About a year ago I wrote a book,
Silver Waters: The Asphalt Paradise. It was released in the springtime of 2004 and didn't do too well. The reason for this post is not to try to sell some more books, but to tell you about the funny marketing scheme I did and the political lessons I learned.
I was thinking of a slogan of some sorts that I thought would allow me to tap into the Presidential election. Since I live in North Carolina, and my book was pretty much an attack on Conservative political philosophy, I thought that I would poke fun at the über-Patriotism of the south. The slogan I came up with was, "If you Don't Buy this Book, you Support the Terrorists."
To release my new slogan I bought out some advertising space in one of those free newspapers they give away on the side of the street. It cost me $10 for business card like space. It was a liberal publication, kind of underground, and that was the market for my book. I also printed up bookmarks, business cards, flyers, and a whole bunch of other crap with the slogan. I went to bookstores, passed out stuff on the street, did a lot of grassroots stuff.
From the books release date to today I sold about 60 copies.
Now it could be that my book sucks. Or it could be that I didn't reach enough people. But for some reason the scheme failed. Perhaps, just perhaps, the moral of the story is: Don't make light of the War on Terror in the South. But I may never know.