Talking to oneself is something a lot of us do, but most of us don’t publish the results. Toronto Star books columnist Phil Marchand does just this in a recent feature on the newspaper’s website.

Reading like a warped promotional interview for Marchand’s new book, Ghost Empire, the conversation is comical for its alternating bouts of egotism and self-deprecation. But the true beauty of having a promotional interview with oneself is that one’s book can be promoted with novelty and humour.

“Let’s say somebody buys the book,” writes Marchand at the end of his interview, “because he or she just has this feeling that the presence of the book … will add some indefinable element to the ambience of their living room. Suppose 50,000 Canadians feel this way. They buy the book and put it up on the shelf in between The Da Vinci Code and The Secret Mulroney Tapes and never so much as turn a page.

“This is unfortunate, in a sense, because, as I said, reading the book will make you a better human being, but still I encourage those 50,000 Canadians to do just what I’ve described even if they are functionally illiterate.”

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Click here for more of Marchand’s self-talk