ATD marketing

[pynchonoid]

If Pynchon's responsible for the novel's marketing
plan, whether by limiting their options or by
specifying what they've done so far and what they have
yet to do, it's brilliant, period. 

No amount of display advertising or corporate web
sites or other canned promotional crap can match the
power of the word-of-mouth buzz that is now spreading
- and about to take a quantum leap with guys like that
edrants blog promising to spread more details - not to
mention the rest of reviewers and their personalized
ARCs - and word of mouth remains absolutely the best
kind of advertising, the kind that marketers will kill
to generate, to drive buyers into the stores to buy
the novel.

Consider for a moment the millions of dollars that
Wal-Mart recently spent to finance a trip around the
country by some old folks in an RV to tout and
celebrate Wal-Mart, which was for a few weeks
presented as the spontaneous act of Wal-Mart lovers
who were just out to spread the love with their blogs
and such, until the secret was revealed, it was all an
expensive marketing stunt, a deception.

Pynchon doesn't need that crap, put up a Book
Description on Amazon where more than a few Pynchon
fans keep an eye peeled, the rest is history.  

The best way to generate desire is to withold the
object of desire.  Steve Jobs used to have a nasty old
bitch of a PR person whose job - back when he was
building NeXT Computer - was to frighten the press
away, which had the effect of heightening interest and
speculation, leading to a veritable fever when Jobs
finally took the stage in San Francisco to introduce
the NeXT computer (which pulled together, a very long
time ago now, all of the pieces of a multimedia,
networked computer like the one each of us is probably
using to participate in this discussion).
Unfortunately, the computer didn't sell that well, a
case where the user experience failed to match the
marketing hype.  That could happen with Pynchon's
novel, I suppose, if people find it a dud, but reports
from current readers that it's "killer" give me hope
it will go the other way. 

People continue to pre-order the book at Amazon, new
articles about the book are appearing in top-tier
papers like the NY Times, and the novel will climb the
bestseller lists immediately upon publication -  it's
quite unrealistic to expect more than that from a
successful marketing campaign, imho. Your mileage may
vary, of course.

I'm grateful to Pynchon, if this is in fact the case,
for preventing a more conventional marketing campaign,
I would expect nothing less from the man who appears
to  be trying to keep the focus on the art, not on the
marketing. Isn't that the outlaw Pynchon we all love?



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