Professional Motion Picture Production and Distribution NEWS

To market her latest thriller The Shop, author M.J. Hawk took an innovative page out of Paramount Pictures’ social media marketing playbook used to create demand for the blockbuster feature film, Paranormal Activity.

(Tucson, AZ) Author M.J. Hawk’s political thriller novel, The Shop, follows her seven novels published by major New York publishers, but with a down economy and the publishing industry in a maelstrom of change, she isn’t taking any chances. Paramount vaulted the low-budget film Paranormal Activity into phenomenal success with a social networking strategy using social media web service Eventful.com’s “Demand it!” button. Hawk bets that using Eventful’s service can build an inherent readership for the novel in a similar way.

M.J. Hawk is the award-winning author of seven novels published by Penguin/Signet, Kensington Publishing Corp. and Dorchester Publishing. Breakaway Media, a Tucson-based Internet publishing, marketing and communications company, worked with Hawk to craft the strategy and design the website, www.whokilledbriennecross.com.

“We built an aura of reality around an important character from the The Shop,” said Glenn McCreedy, of Breakaway Media. “The site showcases the life and violent death of country and pop star Brienne Cross and the final four contestants on her reality show, through features, news articles, and blog posts. Our aim is to engage visitors to interact with the site and one another, and to try and answer the question 'Who killed Brienne Cross?'”

Site visitors who want to get the answer once and for all can press the “Demand it!” button on the website to demand the rest of the story in novel form. When the “Demands” reach 5000, they will be the first to receive the answer to the mystery, “who killed Brienne Cross?” The “Demand it” button takes website visitors to the Eventful platform where they can interact with each other as well as access other events features. Breakaway Media provides supporting integration with Facebook and twitter.

Hawk based the strategy on Paramount’s successful track record with Eventful and the “Demand It” button. Paranormal Activity, made for $11,000, was bought by Paramount which originally wanted to remake the film with a big budget and name actors. But the web marketing executive said, “Let me see what I can do with this.” Paramount told fans that if they wanted a national release for “Paranormal Activity,” they needed 100 demands in each town to get the film’s distribution there. Using Eventful’s service along with test screenings to build word of mouth, they pursed their goal of a total 1 million demands, eventually reaching more than 1.5 million demands.

Hawk and Breakaway Media embedded clues to the murders in the website’s content and story threads offering possible explanations that play out in real time. At www.whokilledbriennecross.com, site visitors can be drawn into the world of a fictional murder victim and participate in a scavenger hunt for clues in the site’s content by looking for “cluecons”, then vote weekly on who killed Brienne Cross.

“I want people to enjoy the website and have fun with the story. Once it catches their interest, they can press the 'Demand it!' button and we’ll let them know when they’ve helped get the book to publication,” said Hawk. “And really, how often do readers have a direct ability to affect what book a publisher will pick up?”

Resources:

http://www.whokilledbriennecross.com