Here at Quaker City Mercantile, we make our own clothing and our own movies. We even make our own rum, ROOT liquor and own a major beer brand. So, it only makes sense that we'd try our hand at publishing. And in true Quaker City Mercantile style, we did it in a way that got an entire country buzzing—and cursing. Evil Empire: 101 Ways That England Ruined the World was published by Quirk Books, a division of Chronicle Books.

On the surface, it's a humorous, politically incorrect and rather insulting history of the British Empire. But dig a little deeper, and it is revealed to be a massive, elaborate, groundbreaking viral and guerilla marketing case study.

We started by creating a fake activist group called the International Coalition for British Reparations. We built a website, held a press conference at the United States Constitution Center and sent out a barrage of press releases. This immediately got us written up everywhere in England and secured us two huge articles in The Daily Mail.

Next thing you know, we were on a jet whizzing to London to do The Richard & Judy Show (the equivalent to The Oprah Show here) which pretty much secured the book as a best seller in the UK. Here in the states, it landed on Barnes and Noble's summer reading table (which, from what we understand, is pretty darn hard to do).

We then used YouTube and Spike.com, like nobody's business, putting up new viral videos every week. We even piggybacked onto our infamous Bikini Bandits franchise and ran our very somber and completely ridiculous commercial for British reparations, immediately after a very patriotic bikini clip, and got over 120,000 views!

The bottom line is, we didn't just come out with a book; we created a whole viral experience that was the talk of the publishing industry.