What Did Troy CLE’s “Imaginary Publicist” Really Do?

Last week, I told you about the grumbling over Troy Tompkin‘s imaginary publicist, and how some writers felt that Tompkins (left), who published The Marvelous Effect as “Troy CLE,” had somehow “cheated” his way into a deal with a major publisher by putting a fake name on his press release after a NYT account of his literary trajectory. The Times “only told 1 percent of the story about my use of an alias,” Tompkins recently emailed the mediabistro.com comment line, which made its way to me along with a link to his version of events.

“I got my deals because the kids I did readings for loved my book and the press documented that,” Tompkins says of his transition from self-publishing to Simon & Schuster (with Random House picking up the audio). “I knew that if I could get a publisher to witness how kids loved my book there was no way I could not get a major book deal… I only used the name Alan Chase on the press release because no one in the publishing world would listen to a press release with an author’s name on it.”

Any press he actually got as a self-published author was from contacting media people as Troy, he insists—it wasn’t until he tried to alert publishing people to a reading in Harlem that WABC’s news division was already going to film that he used a different name on any publicity material. One of the handful of people who responded was former S&S Children’s VP Elizabeth Law, who came to the reading, loved what she saw, and… well, you can figure it out from there.

As an added bonus, here’s the news segment that came out of that reading:

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