Protagonist email account

Amusement How to seduce a writer: wise words from Neil Gaiman

I wanna be adored.

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Paul Whybrow

Full Member
Jun 20, 2015
Cornwall, UK
While researching marketing and self-promotion, I saw a novel idea about how to deal with newsletters and comments to and from adoring fans (who dey?), which is to give your protagonist their own email account.

Sounds weird, but I've already got a Gmail account in my discarded pen name of Augustus Devilheart, to take messages, newsletters and subscription updates from anyone to do with writing and publishing. Google being Google, this led to the strange situation where I received a message from them, asking "Paul Whybrow do you know Augustus Devilheart?"

Not content with haunting myself in this way, I'm waiting to hear from my main character Detective Chief Inspector Neil Kettle—perhaps asking me why I haven't begun writing his latest investigation—I left him in a coma at the end of Book 5 The Dead Need Nobody, completed at the end of 2018.

While writing my books, I've had my eye on creating a tourist trail based on the locations of my Cornish stories, though it's hard to think of merchandising opportunities...mugs, calendars, tea towels? Having an email address might make people think my literary hero is a living person.

It's weird to think that readers might one-day email Neil Kettle, but who knows?

Have any of you made your protagonist real in some way?

Drawings?

A social media account?

A knitted figure?

iu
 
I used to have a photograph of my hero, stolen from an anonymous one on the web -- a model, an actor maybe, with no pic credit -- full A4 size, in a marble frame in my bedroom.

This prompted my next door neighbour, to whom I was trying to sell the bedside cabinets, to exclaim: "Who is that man? That's not your son!"

1 AA. Rodrigo.jpg
 
@E G Logan , I hope you replied that yes, indeed he is and that the excellent genes run in your side of the family. Hence your rather fabulous cheekbones and smouldering eyes.
 
Alas, my son is a classic blond Englishman, like my ex-husband, though he did get my cheekbones. And his father's brown eyes. Nadia, my neighbour, quite likes him, too.
 
I used to have a photograph of my hero, stolen from an anonymous one on the web -- a model, an actor maybe, with no pic credit -- full A4 size, in a marble frame in my bedroom.

This prompted my next door neighbour, to whom I was trying to sell the bedside cabinets, to exclaim: "Who is that man? That's not your son!"

View attachment 4273
And in the interests of equality, this is my female MC, whose picture I chose for looking archetypically English rose. (She, I have since discovered, is an Italian TV presenter and actress. Oops.)

Rachel Regan.jpg
 
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Amusement How to seduce a writer: wise words from Neil Gaiman

I wanna be adored.

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