• Around $400K used for marketing of salacious romance novel
• Andjelika Martin, 46, pleads not guilty to eight counts of theft
• Money spent on search terms such as “steamy” and “shades of gray 50”
• The Web marketer shied away from more common marketing terms the M Resort or Hard Rock would have typically targeted such as "Vegas Hotel"

A former Hard Rock Casino executive has been charged with using nearly $400,000 in hotel advertising dollars to promote her romance novel.

Andjelika Martin, 46, worked as a web marketing and development director at the Hard Rock Casino and previously the M Resort.

She authored the salacious “1,001 Las Vegas Nights” under the pseudonym Angelique St. Chase Jr..  The book was published in late 2015 with Martin promoting it as early as 2013. 

Martin made her first court appearance this week on eight counts of theft and two counts of forgery.  She has plead not guilty to the charges.

From the Las Vegas Review Journal:

She spent almost $100,000 a year in casino advertising dollars to bid on words or phrases such as “steamy” and “shades of gray 50” that would place her book atop Google searches, according to an indictment and grand jury testimony. The highest bidders appear more prominently when users type the purchased words in the search engine.

“What sort of terms would M Resort usually use in its campaigns for its Google AdWords account?” prosecutor Karen Mishler asked M Resort brand marketing manager Cortney Clardy.

“Sample words would be ‘hotel,’ ‘Las Vegas hotel,’ ‘luxury,’ ‘Henderson,’ ‘wine seller,’ things that attribute to the property itself,” Clardy testified.

“So things like ‘steamy,’ not typically one of the key words?” the prosecutor asked.

“Nope.”