Quaker City Mercantile's decision to venture into publishing wasn't merely motivated by the challenges that writing a successful book posed and the reactions that somewhat inflammatory subject matter might bring; we also wanted to challenge the marketing conventions of the publishing industry. See, we've learned a whole lot from building our own successful brands from scratch, and one of those things is that you can take your brand, or book in this case, incredibly far with just a little bit of money and a well conceived and instituted viral and guerilla marketing case study.

First we wrote The Evil Empire: 101 Ways That England Ruined the World and found a publisher—Quirk Books, a division of Chronicle Books. The book is just what it claims to be: a humorous, politically incorrect and somewhat satirical history of the British Empire. Then we set about promoting the
book via non-traditional avenues.

We created a fake activist group called the International Coalition for British Reparations. The fictitious organization, which used The Evil Empire as its manifesto, called upon Britain to pay the citizens of the world 31 trillion pound sterling in reparations for centuries of global misrule and to help alleviate the problems they had caused.

Soon after the book's release, the ICBR held a press conference at the United States Constitution Center while non other than Prince Charles himself was visiting Philadelphia. The press conference was well attended by local media, and the organization's UK press releases gained immediate attention everywhere in England, including two huge articles in The Daily Mail. Quaker City Mercantile also created an Internet presence for the ICBR with an official webiste and blog.

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 is really quite an accomplishment for any book.

We then used YouTube and Spike.com like nobody's business, putting up new viral videos produced by Quaker City Mercantile 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. The video ended up getting an astonishing 120,000 views!

The bottom line is that we didn't just come out with a book; we created an entire viral experience that drove sales of The Evil Empire way, way up and was the talk of the entire publishing industry.