I’m planning to drop by Bret Easton Ellis’s reading from Lunar Park at the Half King in NY City this evening. I’m not sure what I might say if the author takes questions from the crowd; I think I’ll ask if, as I suspect, the character of Robert Miller was actually based on Venkman from “Ghostbusters”.
As the pseudo-site above demonstrates, Ellis’s publishers are mounting what must be the most postmodern web marketing campaign in book publishing history, scattering tiny straight-faced websites representing various characters and incidents from the book all over the internet. The latest volley from the land of meta-Ellis is TwoBrets.com, where you can enter a writing contest (just click “Game” on the menu) inspired by a missing story cited in Lunar Park.
Has anybody else checked Ellis’s new book out, and if so, has all the web-based promotion influenced your decision to do so (or not to do so)? The strange approach Alfred A. Knopf is taking happens to be a great fit for the crazed and quasi-realistic Lunar Park, but if this type of marketing turns out to actually sell books, there’s no telling what we’re going to be seeing in 2006 …
One Response
no telling, indeed…I read a
no telling, indeed…
I read a very good article about Ellis in Rolling Stone, but the main thing that influenced me to want to read the book is your interest in it, Levi, because you have rarely, if ever, steered me wrong. I’ll be reading it soon. Let us know how the reading in NY goes. I’d love to hear about it.