Go Pink or Go Home!

Today, my blog has been taken over by the AMAZING Roecker sisters. Lisa and Laura implemented a massive grass roots social networking campaign in promotion of their debut YA novel THE LIAR SOCIETY that resulted in hundreds of pink-haired avatars (including yours truly) popping up all over Facebook and Twitter.

I asked the ladies to talk about their marketing and self-promotion because I, for one, was totally fascinated by their efforts!

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We are a team. Lisa + Laura = LiLa or the Roecker sisters, the sisters Roecker or L&L. We sign all of our emails as a team, write blog posts together and take calls together—which is usually a cluster of us talking over each other and laughing awkwardly. BUT, what many people don’t know, is how different we are. Let us demonstrate.

Laura Roecker: The younger sister, but also the MIDDLE sister, typical middle child syndrome with associated angst, a natural observer, natural follower, more comfortable listening than talking, highly sensitive, relatively private person.

Lisa Roecker: The older sister, the bossy one, loud laugher, loud talker, was known to say, “Hello, my name is Lisa Roecker, will you be my friend?” at five, precocious, an open book, snarky, all-around attention whore.

What does all of this have to do with publicity?

Mainly, Laura wouldn’t do any if it weren’t for Lisa. Promoting a book is obviously a very PUBLIC thing. So, when it came time to promote our debut novel, The Liar Society, we knew we’d be walking a very fine line. Laura is ALWAYS stressed about maintaining a balance for our online presence to prevent looking like a couple of self-promoting losers. Lisa ALWAYS has a new idea about how to get the book into the hands of readers. TOGETHER we make one, somewhat balanced publicity machine.

Back when we began writing together, we had a handful of more talented, more established authors (*cough* Gretchen McNeil *cough*) and literary agents take the time to guide us and give us the feedback we needed to become (hopefully) better writers. As a result of those experiences, we vowed to always be the types of writers who were willing to lend a helping hand to those just starting out. This philosophy has a HUGE impact on our marketing and PR efforts because a lot of our online presence is really about promoting other people’s books (The Bookanistas) and helping aspiring writers get published (WriteOnCon).

We’ve had a few people comment that our marketing and PR for Liar Society was impressive, particularly the pink hair twitter campaign, but the truth is it was dumb luck. We HATED our cover when we first saw it and we did everything in our power to get Kate’s hair changed to a nice ordinary shade of brown. In spite of our best efforts to destroy what would become a fantastic marketing angle, our publisher ignored us and we made some changes to the book to give Kate a punky make-over. One night Lisa was bored and photo shopped a couple of pink wigs onto our author pic and put it up on Twitter, Blogger and Facebook as a joke. Well, the joke was on HER when people began going pink in support of the book.

So, yeah, our main philosophies on promotion are go big or go home (Lisa), pay it forward (Laura), and dumb luck (pink hair). No idea if any of it actually helps sell books, but we sure as hell have fun trying.