ll also be revamping the “Books” page of this website.
Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! 
I can’t imagine it’s very fun writing a review for “Pool it.” It’s so over-drenched in 80s musical cliches, it’s pretty much unlistenable. “Heart and Soul” is okay (if you can listen past the 80s production), but other than that, there isn’t really a song on the album that I’d want to listen to more than once. You could make a case that the Summer in Paradise album is more listenable than Pool It.
It’s not an album I like — and not even one I particularly *know* compared to most of their albums — but my review in the first edition was unfair. I blamed the producer for the way the album came out, and since then I’ve read interviews which make it clear that it was the producer and Micky and Peter on one side, and Davy on the other, but that Davy somehow won and got the album made his way.
That said, there are a couple of listenable things on there. Peter’s songs are good, and “Whole Wide World” is a great song, although the Monkees’ version isn’t a patch on the original.
Didn’t Davy also have the largest influence on how their touring band sounded during the 1990s and 2000s too? I assume he had the strongest personality behind the scenes during the later years, and that’s why things tended to go his way.
The touring band tended to be a mixture of his and Micky’s solo touring bands, but from bootlegs I’ve heard of rehearsals, Davy was far more involved in directing the band than the others, yes.