Is Having An Imaginary Publicist So Wrong?

Just before Christmas, the New York Times ran a short profile of Troy Tompkins (left), a young author whose self-published YA fantasy, The Marvelous Effect, attracted the attention of Simon & Schuster… after Tompkins sent out press releases for one of his readings that he signed “Alan Chase.” And that detail in his success story bothered a few writers, like Jay Lake, who described the NYT story as “bad messaging to aspiring writers,” because, as one commenter summarized the situation, “this guy lied, pretended to be someone he wasn’t, and not only does he get rewarded by landing a contract with a big publisher, he goes in front of high school classes and brags about it.”

Others couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. “He wrote the book, he published it himself, he publicized it himself,” commented Andrew Wheeler, a marketing manager at Wiley. “He was smart enough to know that signing the author’s name to a press release is the kiss of death… The release still had to be compelling; it still had to grab interest. Signing ‘Alan Chase’ just kept it from being thrown away immediately; nothing more.” The bigger picture here, Wheeler adds, is that Tompkins was only able to make the shift from self-publishing to a book deal with S&S because he’s exactly the sort of “insanely energetic self-promoter” you need to be if you want any kind of success publishing your own work. (It might also be worth noting that Tompkin’s success as “Troy CLE” parallels that of E. Lynn Harris, Omar Tyree, and other African-American writers who undertook the DIY approach and proved they had a sizable audience before “real publishers” recognized their potential—and, too, there are authors like Tina McElroy Ansa who break away from the conglomerates to start up their own publishing companies.)

As S&S children’s book publisher Rubin Pfeffer told the Times, The Marvelous Effect was considered an effective reflection of “the style, attitudes and feelings of children from the inner city… [with] elements of hip-hop, video gaming, anime and science fiction,” all of which Tompkins deploys to get more kids reading—so that maybe in the near future, we won’t hear about situations like his presentation at a Newark high school where only eight students in an audience of 200 said they read books for fun. And if the worst thing he did to get us to that point is pretend he’d hired a publicist so he could get on the radar of overworked publishing and media professionals, then, yeah, I don’t see a problem, either.

(That picture of Tompkins, by the way, comes from his appearance on the Tavis Smiley show.)

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