Adventures in Viral Marketing, Pt. I

Viral marketing is a genie in a bottle, in reverse.  How do you  take advantage of the far-reaching magic of social media and try to capture it, focus it, to promote your product?  This was the challenge when I sat down with author Phyllis Theroux, who was interested in launching a viral campaign for her latest endeavor, “The Journal Keeper.”  The book is a collection of journal entries spanning a critical period in Theroux’s life, beautifully written and chock full of insight that resonates with everyone who gets their hands on an advanced copy.  Still, a memoir can be difficult to sell, let alone get published in the first place.

Why would an established writer need to worry about marketing at all?   Theroux’s publisher is the highly respected Grove Atlantic, one of the few independent houses still publishing literature and not commerical pulp.  They certainly have staff dedicated to the marketing and advertising of their authors and books. But it’s a stormy ocean out there for publishing houses.   They’re trying to dodge one wave, the long-touted demise of traditional book printing (and book reading by the public), while trying to catch another — the feared but still largely unrealized transition to e-publishing and e-books, and, you could argue, the online world itself.  For a small house like Grove, every book is crucial to its survival, and every dollar spent is probably a knot-in-the-stomach decision.  

Some people say there’s not enough marketing done for a book, and I think that’s total bullshit. You do the marketing that works, and not much is working right now.” —Peter Miller, Director of Publicity, Bloomsbury

Grove is pursuing the tried-and-true avenues of marketing for “The Journal Keeper”, but short of an Oprah plug, there’s no guarantee that those dollars will translate into sales.  It’s obvious to all of the publishing houses that online marketing has serious potential.  It’s powerful and it’s cheap.  But there’s no formula for succcess.  For over-extended, budget-slashed publishers, there are few who know how to tackle a viral campaign.  And so Theroux and I wound up in her living room brainstorming about  just that.

There were the obvious things to do – viral videos, a Facebook page,  a website or two.  Perhaps Twitter.   All of those efforts would increase awareness of Theroux and “The Journal Keeper”.  But as Theroux aptly puts it, it’s like tossing “a note in a bottle onto the waves.”   We are at the whim of discovery, and all we can do is hope that people happen upon these messages and share them.  

I wanted to create something buoyant and shiny in that vast sea, a product in-and-of-itself that would draw people to our message like a beacon.  Fortunately, the product was sitting across from me.  Phyllis Theroux.  In an online world thirsty for content — good content — Theroux is a well overflowing with it.  The journal she has kept for more than 30 years is one of the best blogs ever written, pre-dating the term and the internet that made these streams of consciousness popular. 

So, as the first step of our viral marketing campaign, we created The Writer’s Well, a website that encourages journal keeping and provides a place for writers and readers to find inspiration.  Phyllis updates her journal on the site regularly, and we offer inspirational quotes from “The Well”.   To create a community of return visitors, we maintain a Forum where we solicit inspirational quotes and images from the community and promote conversation. 

Time will tell whether this website will be the beacon we hope, or will simply bob upon the waves unnoticed.  What I’m confident about is our decision to do it.  Creating a dynamic destination for a targeted audience and enfusing it with valuable content is a worthwhile endeavor.  At the very least, we have a home for pre-release news and videos promoting “The Journal Keeper,” and have dropped the first of many anchors for Theroux’s search engine visibility.   In the best-case scenario, we are building an armada out of our website community that will spread the word about the book for us.  And with fingers crossed, we hope The Writer’s Well community will grow exponentially with the wild success of “The Journal Keeper,”  and Theroux’s next book will sail smoothly on the course we have charted here.