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Image courtesy Reporter Magazine

The story behind BookMaid was featured in this week’s RIT Reporter Magazine. The feature is on student-run businesses at RIT. Dan Leveille, the RIT student who created BookMaid was interviewed for the article. A “maid” was featured on the front cover of the magazine as seen above.

“Leveille was spurred to action when he felt robbed, as many of us do, by the RIT bookstore. The bookstore sells over-priced books just to buy them back for nearly nothing. They then resell them, making nearly as much as they would for a new book.”

Thanks to everyone at Reporter magazine! : )

Read the full article »

Read the entire Reporter Magazine issue » (PDF)

Fun fact: BookMaid was also mentioned in the RIT secret society article.

BookMaid ran a retweet campaign on Twitter, where users simply had to post:

RIT Students: Repost this tweet for a chance to WIN $25 from http://BookMaid.com, the book exchange exclusive to RIT students.

Of the participants, one would be randomly selected to win $25. @rampantglee was the winner.

View the list of participants

Why The Campaign Didn’t Work Out So Well

Though there was quite a few participants, it wasn’t as successful as expected. A $25 incentive may be enough for simply reposting a tweet, however, the problem was the lack of RIT students on Twitter, and of those, the even smaller amount are following @bookmaid. Twitter is a very viral application, however running a viral campaign can’t be viral unless there’s enough participants.

Last night, a dozen or so BookMaid supporters conquered the residential side of Rochester Institute of Technology with chalk.

We wrote clever advertisements all over, such as:

“She’s on campus…and she’s HOT!”
“Book prices are rising 6% per year. Use BookMaid.com”
“Sexy bookmaid seeks attractive people into saving money on books”
“Cheap books have never been this sexy”

Thanks to everyone who helped out! It was a great success and the site traffic spiked!

View all photos on Flickr »