SAMPLE CAMPAIGNS & CASE HISTORIES
Below are brief case histories and sample documents chosen from over 1000 online marketing campaigns for books, publishers, authors, and websites. The documents are in several formats: Word (Microsoft Word), Web (HTML), or PDF.
For detailed descriptions of the services involved in each campaign, please see the section of our site devoted to campaign descriptions and rates. Just let us know if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions. Thanks!
| New Book Launch Campaigns |
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RealAge went to #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List and Dr. Roizen has gone on to fame & fortune with the RealAge and YOU books franchises. |
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What's the hardest book to promote online? How about self-published first fiction. We turned this "impossible" task into an award winner. |
| Blog Buddy Campaigns |
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Our first Blog Buddy campaign was a smash success. This book on self injury is tailor-made for blogs. Check out the incredible tracking report! |
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This is a Blog Buddy campaign with a twist. We opened our daily blogging sessions so the public and media could listen in as we blogged with the authors. Very cool. |
| Book Blog Campaigns |
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For this campaign, we posted a daily transcript of an online "coolhunt" with the authors. This is an example of us managing an author's blog. |
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For this campaign, the blog was separate from the book's companion site. We built the blog and we maintained it. The author's participation on the blog was not required. |
| Blog Tour Campaigns |
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Most blog tours don't go smoothly. For this campaign, we had tight deadlines and a controversial subject. But we got great value for the author. |
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One of our first Blog Tours. This campaign for emergent church guru Brian McLaren is a textbook example of the value of blog tours. |
| Website Launch Campaigns |
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We don't do many website launch campaigns. This is a campaign for one of the world's great literary magazines. |
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| New Book Launch Campaignss |
New Book Launch Campaign
Book: RealAge
Author: Michael F. Roizen, M.D.
Publisher: Cliff Street / A HarperCollins Imprint
Client: The Author
The author brought us this project -- a health title about how to understand and retard the aging process. He had a large publicity and marketing team promoting the book, and we were hired for the online component. It was one of our largest campaigns for a single title, and included a chat tour and website launch package.
Our online campaign was scheduled to follow the author's real-world tour. However, when the publication date got bumped, our online campaign led off the promotional effort. The author appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show two days before our campaign launched. We tried to capitalize on the intense interest his Oprah appearance generated combined with the fact the book was not yet available in stores.
Return to New Book Launch Menu
New Book Launch Campaign
Book: Noble Vision
Publisher: Winged Victory Press
Author: Gen LaGreca
Client: Winged Victory Press
There are few books as difficult to promote online as self-published fiction from an unknown author. We used the medical hooks in this thriller to reach people in medicine. We used the Ayn Rand-ish quality of the writing to lure Libertarians, objectivists, and rationalists.
The results? Noble Vision won a Writer's Digest Book Award, a Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award, has been made into a screenplay, and launched the career of a promising new writer.
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Blog Buddy Campaign
Book: Comes The Darkness, Comes The Light
Publisher: AMACOM
Author: Vanessa Vega
Client: AMACOM
This is the campaign where we first realized the Blog Buddy was an idea whose time has come.
We built a LiveJournal blog for the author. Day after day, we taught her how to blog, how to respond to comments on her blog, how to find other blogs, how to connect with them, how to talk about your book on the Internet without getting into trouble, and how to deal with mean people on the Internet.
Reading the final Blog Buddy report is astonishing. And even though the campaign is over, the author continues to blog and to visit other blogs, no longer intimidated or uncertain how to make the web work for her.
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Blog Buddy Campaign
Book:Coolhunting
Publisher: AMACOM
Authors: Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper
Client: AMACOM
Our Blog Buddy campaign is designed to work whether or not the author is willing to blog. In this case, the authors already had a blog, and we took it over for a month.
Each day, we posted a transcript of our Blog Buddy sessions (see below). Within a couple days, we took the top spot for the term "coolhunting" on Google and we never looked back.
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Book Blog Campaign
Book: Coolhunting
Publisher: AMACOM
Author:Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper
Client: AMACOM
Our Book Blog campaign is designed to work whether or not the author is willing to blog. In this case, the authors already had a blog, and we took it over for a month.
Each day, we posted a transcript of our Blog Buddy sessions (see above). Within a couple days, we took the top spot for the term "coolhunting" on Google and we never looked back.
Return to Book Blog Menu
Book Blog Campaign
Book:Health Care Reform Now!
Publisher: Jossey-Bass (WILEY)
Author: George Halvorson
Client: Kaiser Permanente
Talk about tricky! This campaign involved a controversial subject, a prominent CEO with very little time for blogging, and strict rules about what can and can't be said (Sarbanes-Oxley, Regulation FD, etc.).
Still, we managed to produce an independent Book Blog on a third party website that survived a long approval process and kept the author's name at the forefront of the debate for the first 90 days the book was out.
Return to Book Blog Menu
Blog Tour Campaign
Book: The Last Word and The Word After That
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
Author: Brian McLaren
Client: Jossey-Bass
This is the most successful blog tour we've conducted so far --
thanks to the author. Brian McLaren is well known among people in
the Emergent Church -- the target audience for this book. The Emergent
Church is huge online, so booking the tour was the easy part.
We used the Giveaway File (Excerpt) -- shown below -- to
pitch blogmasters. We booked appearances for the author on four
of the five top blogs in this area, then started promoting the tour
with news releases and discussion group postings. Two more blogs
asked to participate before we stopped adding tour sites. The Blog
Schedule (shown below) is a Word document that contains all the
contact information for all the participants on one page. This is
an internal document used by the author, publisher, and tour producer.
As the Blog Report below will show, the tour got fabulous pick-up. All the sites installed excerpts and artwork from the book or linked to it. We had over 70 comments at the top blog and more than 20 on most of the other blogs. Most tours produce about 5 comments per site, so these numbers are large for us.
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Blog Tour Campaign
Book:The Price of Liberty
Publisher: Times Books (Holt)
Author: Robert D. Hormats
Client: Professional Talent Management
This was a very difficult tour. First, we got less than 30 of the 90 days we usually require to book a tour. When the tour dates came -- with a high-profile author and no wiggle room -- we only had two out of three blogs booked. We did the best we could with the tour, and made up the shortfall with an added Article Syndication Campaign.
Nothing had as much impact on Amazon sales as the author's blog tour -- not even a favorable review in The Wall Street Journal! Read the Final Summary Report to see the value of the placements we procured for the author.
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Website Launch Campaign
Website: GRANTA
Client: The New York Review of Books
GRANTA is one of the best contemporary literature magazines being published today. It contains fiction, poetry, non-fiction, journalism, and photojournalism. We handled the Website Launch Campaign when the magazine opened its web home. The campaign was responsible for a two-week burst of traffic at the site, which subsided, but did not disappear due to the steady impact of the Linkage Campaign and directory listings.
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