Story By: Gheorghi Caraseni, Sub Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Newsflash
A post from a young Russian writer who insinuated he would kill himself if his fans did not buy his new book caused so much backlash, he has been ditched by his publishing house.
The 26-year-old author, Alexander Polyarny, is from the city of Murmansk in the north-western Russian region of Murmansk Oblast.
According to news channel Life.ru, the successful writer decided to try and boost his new book sales with a provocative post on his social media accounts shared on the 18th August.
The post read: “Jupi is my life’s work. It’s like a second Bible to me. Until you read Jupi, you will not understand this. These are stories about life. About what friendship is. About what it means to love the world and your friends…If the book is not distributed at least 100,000 times till the end of this year, I will be forced to pass to the next world…”
The post received much negative backlash from social media users.
Social media user ‘Chloe Barnett’ said: “Manipulation of a young audience for their own benefit – is it “good”? Low resort to such PR moves. How can you stoop to this?”
‘Victor Trushakov’ reacted with: “Lord, some writers did not spare themselves, most of them were deservedly recognized after death. And here we have ‘whimper-whine, buy my book, whimper-whimper, I was offended’. What sort of culture is this?”
Polyarny deleted the post shortly afterwards and shared another post saying he had even received numerous death wishes from the haters, and urged them to stop pouring “bile and poison” on him.
Polyarny’s first novel “A Tale of Suicide” sold at least 50,000 copies and gained him recognition on the literary scene.
After that, the publishing house “AST” gave him a contract and published his book ‘Mint Fairy Tale’ in 2018, which was a best-seller in Russia and has since become a reference book for schoolchildren and students.
However, since the post, the author reported that the AST publishing house has cancelled their contract with him.
He wrote: “… I was kicked out of the publishing house because of the high pressure from the haters. AST is an excellent publishing house. I understand them. From now on “Jupi” is a forbidden book …”
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