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EGR: The Lighter Side of Armageddon
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Christopher Locke
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Oct 19, 2001 11:53 PDT
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Gonzo Marketing: Winning through Worst Practices
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0738204080/entropygradientr
be the first kid on your block!
http://www.gonzomarkets.com
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Valued Readers:
Under deadline to finish checking the Bombast galleys, but I couldn't
resist sending these:
get your war on [five stars]
http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war.html
Day-O (Colin Powell vocal with GWB on congas)
http://www.madblast.com/oska/humor_bin.swf
Meanwhile, here's a chunk of The Bombast Transcripts I was just
reading. If you're an EGR Old Timer, you may recall reading this some
years back...
Twenty months ago we started writing EGR, and nearly twice that
many issues later, we've decided to try to find a publisher for all
this crap. There are over 70,000 wordsworth here already, enough to
constitute a physical tome of creditable atomic heft. A little
cover art, a few testimonials from people we've paid off, and
voila!: we'd get our shot at a much larger audience offline --
since this one's been such a miserable bust.
So we started spamming agents. Not intelligent agents, mind you;
we're talking publishing agents here. One of these recently
replied: "My thought is that you'd be better off coming up with an
idea for a new book rather than repackaging your web content."
While we thanked this gentleman for his speedy response and
seemingly innocuous advice, we've done a slow burn in the couple
days since...
[snip]
We still love the web. Where else could we rail away like this
without rhyme or reason, point or apparent destination, and ever
hope to get a halfway decent hearing? As to why we might want to...
well, there's that nagging question about publishing once again,
and that nastily insistent issue of a theme worthy of putting down
in a disciplined and thematic manner upon Real Paper.
Look at it this way. When people write actual books, it's because
they feel they have discovered something of value to share with the
world at large, or at least a world larger than their local Mary
Kay Cosmetics circle. This could take the form of practical advice,
like Ellen Banks Elwell's The Christian Mom's Idea Book: Hundreds
of Ideas, Tips, and Activities to Help You Be a Great Mom. Or
history, like Michael Pollard's The Lightbulb and How It Changed
the World. Or it could be a work of utterly contrafactual
imagination, like a sweeping family drama that examines eight
generations of okra farmers scraping a living out of the Australian
Outback -- their passions, their occasional despair, their
proclivity for inbreeding, their substantial poker winnings.
These are but a small handful of the serious literary genres that
warrant bona fide publication on acid-free pages worthy of the
shelf space in such select emporia as Waldenbooks, Borders, Barnes
& Noble. Not for these established outlets nor the publishing
houses that serve their mass-market requirements are the tawdry
ramblings of congenital retards who relegate their hastily
scribbled musings to the back pages of the World Wide Web where
they let just anybody write whatever they fucking feel like writing
and where, moreover, any bloody rabble can already read it free!
Publish EGR as a book? My God, what were we ever thinking?
And so, as the sun sets slowly on the West, we find our hero, back
from the edge of Death Itself, pondering a theme important enough
to merit the kind of Sustained Treatment that would lead to
immortalization in the form of a Genuine Volume with height, width,
depth, weight and its very own ISBN.
"What do you think about 'Internet for Sewage Plants: The Big Money
Finally Gets Connected'?" RageBoy asks me, donning that serious
mien he's lately taken on. You can tell he's really thinking about
this.
"Or maybe an anthology," I suggest. "Those are big. I notice
nobody's done anything yet with food-related poetry by anorexic
transgendered differently-abled animal rights activists of
color..."
RageBoy gives me the look that says "You are being frivolous again
and I do not approve."
I give him the look back that says "You are a flaming asshole!"
And so, Valued Readers, we once again find ourselves at something
of an impasse here at EGR World HQ. Should we continue to post
these vapid meanderings to the World Wide Web, filled to bursting
as it is with morons and degenerates like yourselves, or should we
perhaps aim higher and attempt to produce a novel, say one that
interweaves a contemplative thread on the economic ramifications of
rainforest biodiversity with the sexually explosive adventures of a
privileged young career woman from Darien Connecticut who trades
off the easy money of Wall Street to devote her life to the
thankless task of introducing a hopelessly backward leper colony in
the darkest reaches of the Amazon basin to the wonders of modern
information technology and discovers God in the process?
Ach! Spaeking of the Amazon basin, I see that Gonzo has just fallen
out of the Amazon top 1000. *Again*! And it's been shipping for nearly
72 hours now. What do you think I keep you people around for? Why
aren't you out flogging this to your pals? YOU SCURVY DOGS!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0738204080/entropygradientr
Well then, off to find some decent anthrax spores I guess.
The Management
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