Author Turns Down Seven Figures to Publish New Novel: Cites Da Vinci Code as inspiration for pseudon

Added: (Mon Aug 30 2004)

Pressbox (Press Release) - “But I won’t tell you what the figures were,” says Francis Ellen, author of the new book, The Samplist. "Let’s just say that if you put them one after another you’d have enough to get arrested, but one at a time they don’t sound so big."

After writing two of last year’s biggest selling novels, ‘Death of a Human Resources Specialist,’ and ‘Cockroach at Dawn,’ Ellen has turned to computer science and the arts for inspiration. “I was about to embark on the third leg of my non-fiction trilogy ‘Kill the Boss,’ when the urge to strangle record executives got the better of me and I wrote The Samplist instead. There’s far too much sex in it but I can’t help that. It’s a hard novel to describe, it’s a bit like The Da Vinci Code without the boring bits or Eats, Shoots & Leaves with the wrong punctuation and while it pays homage to Proust I’ve never read any Proust so I can’t be exactly sure of what I’m talking about.”

“Mr. Ellen is a little off the wall,” said a spokesman for Ronak Publishing (www.ronak-publishing.com) in an interview. “Frankly, if we’d known he’d give us so much grief we’d never have taken him on in the first place. There’s someone at Simon & Schuster who’s down for a black eye for this.” The spokesman then became aggravated and attacked our interviewer, later claiming he was choking on his chicken salad sandwich he told that us his job was on the line and he begged us to buy a copy of the book. Our doorstop expert is currently working diligently to provide a critique and we intend to publish in early 2007.