I Just Had to Buy a Marketing Book

During my first quarter in the Book Publishing Program at Portland State University, I was immersed in marketing through Kent Watson’s Book Marketing class, through creating the marketing materials for my Intro to Publishing mock press, and through 4 credits in the Ooligan Press Marketing Work Group.

Marketing was new to me, and overwhelming at first, but as I became more immersed, I began to enjoy its creativity. I found guerrilla marketing in Kent’s class particularly intriguing. It is free (my budget), and it works. For the final project, I made it integral to my book marketing plan by researching and developing my own guerrilla book marketing techniques. That’s why when I read the reading list for this quarter’s Online Marketing class the book Guerrilla Marketing on the Internet by Jay Conrad Levinson stood out to me. Here I had been bumbling about with guerrilla marketing when there was a whole book on how to do it.

However, there were many books on the reading list, and I thought I should do my research before I ordered my book. I don’t know a lot about Twitter and why it is a big deal, so I thought a Twitter book would be great. When I logged on to Amazon.com to look up the book description for Twitter Revolution: How Social Media and Mobile Marketing is Changing the Way We Do Business and Market Online by Warren Whitlock, the book description was short and focused solely on Twitter. That’s fine, I do want to know more about Twitter, but I want Twitter placed within a broader context of online marketing and be able to apply the entire book to my own pursuits. The short book description did not imply that that would be my reading experience despite the book’s ambitious title.

Insufficient book descriptions were as bad as the over-bulky ones. I abandoned long, unbroken blocks of texts after reading about a line and a half. I preferred book descriptions that combined shorter paragraphs with bullet point lists for the topics covered in the book.

Decision time came down to two books: the original Guerrilla Marketing and The Age of Engage: Reinventing Marketing for Today’s Connected, Collaborative, and Hyperinteractive Culture by Denise Shiffman. This second book focuses more on theoretical aspects of marketing whereas Guerrilla has a more practical flare that I hope I can make use of in my own marketing campaigns. However, The Age of Engage did have 100 fewer pages, a fabulous selling point for the grad student on the go. I really wanted to choose Guerrilla, but Molly, who sits next to me in class, said she had already ordered her copy of Guerrilla, and I didn’t want to look suspicious choosing the same thing. But I chose it anyway because I really want a book I can use long after this class ends.