Book | The Art of Manliness
Tribe | ArtofManliness.com
Husband and wife team Kate and Brett McKay started the Art of Manliness blog back in 2008 while Brett was a second year law student. In two years they’ve attracted over 50,000 subscribers and their site receives over a million page views a month.
In addition to developing a large blog following, the McKay’s worked hard to create a tight knit and active Ning community. The Art of Manliness Community boasts over 5,000 members. The members are the site’s biggest fans and evangelists.
The McKay’s also worked on developing an Art of Manliness presence in other areas of the web like Facebook and Twitter. Their Art of Manliness Facebook Page has over 6,000 fans and they have thousands of Twitter followers.
When the McKay’s published their book, The Art of Manliness: Classic Skills and Manners for the Modern Man in the fall of 2009, they leveraged the community and network they had nurtured for the past two years to get the word out about the book. Readers were invited to blog about the book, request the book at their local bookstores, and put an overlay of the book on their Twitter avatars.
To help drive up sales when the book was launched, the McKay’s offered a free 72 page ebook called Man’s Guide to Holidays to customers who bought a book in the first week. The promotion was a success and The Art of Manliness book reached #33 on Amazon.com bestseller’s list. Since the initial launch, The Art of Manliness book has been hovering around #1,000 on Amazon’s bestseller list.
The McKay’s plan to give the book another push in a few weeks. Teaming up with Saddleback Leather company, they plan to hold a contest called “Where in the World is the Art of Manliness?” in which entrants can submit pictures of themselves reading the Art of Manliness book in interesting and manly places. The contest is designed to promote the book and encourage those who haven’t yet bought a copy to do so in hopes of winning one of Saddleback’s highly sought after leather bags.
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AoM is a brilliant blog. It’s the combined great writing, cool ideas and quirky sense of humor I think. Good luck to them and thanks for sharing a bit about how they grew to be so successful.