Shea Serrano is the new Internet hero

You probably haven’t heard of Shea Serrano, but he is the one who became a celebrity overnight as the best-selling author, all thanks to his unusual advertising push on social media, Twitter to be specific.

The Rap Year Book, authored by Serrano, was sold out on Amazon and Barnes & Noble within two days of its release on October 13. Serrano, best known for his work with the now-defunct sports website Grantland, his rap-centered books, and for his Twitter humour hip-hop and basketball, has now started a subscription based newsletter—Basketball (And Other Things)—which melds together his interest in NBA, hip-hop and action movies of the 1990s.

But how did Serrano, a little-known author, sell the entire first round of printing (20,000 copies) of The Rap Year Book, even before his book was released? It was with intelligent and cheeky advertising on social media.

“I don't understand it either. The only things I know are: you got to sell a lot of books, and you got to make some noise. Those are the two guidelines my publisher told me,” Serrano says. With his first attempt at authorship, Bun B’s Rapper Coloring and Activity Book in 2013, Serrano used conventional advertising methods, and the book sold consistently. Two years later, Serrano wrote The Rap Year Book, a non-fiction graphic novel framed as a series of essays about the best rap song of each year from 1979 to 2014, with drawings by Arturo Torres, and this time he decided to cook up a storm. Rather than just urging people to pre-order his book, he decided to crack a deal.

He offered to give away 36-pack of Yo! MTV Raps trading cards, to each of the first 36 people who sent him a screenshot confirming that they had ordered the book. Two hundred people sent him tweets of order confirmations in the next 40 minutes. He then started reaching out to companies to giveaway more goodies in exchange of a book order. Today, he has over 43,000 followers on Twitter.

Riding on the success of his book, Serrano has once again collaborated with Torres to release newsletters with custom illustrations. He insists that the campaign around the newsletter was a casual endeavor, started a month ago, to test material for his upcoming book on basketball. The campaign has exploded into a near-viral sensation with 27,000 subscribers and counting.

Serrano’s overnight success can be dismissed by many as ephemeral. But the truth is that Serrano has managed to do what many just dream of, with his sheer talent for humour and communication. If you follow Serrano you will see him interact with followers in a series of tweets, a thing you expect happening between friends. His initial push on Twitter got him noticed, but it was his funny tweets and his engagement with his followers that kept supporters flowing in.

Even when he sends gifts, they are marked with his own address and a thank you note. Now, who doesn’t love a little bit of personal touch! As Serrano says, it’s not all about commerce; it’s just about hanging out and having a good time. He doesn’t just obsessively urges people to buy his book; he is also sometimes the life coach to his followers and takes them with him on a food outing.