How do you market a book written in a foreign language by an author who’s now dead, that was originally published 60 years ago, and has been overlooked by mainstream publishing ever since? This series takes an ongoing, insider’s look at the campaign to get Hans Fallada‘s Every Man Dies Alone on the bestseller lists, by Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson.

Week one of our TV advertising campaign using Google TV Ads is over, and the statistics are impressive. Google, of course, is nothing if not statistical data, and what that data is telling us about our first seven days is that we successfully bid on 60 ads, which got a total of 1,270,000 “impressions.” According to Google, “An impression is an active television that is tuned to and displays a given commercial for 5 seconds or more.”

Assuming at least one person was in front of that TV, that means that at least 1,270,000 people might have paid attention to the ad. True, a lot of people may have run off to get a sandwich during the ad, but it’s also true that in a big percentage of those households there was more than one person in the room when the ad ran. So it’s probably fair to say that number is a conservative estimate.

As to how many actually paid attention to the ad, however — well, that’s what business people call SWAG (a Scientific Wild-Assed Guess). In other words, as with most marketing efforts, it’s about doing the best job you can to attract the attention of the best audience you can get in front of. Beyond that, it’s hunch and instinct.

For Every Man Dies Alone, our instinct was that even though the book has amazingly wide appeal, we should go after two specific target audiences, from which we thought things would grow. That meant people already inclined toward World War II era thrillers and love stories, and people who liked literary novels. AKA, smart people.

So, we bid for ad time on the History Channel, the Military Channel, BBC News America, MSNBC and some of the movie channels. We landed some interesting spots: “The Rachel Maddow Show,” “Meet the Press,” and “Countdown with Keith Olberman”; “Mysteries of the Smithsonian,” “Heroes of World War II,” and “Wings of the Luftwaffe”; and a wide range of movies, from The Dirty Dozen to King of Hearts. Most of them were showing in the middle of the night, or early in the morning, but that made them affordable and, we suspected, exposed us to a more dedicated viewer. There was one mistaken bid for prime time on the History Channel when we found we’d aired ads during “Ice Road Truckers.” If you hear of any eighteen wheelers going off the road in the Yukon because the driver was reading Hans Fallada, well, you’ll know who to blame. Still, over all, we were pleased with the programs we managed to get our ad on, and the total number of “impressions.”

So what was the impact? Amazing. Sales were up 50% over the previous week, according to Bookscan.

We’re fairly confident we can get in front of an even better viewership during the next seven days — there’s a definite learning curve at figuring out how to place winning bids, and we think we’ve got it down now. And getting more of the exact programming we want could lead to a bigger audience made up of a more perfect demographic. We’re trying to tamp down our optimism about what that could mean for getting more and more people to read the book.

Stay tuned.