Mystery author gets publicity by pretending to shun it

There's a new book called The Traveller by someone calling himself John Twelve Hawks. Now, in order to drum up publicity, the publisher is "admitting" that the byline is a pseudonym, and the real author "will only communicate with his editor on a telephone connection that is scrambled and that he calls on an untraceable satellite set." Pixel Kill suggests: "All a cunning hoax?" (which is an anagram for "A gala Nixon lunch" and "Ann Laughlin Ox CA" -- perhaps the real author is a Republican named Ann Laughlin who lives in Oxnard, Calif.) According to this article, the publisher created an online blog for one of the book's fictional characters. And this screenwriter calls the book "a marketing ploy masquerading as a novel."

Yeah, whatever. I guess now that Harry Potter and the last Star Wars is out, people need something to get all mysterious about. This guy is totally buying it:

In this blog I will be exploring the ideas in John Twelve Hawks book The Traveler, and how to impliment them into your daily life. For the last twenty years I have studied how individuals have managed to live out of sight of the surveillance state. Or as John Twelve Hawks calls it... The Vast Machine.

Sigh. No one yet has ever overestimated the appetite of the public for paranoid fantasies.