My publisher is looking for approximately 20 volunteers willing to participate in a campus book drop guerilla marketing effort for my new book,
Elephants on Acid.
Their idea is to have people leave copies of the book in highly visible places, such as on college campuses, where someone else will pick it up. Hopefully this will help spread the word about the book.
I'm not sure how many sales these book drop efforts actually create, but it's worth a try (especially since my publisher is the one paying for it!). If you volunteer, my publisher will mail you a free copy of the book. Of course, it's not a copy you can keep forever. The idea is to leave it somewhere after you've finished reading it. And yeah, it's all on the honor system, so you could just keep the book. But that would be dishonest!
Contact me by
email if you'd like to volunteer. The only conditions are that you have to live in the U.S. or Canada. (Sorry, it's not being published anywhere else yet.) And we're also looking for some geographic variety, so that we don't get twenty people all in the same city.
UPDATE: So I've now already got all the volunteers I need. Thanks to everyone who's agreed to help out. And sorry if you wanted to volunteer, but are only reading the post now. You can always buy the book and leave it somewhere. 😉 The geographic location of volunteers turned out to be well distributed, just by random chance. The largest concentration of volunteers was in Missouri, but there's not enough Missourians to warrant dropping anyone for that reason. After all, It doesn't hurt to have a couple of the books circulating in the same state.
UPDATE 2: One other thing. A couple of people mentioned that the books should be marked in some way to prevent people from simply selling them on eBay. I assume the publisher is going to do this, but I'll point it out to them, just in case this possibility never occurred to them.
Comments
Hmm, is there some kind of sticker that we could put on the inside of the front cover that would increase the intrigue level?
"Property of Homeland Security" perhaps? Something different and better?
It sometimes sucks to live in Australia.
Of course, stores might later return all those books if they go unsold. You have to wait for six months or a year to know how many have actually sold. And to anticipate potential returns, the publisher puts a large chunk of whatever royalties an author might be owed "in reserve." Which means the author may not see the money for one or two years... or perhaps never.
The way the publishing industry does its accounting is truly byzantine.
I work in the same city as Michigan State University and have several of their students working in our office... woulda been easy enough to get it there from here.
*wonders why Amazon shows 2 resellers with used copies* :lol: