Yesterday I mentioned an article about a woman who was campaigning against kids’ books that didn’t have happy endings. Well, it turns out that Adrienne Small, Clare Hughes and the Happy Endings Foundation were all part of an elaborate hoax, a marketing ploy by ArtScience to promote the Lemony Snicket books (A Series Of Unfortunate Events).
I admit I was taken in. As I said in this post, I was soon straightened out by cyber-sleuth Sal Towse (who runs the excellent Internet Resources for Writers, by the way) who discovered it was a marketing ploy by the Lemony Snicket people. For those of you who want to know how she found out, please read this post.
Looks I wasn’t the only one fooled; the news appeared in several mainstream news sites as well as the BBC and (in Toronto) CFRB. Clare Hughes, the woman who was featured in most of the stories, was even interviewed on Jeremy Vine’s BBC radio 2 show. I also sympathized with responses like this one, which motivated me to post the entry you’re reading now.
After I swallowed my pride and marveled at the clever marketing scheme, however, there was still a bad taste in my mouth. I’m willing to laugh at a joke as much at the next person, but this was different. This was about literary censorship as well as children’s lit, both subjects I care a great deal about, as do many others in the writing and publishing industry.
Authors, editors, librarians and others were motivated by the HEF news to write about how they felt about the issues. Some even specifically praised the Lemony Snicket books…I’m sure the marketing people must have loved that; free publicity from people they were duping!
It would have been different if the scenario was clearly so over-the-top as to be completely silly and unbelieveable. Sadly, we live in a society where book bans and burnings are not completely out of the question, and people like Clare Hughes DO exist.
Which is probably why respected news sources like the BBC were taken in, and this in turn helped convince others that it was a legitimate story. I can’t help but think that using the issue of censorship and book banning as a publicity stunt is in poor taste.
UPDATE: Humble apologies: I accidentally deleted this post and had to re-post it. Unfortunately comments were lost. Just wanted to clarify that the comments were deleted accidentally (and stupidly, on my part)!
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I absolutely agree with you that this was a terribly tasteless marketing scheme. I can totally appreciate it’s brilliance, but I can’t really forgive it either. The fact that there are so many cases where things like this really do happen makes it a really bad idea to use it simply as a way to drum up publicity. The fact that the books in question didn’t need the publicity anyway just makes it worse. Thank you for writing this.
As the BBC lined up Micheal Morpugo for the rebuttal and had him defend sad endings, they’ve even gotten free advertising out of a respected children’s author… and a corporation who is bound by the Royal Charter not to advertise products.
Brilliance. Utter brilliance. As someone who has been trying to smother the cries of “Romance must have a HEA” I find this just hilarious. And after all, very in tune with the books.
I don’t think it’s tasteless at all, I think it’s great satire.
If Swift wrote A Modest Proposal today, people’d be criticizing it as bad taste. Nuff said.
I don’t think it was tasteless at all. I think the site DID try to go over the top and be silly, and it’s OUR WORLD that is so extreme and ridiculous at times that we believe without hesitation that someone would do this.
It’s also PERFECTLY in the style of Lemony Snicket and their whole ad campaign– I think it’s genius. And kudos to all those people that got worked up– the topic is worth the energy,.
I’m with you, Inkygirl. I’m all for clever ploys, but this was not it. Something was not right about it, something was mising. I also do not think it is “in the style of Lemony Snicket and their whole ad campaign.” I am (was?) a huge fan of the books and I ate up every little bit of their marketing campaign and promotional materials (as an elementary school teacher, I probably saw more of it than the average bear). There is a playful, teasing, joking tone in the books and their previous marketing that was not present here.
Perhaps the problem here is, as you mentioned, the fact that it involves censorship, which is no laughing matter. It’s too real to be funny, to be taken lightly. This came out the same week libraries celebrated banned books; book-burning, how real it was, and how real book-banning still is, at least in some people’s minds, was very much on our minds at that time. The joke was tasteless, and not funny.
Whoever was in charge of this should have known they had crossed the line when the BBC asked for an interview. If they were truly going for a joke, and nothing else, they should have known then their joke wasn’t working, the sarcasm was not coming through, and they should have ‘fessed up. Going on the BBC interview and implicating a public broadcasting corporation, which has clear laws about not advertising stuff like this, was a big mistake on their part. Sure, some people will argue that the BBC should have know better, they should have sent fact-checkers out, etc. But if the people running this HEF scam were professional and *ethical*, they should have drawn the line there, and told the BBC it was a hoax. They chose not to do this, which says a lot about them, and completely changes the way I feel about Lemony Snicket.