Skip to main content

The PR corner - issue #4

 I was always a fan of Pseud's Corner in Private Eye. These days, the most purple prose I receive is often in the form of press releases for books being offered for review. I will provide an irregular series of these, both for your entertainment and, I hope, as pointers of what not to do with the press releases for your own books. 

Note that the books themselves could be brilliant... or not. But a poor press release is unlikely to generate many reviews. Names will be omitted to protect the innocent and guilty alike. 

I suspect the problems are fairly self-evident, but just in case here's a few key pointers to look out for:
  • Are you ready to be empowered?
  • A diary-style journey? Is that a bit like a blog-style elephant?
  • Who would have thought that India was a land of geography?
  • Can people collectively form a wisdom?
  • Apparently we are unlikely to read the like of the author in our lifetime. No, doesn't make any sense to me, either.
  • I have read 'Just as quantum physics presents a very different view of the world from the classical physics of Newton, the same is also true of consciousness' three times and still don't understand what it means.



[Title]: Uplifting New Memoir Empowers Readers to Unleash “Transcendental Consciousness”
Written by X and inspired by a life-changing, spontaneous trip to India, [Title] takes readers on a diary-style journey through the author’s daily life alongside the goddess Durga. From falling in love with a guru to undergoing a series of transformational experiences, X's true and incredibly vivid memories will lift readers up to a new state of being.


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
United Kingdom – For thousands of years, people have turned to the mystique and allure of India for assistance in all facets of their life; a land of geography, culture and people who collectively form a wisdom unmatched by anywhere else on the planet. [...]

Synopsis:
This is a remarkable book by an equally remarkable man, the like of which you are unlikely to read in your lifetime.

An inner prompting sent X to India – the home of the timeless knowledge of the Veda. In the topsy-turvy world of modern times, we are more au fait with our mobile phones than we are with the even smarter circuitry, lying latent within our own nervous systems.

Just as quantum physics presents a very different view of the world from the classical physics of Newton, the same is also true of consciousness. The more we expand ours, the more we find there.

The Veda tells us in its own symbolic language that everybody is born with a nervous system capable of being refined and perfected with the right input.

Comments

  1. I once worked for a (fairly large) US company who announced a recruitment freeze by saying, "we are consolidating our resources using a head-count neutral scenario". Perfect for Pseud's Corner but sadly, only just remembered it.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...