Promoting Pynchon

[Pirate Prentice]

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1548914,00.html

TIME magazine has an article on the marketing for Against the Day, but
you really have to read between the lines to glean new information
from it:

> "It's a huge, uphill battle just letting people know," says one Penguin publicist about the >book's imminent release.

I don't believe this for a fucking second, and notice that the "one
Penguin publicist" goes unnamed, even though this is a simple quote
with a very respectable magazine. Although the article mentions the
difficulty in getting journalists to cover fiction, Penguin has failed
to take even the simplest marketing steps: a simple website and
getting copies in the hands of reviewers. Penguin's excuse elsewhere
that the advance copies are expensive, even if true, sounds like a
lame excuse when Penguin isn't spending those advertisement dollars
elsewhere.

> the notice quickly disappeared. Was it viral marketing? A hoax? No one is saying.

No one is saying because they simply fucked up.

> schedule special events around the new book's release. But Penguin is deliberately >keeping hands-off such hoopla. "We're respecting the author's choice for us to stay apart >from these things," says the Penguin rep.

What this entire article, coupled with the fact that Pynchon wrote his
own blurb, indicates is that Pynchon has managed to negotiate an
enormous amount of control over the publication of his book. My
conlusions:

1) Pynchon wrote his own blurb not as some kind of valentine to fans
but because he didn't trust anyone else to do it.

2) The Penguin people fear his wrath.

3) Penguin is NOT DOING A GODDAMN THING to market this because
Pynchon's not letting them.

4) Pynchon specifically does not want book reviewers to get many
reviews out there before publication. Why? Again, he probably
mistrusts them, too. I bet that he want readers to make up their own
minds.

What's interesting is that all this can be taken as an indirect
statement by the man and an extension of his, shall we say, unorthodox
personality. I am willing to bet that he felt burned by the response
to Mason & Dixon, although that's a little surprising since, as I
recall, most or the majority of reviews were pretty positive?

Pirate