An untold number of used books rest on shelves, under beds and stacked in offices across the country. The Great American Book Drive is a book-by-book, click-by-click campaign to turn these books into dollars to support Brooklyn Public Library. At last year’s event, over 15,000 books were donated.

Bring your books to Central Library from 10-3 on Saturday, May 16th. In addition to the Book Drive, enjoy the music of the Library’s own Lost in the Stacks from 10-12, and crafts for kids throughout the day. In addition, the library will also revive its popular book sale with all books priced at $1.

For additional information, check out The Abbeville Manual of Style blog post about the event!

Chris Johnson, Better World Books’ organizer of the epic Great American Book Drive (which by now you know is the biggest community based book drive in the US) just dropped me a line about the recent event in Boston:

“The drive went very well, we collected about 13,000 books and everything went super smooth, and I’m itching to begin the national rollout.”

Nice!

Rather than me tell you how it went, considering I was over 2700+ miles away, I’ll let the Boston Herald do their job:

“Bay Staters paged through their book collections for donations to the annual Great American Book Drive, held yesterday at the Brighton-Allston Congregational Church UCC in Brighton.

“It was actually a good excuse to clean out my book shelves,” said donor Stewart Ulm, 27. “They were getting a little unwieldy.”

The Web developer donated about 150 tomes to Internet bookseller Better World Book’s annual drive. The donation ran the gamut from GRE study guides to novels to nonfiction chronicles. He gave nearly as many last year.

The drive from Better World Books collected tomes to sell and raise money for the Prison Book Program and City Mission Society of Boston.

Last year’s effort brought in more than 20,000 books. Since 2003, the for-profit Better World Books has raised more than $4.7 million for the nonprofit partners.”

The Great American Book Drive got off to a strong start in Brooklyn.  There was a band, a book sale, face painting, and, of course, lots of book donations.  Minus a few stitches in Dustin’s finger, the drive went off without a hitch.  By the end of the day, the library was already talking about a repeat performance in the spring – and given the number of people who asked when the next event would be, this seems like a great idea.

We received some good press in advance of the event – including mention in the New York Times and TimeOut New York.  And while a concerted push the past two weeks to promote the event resulted in a total of 15,000 – 20,000 books (many were recycled locally and 8 packed pallets are en route to the Green House), the next time around we will be able to considerably build upon this with sustained and concerted promotion.

Check out a few photos from the day.

Looking forward to sharing more details but I wanted to give you a quick update before the close of the weekend.

Finally, was great to have the help of my colleagues – thanks guys – and I’m looking forward to building off of our good start in Chicago and Boston.

People are so used to bad marketing that they often don’t recognize good marketing as marketing at all. Every time someone walks into our office, that is marketing. Every time they meet a member of the Better World Books team and have a positive impression, that is marketing. Every time a customer is flabbergasted, they are going to tell people, and that endorsement won’t cost us a dime. It’s awfully tough to fake authenticity and passion,and that’s why I believe that everyone in a company is working in marketing, whether they like it or not.

That being said, we need to do a lot better. We need to wear our hearts on our sleeves and show people why they should care about us every day. We do need to do a little more traditional advertising to let the right people, who are already predisposed to like us, know about us. We need to get better at communicating to all of our supporters, and let them know the impact that they are creating. And if we do that well enough, I hope that before too long, we will be much more of a household name.

With that, here’s a short list of a few things I’ve learned from my experience with Better World Books.

1. A great customer experience makes marketing a lot easier. Get your customers in a room, have them fill out online surveys, and ask what you can do better. Thanks to my friend Mark Hurst of Good Experience for being a tireless evangelist of customer experience. Check out his book Bit Literacy in our bookstore. Looks like we’ve got a used copy for 40% off as I write.

2. There’s no substitute for just getting out there in the world and talking about what you do. As Woody Allen said, “80% of life is showing up”. For Better World Books, that takes the form of dozens of events every year, from the Green Festivals, to the American Library Association.

3. Manage your relationships, they are one of your company’s most valuable assets. We heart Salesforce.com, which has made an incredible commitment to B Corporations (For Benefit Corporations, in which Better World Books is one of the founding members).

4. Word of Mouth is the king of all marketing mediums. The more clutter there is in people’s media environment, the more they trust their friends. We assiduously cultivate word of mouth around here. Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz is the finest book on this that I’ve read.

5. Guerrilla Marketing is free and people generally love you for it. Check out Chris, Rudy and Dustin promoting the Great American Book Drive.