These days every part of the publishing process can be used to promote a new title. A few months back, Random House got a ton of great press for its redesign of the paperback editions of the novels of Vladimir Nabokov. Last spring, FSG sent around an excerpt from Wells Tower‘s story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned—which contained a single story from the collection, as well as an earlier draft of the same story, inviting reviewers and booksellers to look at the story before and after editing.

And now Tom Roberge, an editor at Penguin Books, has started posting his email correspondence with French author Martin Page in an effort to promote Page’s new novel, The Discreet Pleasures of Rejection. The idea occurred to Roberge after a series of emails discussing the similarities between the novel and a number of films by Woody Allen. After that, according to Roberge, “we kept emailing…. And the answers he gave me were incredible—these long, sprawling musings on all sorts of things, all of them witty, thought-provoking, and entertaining… And we still are [emailing], at least until I offend him, bore him, or make a fool of myself with some sort of wholly ignorant remark, at which point I’ll hardly blame him for breaking off contact.” The correspondence, now five missives long, is posted here.