The Underground Book Club

The Underground Book Club, a project of Attack!, was launched under the theory that book lovers who are also avid social media users can be highly influential in creating buzz for newly published books. The Book Club stemmed from when Rare Bird Literary Events & Promotions and author Karen Essex approached Attack! with the challenge of identifying an innovative way to promote the upcoming release Dracula in Love. Attack! ultimately created the Underground Book Club to tap into the influence of online brand ambassadors and their existing social media networks in generating pre-release buzz for the book.

Using proprietary staffing technology, Attack! identified 55 out of 50,000 nationwide online brand ambassadors who were avid vampire-fiction enthusiasts and active social media users. Each individual was sent an advanced reading copy, a custom link to the book’s landing page, and cryptic instructions to begin the book club experience. The book club experience consisted of daily Facebook conversations, phone call and social media conversations with ‘characters’ from the book, and an online video chat with author Karen Essex.

The result was an engaging experience that garnered deep conversations, established community and created significant online buzz. Readers posted links to the book’s landing page on their personal social media pages and generated hundreds of online shares and conversations that totaled 6,710 social media impressions for an overall 9.2% click-thru rate to the Dracula in Love landing page.

Overall, The Underground Book Club offers an example of how a brand can tap into social media ‘influencers’ to initiate and extend an authentic brand conversation, by first creating a differentiated experience that gives loyalists a reason to be so. The benefactors of the project weren’t limited to the publishers and authors that experienced pre-release buzz, or sales lift – but also those passionate readers that enjoyed an experience that extended beyond that of the actual book.

The Underground Book Club