Author John Green gets an A+ for creative promotion

On the heels of writing about the marketing machine that is James Patterson, I came across this interesting promotional effort by YA (young adult) author John Green. According to an article in Publisher's Weekly, Green will provide a personally signed copy of his upcoming book -- still being written/edited -- to every person who pre-orders "The Fault in Our Stars" (the book itself is not due until May 2012).

Now, I've never heard of Mr. Green, but the articles states he has over 1 million Twitter followers and 500,000 YouTube subscribers. With such a large following, the announcement of this promotion apparently resulted in his forthcoming book reaching No. 1 at both the online bookstores of Amazon and Barnes & Noble. That is pretty amazing.

Being a marketing consultant by day, the great thing about the promotion is he is not only using social media to announce and fuel interest in it, he is using social media to document it. Talk about a stroke of genius. Many that don't initially hear about the announcement may find out about it from forwarded links and referrals from friends enabled by sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and YouTube; and the process of documenting the promotion should lead to even more awareness and pre-orders.

Like the disproven saw that anything interesting has been done, fantastic and novel uses of social media are obviously possible. Of course, the next few hundred authors that copy this idea may also garner some success, but they won't necessarily get the media attention from being first. Patterson would be proud!

Some author links that may give you ideas about turbocharging your author platform include:

• Web site: johngreenbooks.com
• Twitter: realjohngreen
• YouTube channel: vlogbrothers
• Tumblr
• Latest book: "Paper Towns"

PS I just watched his most recent video. Green is certainly energetic, entertaining, and willing to promote. He's not your stereotypical shy, nerdy wordsmith.