As I was reading the recent posts in Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's blog yesterday, I was redirected to the marketing campaign she's set up to promote her forthcoming novel, Dirty Girls on Top (a sequel to The Dirty Girls Social Club.) When the book comes out this summer, Valdes-Rodriguez wants to throw 250 book parties in a one-week period. "My books are sold through networks of friends and family, women telling other women about the books," she explains, and traditional methods of promotion just aren't likely to have the same impact—New Yorker ads, Kirkus reviews, NY Times features; none of it, she says, has done much for her sales.

"Again and again, I found that the only media my readers ever mentioned in conjunction with having heard about my books was Latina magazine," she says. "A few saw me on The Today Show. The rest? The rest heard about me from their sisters in their Latina sorority, or from a Latina pal at work, or from their Latina sisters, mothers, aunts, daughters and, yes, even from their grannies. It was a sister-to-sister grassroots network that was selling my books—and one that I believe requires a grassroots approach to marketing to be effective."

Thus, the Dirty Girls Book Parties: "Why not bring the books into women's homes, where other women can come?" Valdes-Rodriguez asks "And why not get sponsors to donate gifts and goodies? And why not raffle off a fabulous trip to a resort for the hosts?" As she tells the story, St. Martin's had plenty of reasons why not, which boiled down to either "it's never been done before" or "it's never worked before," but she's going ahead anyway. So far, she's got 21 parties in 13 states lined up and registered online, and as the list grows, she's hoping that many of them will be scheduled around a single weekend in July, as she'll be doing remote webcasts to connect with readers. Guests will be encouraged to buy the book beforehand, but some of the larger parties appear to be interested in making arrangements with local booksellers to have copies of Dirty Girls on Top available on-site.

I was going to say that this should be a very interesting test case for marketing books to a non-mainstream audience on a large scale, but then it dawned on me: The point is that Valdes-Rodriguez's readership is a mainstream audience, just not one "the mainstream" quite gets. We talk a lot, inspired by the Long Tail, about the proliferation of microaudiences... but we need to remember that there's more than one macroaudience out there, too.

(Disclosure: Valdes-Rodriguez and I have the same literary agent.)