Our speaker was Stephanie Triplett, who along with co-author Sara Ellington, wrote The Must-Have Mom Manual. Stephanie spoke to the GWA on being your own book publicist. Now, I’m not planning on writing any books in the near future (a couple of short stories are the closest I come to literary fame and fortune) but when I do, I’m taking Stephanie’s advice to heart. Along with her writing partner, this sassy lady kicked off a publicity campaign for her book that would put [insert name of any interchangeable, self-important, Twitter-holic, sales-letter-writing guerrilla marketer here] to shame. Her book came out on Tuesday, and on Wednesday she conducted an experiment with her Amazon.com ranking. 

Now I never knew this, but apparently the Amazon.com ranking is a big deal in publishing. (If you don’t believe me, see the kerfluffle at my friend Elizabeth Switaj’s blog over Amazon removing adult books from their ranking system.) The formula for calculating the ranking is one of those secrets on par with Google ranking, but it seems to have to do with the amount of books sold in a single day. If a book cracks the top 100, it’s considered an Amazon bestseller.  Anything close is still pretty darn good. So Stephanie and Sara enlisted their neighbors and their co-workers and their co-workers neighbors and their tennis friends and their tennis friends’ pets (oh, and through a strategic email, the 400+ members of the Georgia Writer’s Association) to all buy a copy of the book on Wednesday. They printed post cards, hung flyers, sent emails and texts, updated Facebook and Twitter and just generally made happy nuisances of themselves marketing their books. Don’t quote me on the statistics, but I think they started out the day ranked at something like 160,000 out of Amazon’s 2 million books (again, I’m a writer, don’t quote me on numbers), but as the day progressed, worked their way down bit by bit to 313^th place on all of Amazon.  So yes, you could say that they took guerrilla marketing to the extreme, but on the other hand, the results speak for themselves.  All 160,000 results.

Lessons any writer can learn from Stephanie and Sara:

Believe in Yourself – Stephanie and Sara wouldn’t have been able to achieve such a huge jump in rank if they didn’t believe that their book was a worthy investment. Think about it, have you ever wanted to email all your friends and neighbors to announce that you’d published a crappy piece? Of course not.

Make it Relevant – Just like with a press release, if you’re going to embrace this type of marketing, be sure to have a hook. In Stephanie’s case, this was just an update on their new and improved Amazon ranking every few hours. Still, coming back with new information made the emails-gone-wild interesting, and for friends who got into the spirit, the drop in Amazon ranking became a cause for celebration.

Leverage Your Experience – In Stephanie and Sara’s case, they’d already hosted a successful Sirius satellite radio show and made several television and radio appearances. They leveraged this experience to make a jump from their small publishing house to Random House and to book even more public appearances and even product sponsorships. Even if your first book/article/radio show etc. doesn’t make you a household name, you don’t have to start over. For us freelancers, this means leveraging our portfolio every chance we get.

Keep Your Contact List Organized – Any mom, author or freelance writer knows that an organized, easy to use contact list is downright imperative. I found out the perils of a disorganized contact list when trying to send out my client Christmas email last year. Over the months, I’ve realized that I missed at least three prospects and who knows what business could have come out of that simple bit of networking? Ouch. Stephanie and Sara needed an extremely organized contact list for their guerrilla marketing endeavor. Imagine only getting to 10,000 and then realizing you forgot to remind a whole group of your network to buy your books?  Ouch again.  

So yes, I learned something this weekend and I hope I managed to pass it on. And if you’ve written a book, just try to resist the urge to run over and check your Amazon ranking right now.