The girlfriend's guide to E-marketing a blockbuster: how to savvy black internet professionals—Jen Hunt and Sanyu Dillon—brainstormed an innovative online promotion for Stephen King's latest thriller over lunch - book bytes

Black Issues Book Review, Nov-Dec, 2001 by Sheryl J. Estrada, Michele D. Thomas

Take two talented African American Internet professionals, add marketing savvy, a world-renown author and two media giants and season it with friendship. What do you have? Ground-breaking online book marketing success.

Sanyu Dillon, 31, an online marketing manager with Viacom's Simon & Schuster Trade Publishers, and Jennifer Hunt, 29, an online producer, at the time, with AOL-Time Warner's Time.com, are the creators of an innovative promotion for Simon & Schuster's best-selling author Stephen King's novel Dreamcatcher on Time.com's Web site. Getting two major media competitors to work together and defy traditional online book marketing practices may have sounded impossible. But not to Sanyu and Jennifer, two friends who spontaneously devised a plan over a casual lunch.

BIBR met with Sanyu and Jennifer for an exclusive table talk at the sleek lounge in New York City's Millennium Hotel. Dressed in eye-catching aqua, Sanyu, a native of Ohio, exuded confidence and charisma, characteristics of a top on-line marketing manager. But her career in online marketing was almost accidental. "I just fell into it," she explains. "I was working at Simon and Schuster for about two years, and then I quit to freelance. I worked for a year as a freelance editor and launched an Internet start-up with a friend of mine. Then my old boss at Simon and Schuster called me and offered me a position in the online division."

Jennifer, a native of New Mexico, who's affable, intuitive and stylish, also entered the online world because of an unexpected opportunity. "I worked at Random House at Crown as an editor. And before that, I worked at Money magazine and kept contacts there. Time Inc. corporate human resources manager Breena Clarke (who, incidentally, became the celebrated author of the novel River, Cross My Heart, Little Brown and Company, 1999) was running a program to help recruit minority editor, and she gave me a call about the position at Time.com."

According to Sanyu, incidents such as Breena Clarke hooking up Jen are commonplace among African Americans in publishing. "Publishing is such an incestuous industry and there are so few African Americans that everyone kind of looks out for each other. I heard Jen's name long before I met her" she recalls. "Anytime anyone would say they had a job opening and were looking for someone, I'd say, `Call Jen Hunt, she knows a lot'" But the two had a professional connection that eventually brought them together. Jen had written book reviews for BIBR and when she was invited to lunch by the reviews editor, Sanyu, who was freelancing with BIBR, tagged along.

Now Jen and Sanyu are both black women working in Internet divisions for corporate conglomerates, which is an ever-changing field with many challenges. "I think the Internet industry as a whole has changed" states Sanyu. "Since a lot of sites have gone out of business, it's more about making money than it is about content. It's more about partnership. And since publishers don't make a lot of money, it's difficult. We can only promote on a title-by-title basis."

In addition, there's a greater sense of isolation working in the Internet division of publishing. "Since there also aren't a lot of African Americans in the Internet industry," says Sanyu, "many, many times, I'm just the only one. I think that's my biggest challenge."

Jen also finds that aspect of the business wearisome. "You end up working with smart and interesting people, but it's just as difficult as it is in other corporate industries to be the only black--whether the pressure is internal or external. But I would say that the more specialized sites such as blackplanet.com are really trying to reach out to editors and people of color in the industry to make connections."

It's no surprise that the two women first came to know about each other socially, since they had mutual friends that invited them to the same parties. "We had been trying to catch up with each other" Jen explains. "Then one day we ran into one another in a tunnel beneath our work spaces. Before we headed toward our trains, we made a lunch date."

They chose lunch at Victor's, a Cuban restaurant in Manhattan that happens to be Jen's favorite spot. And between bites of plantains, black beans and rice, chatter between girlfriends blossomed into a conversation about a monumental deal. Who knew that an ordinary lunch between two sistahs would result in an online cross-promotion between two of the top media companies in the world?

When Sanyu met with Jen for lunch that day in October 2000, she already knew that she had to create an on-line marketing plan for Stephen King's upcoming book Dreamcatcher. The book was scheduled for release in March 2001, but Sanyu had to finalize online plans four months prior to its publication. This promotion was on her mind as she met with Jen. "I knew I had until December to come up with an online plan," she says. "I'd thought of speaking to Jen about it originally, but I didn't think she'd be interested. Time.com is so heavily news-oriented."