How does the star of one of the biggest movies of all time spend the Saturday after his movie opens? Calling comic book stores, of course.
Though Tyrese Gibson’s name isn’t above the title of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, he is front and center through most of the movie, which looks to be on pace to break The Dark Knight’s opening weekend record of $205 million. But Gibson isn’t concerned with that today. Instead, he’s working hard getting comic book stores, and non-comic book fans to order his upcoming book, Mayhem.
Fans of Tyrese have been hitting up his Twitter feed (@Tyrese4ReaL) all day long, after the star has urged his 155,096 followers to call their local comic book shop, and order the book. Here’s the kicker: if the fans call the shop, and the shop says they haven’t ordered the book, they’ve been tweeting back Tyrese with the shops’ phone numbers… At which point the star has called the shops himself to ask them to order the book.
Given that he’s starring in the number one movie in the country, that probably holds quite a bit of sway over the owner of any comic book store.
Even more important, the majority of tweeters comprising this virtual street team have had one common thing to say: “I’ve never bought a comic before, never been in a comic book store before, but I’ll buy your comic, Tyrese.”
There’s been other pieces of evidence that the actor has been looking to the music street team model to spread the word, including forum postings, YouTube videos, and a website called BuyMayhem.com, which previews the book, and shows you just how to buy, and help promote it as well.
Will every single follower of Tyrese on Twitter buy the book? Probably not. And I honestly have no idea how many will be printed to meet the demand. But considering the top selling comics the past few months have peeked well under 100,000, and Gibson is getting the word out to far, far more than that, the question remains: have you ordered enough copies of Mayhem?
