Design-savvy fans of Chuck Palahniuk, author of novels such as Fight Club and Choke, have an opportunity to contribute to the promotional campaign for his forthcoming novel, Pygmy, to be published by Doubleday next month. The publisher is seeking a logo that can be used as a promotional sticker for the book they are marketing as "The Manchurian Candidate meets South Park." The winner, in whose selection Palahniuk "will have a say," will receive six hundred dollars. Two other cash prizes will also be awarded.
According to the contest announcement, Pygmy tells the story of a group of young women from a country “not unlike North Korea" who are sneaking into the U.S. under the guise of foreign exchange students in order to carry out a terrorist act dubbed "Operation Havoc." The publisher's only hard-and-fast stipulations for the logo are that it should bear the phrase "Operation Havoc" and "be associated with the book in some interesting way." Excerpts from Pygmy are available on the Web site hosting the contest guidelines.
The author's target audience is described as "eighteen to thirty-four, fifty-fifty male/female, college educated, affluent, urban, hipsters, suicide girls, fans of transgressive fiction and the alternative music scene." The contest announcement states, "We'll want something that his fans will be proud to work with, so it should be subversive and slyly promotional," citing the book jacket, a PDF of which is posted on the guidelines page, as an example of the publisher’s design aesthetic for the marketing of Pygmy. The book trailer, which contains design elements similar to those of the cover, is also available for online viewing.
