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Show Acting Alone Page 406 of the racial memory- to be a pitiful dud. Well then, so be it. The Elder had already gotten a pretty firm commitment of X-number of promo dollars from that good drumbeater friend of his back in New York City, Scotty Meredith. Modern communications and subliminal advertising techniques being such a marvel these days, publishers could, without fear of being accused of conducting their business affairs in a cavalier fashion, flat-out guarantee a certain huge number of copies sold, purely on the merits of promotion, as opposed to literary or even mythopoeic merits. "Sheer hype," Sammy would probably call it as he sneered down from his high office window at the parks and sidewalks and avenues brightly speckled with cheery bumperstickers and teeshirts bearing his likeness and the title of the psychosex bio, curling •his deformed upper lip back with an effete intellectual's supposedly non-materialistic scorn even as he pocketed his own considerable cut of the filthy lucre. The Elder, as Sammy's "agent," along with good Scotty (Sammy's actual agent) and the whole bookselling industry at large, earned the scorn of a self-styled "literary person" like Sammy just because they exercised to the fullest extent their prerogatives and options in a free enterprise system - that same free enterprise system, in fact, that had generated enough surplus fat on the land for a whole generation of parasites like Sammy to suck on for close to thirty years without doing a lick of honest work. But, even if the psychosex bio turned out to be a completely worthless and ineffective piece of trash, which would be no great cause for surprise, that minimum number of paperback original copies would inevitably be sold, barring some major continental catastrophe, and Elder Cicerone could cut his losses and go somewhere else, do something else esoteric for the church. |