Ask anyone who spends a meaningful portion of their day on social media what they are really looking for, and the honest answer rarely has much to do with staying informed. It has to do with being seen. Kordell Rashad Rhodes has spent years watching that dynamic play out, and his debut book is the result of taking it seriously.
Rhodes, based in Mesquite, Texas, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, has built a creative practice that spans authorship, voiceover work, and music. The disciplines might seem unrelated, but they share a preoccupation: how a voice reaches an audience, and what it takes for that audience to listen.
The Book
His debut, Attention Everybody: The Experiment Edition, takes its subtitle, How Far Will You Go to Be Noticed, as both a question and a frame. Drawing on what it describes as the mechanics of social engineering, the book examines the tactics people use to attract notice, the situations in which attention functions as something closer to currency than byproduct, and the ways that hunger for visibility shapes both identity and behavior. The full name on the cover, Kordell Rashad Rhodes, reflects the same instinct at work: a deliberate claim of authorship in a space where names matter.
In a 2026 profile published by VoyagePhoenix, Rhodes described what drove him to write it. He characterized contemporary culture as operating in what he called an “attention no matter what” state of consciousness, one in which visibility had come to outweigh money for many people as the measure of a life well lived. His interest was in mapping how some individuals attract attention naturally while others feel a compelled need to seek it as a source of fulfillment, and in putting the underlying tools and patterns on the page. He frames the book not as a guide but as an experiment, one he says he built with his generation in mind, and with the generations after it.
A Multi-Platform Creative
The book sits inside a wider body of work. Rhodes releases music under the name Rashad Kordell, distributing tracks through SoundCloud, and describes himself as a voiceover actor in addition to his work as a writer and artist. His Facebook presence, maintained over several years, reflects the same range: original music, commentary, and the occasional document of the work itself.
By his own account, the thread running through all of it is consistency in the hours when no one is looking. In the VoyagePhoenix profile, Rhodes described working when others were sleeping or not paying attention, writing and composing and drawing in ideas during the time that no audience could see. He connects this practice to growth and maturity rather than to sacrifice, and frames it as the foundation of whatever he has built. He describes his path through the creative world as that of a “black sheep,” defined less by conventional recognition than by the refusal to stop producing.
He says the work is aimed at the people who need what he has to offer. The phrasing speaks to purpose as much as market.
What Comes Next
Rhodes is now completing a second book, and by his own description it moves in a different direction from his debut. Where Attention Everybody examined attention as a phenomenon observed from the outside, the new work turns inward. He has described it as drawing directly on personal experience and relationships, potentially with a speculative or science fiction dimension layered in to give the material room to breathe as storytelling rather than memoir.
He has also been preparing for his first live tour, one that combines book appearances with music performances. In the VoyagePhoenix profile, he described the opportunity as one that does not come along often, and said he intends to stand in front of crowds and make the most of the chance to connect directly with an audience for the first time.
The ambition he has articulated is consistent and unambiguous: to take a place alongside the creative figures of his generation as a genuine author and artist, and to stand as evidence, through the work rather than through statement, that persistence carries.
