UBIQUITOUSLY, HERTZAN CHIMERA

But why, Chimera?

There are simply not enough hours in a day to engage all the "new" writers and sponsor them through their terrible books as their "talents" grow. Think of the mass-market book reader - they wanna be romanced with Guinness adverts and tantalized by abstract perfume adverts that give them nothing but a taste of the forbidden or a whiff of the outrageous - you bring out a bad book, you are dead. No one will waste money on you ever again.

These realizations lead me to this crazy marketing idea. Instead of trying to be very earnest about one's "work" as a "writer" and trying to conscientiously promote it in the standard format with glowing cover quotes and a massive marketing budget it would be more 'fun' to invent a persona that grabbed the imagination, no matter how surreal or irrelevant to the content of one's books.

Ubiquitously, Hertzan Chimera took inspiration from something I read in my teens, which only now seems relevant somehow and flavored my own ends. A novel by Philip K Dick called UBIK. It's a book about a miracle spray and, I don't know why, this really spoke to the marketing slut buried deep in my bowel, hence...

In terms of marketing a writer, a crazy idea like this based on something so out-there says more than a selected chapter of some collection or book or interview about the writer; and beyond that, it enigma-ises and abstractifies the creator to a product. Aren’t we all but products in a marketplace sold to the highest bidder after all? The idea is to move beyond the user of a keyboard, the printer of words on a page. That concept helped, not hindered this descent into the abstractification that the writer himself can become a family name without anybody ever having to read anything he writes.

One day, Mister Mass Market is gonna realize that he has never yet bought a Hertzan Chimera book and he will just have to, to see what all the fuss is about.

['8>)