This is the story of how a cat in a box caused our book to move up 600 places in the Amazon charts.
Can we try to make some sense of nearly 38,000 people liking a picture of my cat in a cardboard box?
Twitter is many things to many people - a place to chat and engage with like-minded people; a marketing tool; a source of both news and entertainment. It’s also quite mad. As authors, to us Twitter serves all the afore-mentioned purposes. So, amongst other things, the more engagement the better, hoping more potential readers discover (and hopefully) enjoy our book.
The Scenario
When posting what felt like a fairly amusing photo of my cat at 7pm one Thursday evening, it was a pleasant surprise to see a few ‘likes’ start to appear. The scenario was we’d just bought a fancy new chair for one of our three spoiled moggies. With the legs screwed onto the chair, it was positioned next to the cardboard box from which it came. In typical cat fashion, the youngest, Tommy, showed no interest in the plush fabric furniture. Instead, he made himself very much at home in the empty discarded box.
It felt like a fun, relatable post. Pet pictures often go down well. ‘Bought the cat a new chair’ was all the text that seemed necessary. Plus a couple of customary emojis - including an eye roll. Notably, no hashtags; no tagging. Just the pic and a short caption. The following morning at 10am, I was keen to let Kirsty know that we’d reached an impressive 400 likes. That was quite a lot for us. We started to wonder what our previous most popular tweet had been and whether we would be closing in on it.
Harnessing the Attention
At this point, it was all well and good having people like the picture but we started to wonder, would it or could
it help increase sales or visibility of our book? I joked with Kirsty that I should have left a copy of the book in shot. Kirsty replied, ‘Right, every photo now has to just be Tommy sitting on one of the books’. That gave me an idea. With Tommy sprawled out on the floor, happily oblivious to his prospective new status as King of Twitter, I slid a copy of the book between his paws. I then added a ‘reply’ tweet with a link to the book on Amazon. At least now, some of the people clicking on the original tweet might also see the one underneath in the thread and be directed to the book itself. By 7pm, around 24 hours after posting, we were at 1500 likes but they were rising by the minute. It was starting to get weird.
How Many is Viral?
We went to bed on Friday watching the ‘likes’ count tick along to over 3,000. Doubling in a few hours had us surprised and fascinated. On waking Saturday morning, I expected it might have gone quiet overnight but woke up to see a figure of 7,000. More than double again. By the end of me finishing parkrun at 9:30am, I watched it tick over to 10,000. We’d just reached the point where there were too many digits to display so the report went from 9,999 to ‘10k’. ‘What counts as viral?’ I asked. Maybe to be viral you need 100,000 or 1 million views. Who knows? For us, this was unprecedented and unbelievable. The rest of Saturday involved thousands and thousands more likes. I had to turn off notifications in the morning. Kirsty was setting up at a craft fair when I asked if she’d seen the latest numbers - ‘nearly spat out my tea’ she replied after she’d checked Twitter. I spent the afternoon messaging my daughter at work with updates as we hit 20k, 25k, 30k.
Making Friends
Another thought was that even if people weren’t immediately drawn to the book, there may be people discovering us via this tweet who could be interested in what we do and vice versa. So, also during Saturday, I spent some time scrolling through the users who had ‘liked’ or engaged. If the bio caught my eye - for example someone described themselves as a ‘reader’, ‘booklover’ or similar, maybe they were our kind of people. It felt like a nice opportunity to connect with like-minded people.
Making Sales
It was fun replying to people. Some had really good advice, like putting a blanket or something with the cat’s scent on the chair. Others shared their similar experiences, and we got to enjoy photos of lots more cats sitting in unorthodox places. Then there were the few users who took a swipe at us for the ridiculous idea of buying the cat a chair at all. Thanks, guys! Amongst it all, we did start to notice bars appearing on our Amazon dashboard. We’re self-published and the book came out nearly a year earlier so a sudden spike on the graph was quite noticeable. Amazingly, Tommy’s cat-in-the-box antics had actually generated some book sales.
In The End
We followed up with a couple more tweets to keep the fun and the momentum going over the weekend. Of course, Tommy himself had to feature further. By Monday, we were slowing down after topping 37k. It almost felt safe to turn the notifications back on.
And to reflect on a crazy few days of social media, we wrote a blog. Thanks for reading it.
At the time of writing, the original post has reached 37,900+ likes and 3,000+ retweets; we’ve gained around 200 new followers; made some book sales and moved up 600 places in the Amazon charts.
Tommy has still not tried out the chair.
'What You Don't Remember' is a psychological thriller available on Amazon or Etsy. If Tommy loves it, then we're sure you will too ;)