I am more convinced than before that I didn't 'get' The Gum Thief - the bit he read out was one of the bits from the novel being written by one of his two protagonists. It is clearly not supposed to be a spoof bad novel.
The guy who introduced him, as part of their (rather laboured) discussion mentioned the factoid of there being 30 books published an hour - is that in the UK or in English? Scary, not even your 15 minutes of fame, your 2 minutes of obscurity.