Well, we now have a name for Richard Douglas Weber’s forthcoming Voynich novel: “The Voynich Prophecy”. His author page on the Publisher’s Marketplace site seems to describe his novel as a euro thriller with a kind of neo-Nazi alchemy twist: he’s also posted up a four-minute video montage on YouTube for the book, where it is described as an “occult conspiracy thriller”.
Curiously, Weber’s whole media approach to novel promotion / marketing seems quite opposite to the kind of thing novelists have been doing. I went to a lecture in the Borders in Kingston a few days ago given by the very pragmatic Alison Baverstock (soft-promoting her actually very good book “Marketing Your Book: an author’s guide“): sadly, the best current advice she had for authors seemed to be to try to make press out of your personal circumstances, the examples given being (a) losing half a limb (b) sleeping with a celebrity, or (c) having police take over your house during an armed incident.
As for me, I feel caught in the no-man’s land between these two extrema: while I have no huge faith in the traditional book-selling industry’s agenda and methodologies in the age of the Internet and digital print, I’m still just that bit too old-fashioned to montage loads of borrowed images on YouTube. But I have an MBA: and MBAs are forever looking for a “middle way” that finesses the best of both worlds, rather like intellectual historians steering a path between unreliable accounts. Hopefully I’ll find my own answers in the end…