A few days ago, I gave thumbs up to the ladies at Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books blog in my post, “Ain’t It A Bitch.” I also emailed Sarah and Candy, the bloggers behind SBWLTB, to let them know. Sarah had some additional advice to share about a sudden increase in web traffic due to publicity:
“[W]e didn’t expect the AP or the NYT to pick up the story - I said the day before we launched the news that the Seinfeld plagiarism cookbook scandal would probably get more press, and was I wrong! - and once they did, we had to scramble, removing a lot of the slow-loading content from the site, talking to our hosting company to get more server space as fast as possible, and adding the “Looking for Cassie?” content to the top of the sidebar. I figured a lot of the clicks would be curious readers who aren’t really interested in romance novels, just in the Cassie Edwards content.”
I also got some great comments from visitors who had suggestions for handling the Cassie Edwards scandal, including Ivana Taylor of the marketing blog Strategy Stew. She was one of Anita Campbell’s “partners in crime” in rounding up contributions to “Top Experts Dish with their Best Kept Marketing Secrets” at the Small Business Trends blog and is doing a series on her own blog where she expands on some of the marketing secrets that commenters added to the list. You can see the post where she wrote about my idea here. (I saw incoming traffic from this post on my web stats and that’s how I met Ivana, by the way!)
Here’s what Ivana suggested:
I’d love to see someone do something really honorable and dramatic - like re-print the novel and insert an introduction by Cassie Edwards that says that much of the work is pulled from the following books and authors (with references in the text). The I’d like to see them actually take the proceeds from the book and pay the references a fair amount as a royalty. By doing this, those readers who are interested in the subject matter (in this case the Lakota) will have references they could follow for further reading - if they want to. Most won’t care and I don’t think her sales would be affected.
Steve Weber also dropped by and left a comment. His book, Plug Your Book!, is a great read. I highly recommend it for any authors trying to learn online publicity tactics for themselves. Like I told Steve, I’ve been doing online publicity for years, but I still took pages of notes when reading this and I really want to read through it again. An interesting side note: Steve O’Keefe of Patron Saint Productions, where I worked for years and still do some freelance work, wrote the foreword!
