What do you get when you combine beauty, brains, and talent with over 60,000 Instagram followers? If you are Fast & Furious actress and best selling poet Mirtha Michelle Castro Marmol, you get two Amazon best-sellers in the same week, as just announced in the December 1 issue of our Outskirts Press self-publishing newsletter.
Elusive Loves; Amores Esquivos is the actress/poet/author’s highly-anticipated follow-up to her Outskirts Press debut Letters, To the Men I Have Loved, which was published in June 2014 and quickly shot to best seller status on both Outskirts Press and Amazon. It has been one of our top 10 best-sellers 16 times out of the last 17 months!
So when it came time to publish her follow-up, Mirtha Michelle leveraged her highly influential social media presence months in advance to build up buzz and anticipation for Elusive Loves; Amores Esquivos. The results were no less impressive, as Elusive Loves hit #1 in her category on Amazon even BEFORE the Nov 15 launch date she had told her 63,000 Instagram followers.
That tends to happen when you count celebrities like Selena Gomez and Kim Kardashian among your friends, and invite Hollywood A-listers like Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez to your book-launching parties.
But perhaps the biggest reason for her success is her “platform” and the tenacious way in which she builds upon it, supports it, and embraces it. It also doesn’t hurt that both of her books are honest, inspiring, and intimate studies of love and relationships, which brings us back to the beauty, brains, and talent I mentioned earlier.
Keep it up, Mirtha Michelle! We’re with you.
As a side note, I know we’re in the middle of an on-going blog series about our migration to Responsive Website Design, and we’ll get back to that with the new RWD Author Webpages next time…
President of Outskirts Press 