A Tale of Thunder in a Vacuum: The Ultimate Shopper Promotional Kit How Canada's worst-selling title of 1988 got media coverage in 100-plus markets in 3 months Last updated 07/05

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In 1988, The Ultimate Shopper earned the mixed distinction of being one of the worst-selling yet most highly-publicized self-published titles in Canadian publishing history. While readers found the book so unappealing that it sold fewer than 1,000 copies in a full year of national distribution, the book, and me as the author, got top-flight free publicity in nearly half of all available print and broadcast markets in eastern Canada. Here's the full rundown on how a book nobody wanted to buy also became the story everyone had to cover.

Some of the material here, notably the 60-second radio features and free print features produced for magazines and newspapers, will be of interest to most readers as supplements to SuperThrift, but the primary purpose of this section is to offer prospective self-publishers and independent publicists a template for present-day promotions and publicity campaigns using the successes, failures and analyses of this campaign as a guide.

After assisting several other self-publishing authors with their promotion, I decided in 1993 to turn the promotional campaign for The Ultimate Shopper into a stand-alone on-disk information product including all promotional materials ever produced for the book and a complete postmortem of their effectiveness...or lack thereof. This package has only ever been available as plaintext, and for the first time, I am posting the entire package in HTML format.

While the campaign itself is nearly twenty years old, the tactics and techniques used to achieve its amazing promotional success are still largely applicable today, and in addition to serving as yet another addition to my rogue's gallery of failed entrepreneurial ventures, it stands as a monument to what solid research, a little thought, and a lot of hard work can achieve when

To the best of our knowledge, "The Ultimate Shopper" by Steve Winter was the second most widely publicized self-published title in Canada in 1987 behind the international bestseller "The Joy of Stress" by Dr. Peter Hansen. We had everything necessary for a bestselling nonfiction title: solid writing, a hot topic, a good title, a media- wise author, a relatively market-wise publisher, and publicity to beat the band. In fact, we calculate that we received publicity in nearly half of the available media outlets in Eastern Canada, no mean feat for a new author and an unknown publisher.

The results? Of a 5,000 first print run, about 1,000 remain in the author's possession as business cards, another 2,000 were given away free to persons unknown, another 1,000 were given away during the publicity blitz, and of the remaining thousand we estimate about half were actually sold, based on returns from stores that bothered to return unsold stock. It was a huge publishing flop. This archive is an attempt to make what little hay may still remain from this nightmare, because there's no question that the publicity campaign was a whopping hit.

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INTRODUCTION ------------

"IF YOU'RE GOING TO MESS UP, MESS UP _BIG_!"

This kit is as complete an accounting as I could make of "The Ultimate Shopper" publicity campaign. I've annotated many of the transcripts to indicate what I believe were flaws in the material, errors in judgement or particularly useful ideas. My goal was to provide small presses and self-publishing authors with a blueprint for a publicity campaign that will, I can virtually guarantee, produce superb results with any issues-relevant title by any author willing to face the media. It's not just "if I can do it so can you". The fact is that I'm not the only one who's done it. I've been well-paid by larger firms for the expertise that went into this campaign and I've helped more than one self-publishing author with publicity campaigns that produced sales figures far beyond those for my own book.

Don't let the age of this campaign fool you. The techniques I used in 1987 are every bit as valid and useable today as they were then, and with printing prices lower now than they were then, your total cost for an equivalent campaign should be just about the same as mine. No mean feat considering six years of rising postage costs!

I make this promise because I've seen how well watered-down versions of my campaign have worked for other self-publishing authors. It is particularly effective for regional markets; national publicity, particularly in the US, requires a different set of tactics unless the title can be targeted to a small segment of the national market, such as computer programmers, golfers, occult enthusiasts or Volkswagen owners.

THE COST

The campaign included here was developed over a period of several months. The level of detail goes far beyond that seen with most small press titles mainly because as the author I had a personal stake in seeing my book succeed. I had no perennials, receivables or works-in-progress from name authors to fall back on. So the time expense involved in creating all this material totalled well over 150 hours. However, the total cost of the publicity campaign, including all printing and mailing, was less than $1,500, or about $10 for each clipping or appearance. That kind of value is nothing short of phenomenal considering the scattershot approach I took.