Word of mouth and Zombies

The project report Word of Mouth and Zombies approaches the question of what publishers can do when a new book title gets extraordinary attention among readers online. It takes the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as a case study and examines the reasoning behind what caused the viral success as well as what the American publisher Quirk Books and the Canadian distributor Raincoast Books did to support the word of mouth developments. This report shows that a small publishing company can capitalize financial success out of online buzz and points out how important it is to engage in a conversation with end customers and provide new platforms and topics to discuss. It illustrates how the publisher used the advantages of the Internet and social media tools to keep word of mouth going over several months and how it helped the book to become a bestseller.