The Goldilocks Genome

AUTHOR HIRED: Wildbound PR
$30k campaign

• Promotion via social media (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) through author’s own platform as well as Wildbound PR and associated platforms.
• Social media campaign leveraging tastemakers, including bookstagrammers, authors, and influencers in science, pharmacology, and mental health world.
• Social advertising to build author’s platform and expand author’s readership.
• Build messaging and creative campaign around the emerging practice of gene-based “personalized medicine” and the Goldilocks principle.
• National media campaign covering newspapers, magazines, radio and TV, websites, blogs and podcasts, focusing on a wide range of coverage, including features, reviews, interviews, excerpts, and bylines.
• Interest areas targeted by media campaign include all areas relevant to the book: medical thrillers, pharmacogenomics, women sleuths, science fiction, suspense, local San Francisco angle, etc.
• • Outreach to book reviewers at major national newspapers (New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, etc.)
  • Regional and local media campaign focusing on reviews and human interest features (Mercury News, Bay Area Newsgroup, Berkeley Times, Berkeleyside)
  • Outreach to women’s interest media (Oprah Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Refinery29, Good Housekeeping, Popsugar)
  • Outreach to mental health/science media (Psychology Today, Psych Central, Scientific American, etc.)
  • Outreach to news-based radio/TV (NPR, PRX, KQED, KPFA, etc.)
  • Outreach to literary arts and entertainment media (Vulture, Slate, Paste Magazine, Bookriot, Literary Hub)
  • Outreach to Film/TV producers and studios to pitch the book for adaptation.
• Giveaway promotion on author’s website and social media, offering a booklet on DNA testing to readers in exchange for signing up for the author’s mailing list.
• E-Book Promotion on Amazon after book’s release to maximize sales and to drive book’s ranking on Amazon to “Bestseller” status.

The suicide of a woman being treated for depression initiates a cascade of events leading to a rash of unexplained deaths. When FDA epidemiologist Carrie Hediger inadvertently uncovers these deaths, she’s left with pressing questions: Are these deaths connected? What do they have in common? Are more deaths to come? Carrie and her team buck the system to find the answer.When San Francisco–based FDA epidemiologist Dr. Carrie Hediger uncovers a rash of unexplained deaths while investigating the suspiciously convenient death of her best friend, she becomes determined to find answers—even if it leads her to a murderer, and even if confronting authority, using her wiles, and bending the rules to get justice risks her future in the FDA.

To unravel the puzzle, Carrie assembles a team: some talented post-doctoral fellows, a quirky pharmacologist, an unctuous chemist, and a skeptical FBI agent that she can’t help her attraction for. Together, they follow the data through the twists and turns, eventually uncovering that the Goldilocks effect in prescription drugs—the premise that people are inclined to seek “just the right amount” of something—is central to understanding these mysterious deaths. Through the twists and turns, Carrie and her team enter a race to uncover the truth . . . and catch a killer.

Grounded in real data analysis techniques, real science and pharmacology, and actual current psychiatric practices, The Goldilocks Genome is simultaneously a taut, race-against-time thriller and a condemnation of the psychiatric industry’s failure to implement genetic-based “personalized medicine”—a problem that persists to this day.