I saw in a newspaper article recently that a book store owner burned some books because he has a warehouse full of 20,000 that he couldn’t even give away. The libraries and charity shops he approached said they were full. Lamenting the decline of book reading, he called his fire “the funeral pyre for thought in American today.”
The story was picked up by the Associated Press and featured in newspapers all over the country (I’m not sure whether there was a news team filming it as well, but I wouldn’t be surprised).
I have a hunch that he’s now going to be contacted by a lot of people offering a good home for the rest of his books, maybe even offering to buy them.
As much as I cringe at the thought of books being burned for any reason, I have to give him credit for getting publicity. The lesson is clear: if you want the media to give you attention, do something different (ideally, visual and dramatic).
(If you'd like 100 examples that show you how to do something different in order to get inexpensive publicity for your product or service, see my book, DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT, published by Virgin Books and available online and in many book stores.)
