Are you handing out business cards to promote your book, your store, or your product? Seriously? How 20th century!

If you’re really interested in promoting yourself or your work, pick up David Seaman’s Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz and commit it to memory. It’s a crash course in the kind of marketing that works NOW and works well. “Celebrity culture is an inextricable part of modern life,” says Seaman. You didn’t really think Paris Hilton got all that media coverage because of her talent, did you? The media (and the public) love celebrities, so the easiest way to get attention is to be a celebrity.

Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz will teach you how to do just that, and for little or no cost. For example, Secret #2: Be outrageous or die. There’s a benefit to angering the public. “It’s often better to piss someone off than to leave them ambivalent.” It doesn’t matter whether they like you, only whether they remember you. This goes against the traditional advice – mind your manners—but it certainly makes sense. Who’s going to buy your product if they don’t remember it exists?

There’s a chapter devoted to helping you get on television, with tips for making the contact, taking the call, and how to spend your time in the green room, along with the all-important tips about getting your message across once the cameras start rolling. Similar tips are provided for radio interviews, by the way. And have you always wanted to have a trashy story about YOU in the tabloids? Seaman tells you just how to make that happen and why, oddly enough, that sort of lurid publicity is a good thing.

With 62 secrets in all, Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz covers just about every conceivable aspect of promotion, even the ones that aren’t quite ethical. A good portion of the book is devoted to online celebrity avenues such as MySpace and Facebook, with tips for using social networking and viral buzz to your advantage. Seaman ends this frenetic course with some words of advice to help keep you sane and grounded, and – perhaps most importantly – to prepare you for the eventual and inevitable end of your fifteen minutes.

Clearly the Internet plays a vital role in any marketing strategy these days. Seaman provides an appendix full of some of the best online services and websites for your celebrity path, and he even mentions a couple of books that might prove useful. (You can probably get the Kindle version).

Appropriately, David Seaman is a writer, blogger, and “media personality.” His experience in PR seems to be confined entirely to marketing himself and his products, which he’s done with great success. This is definitely a case of an expert who knows the territory. When he tells you to do as he does, you should listen. By following the advice in Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz, there’s every reason to believe you’ll have as much or more success than Mr. Seaman.