Hi jdbelsterling-
Honestly, I'm not entirely sure how I got on BoingBoing – but it was a huge help... To this date, they are still responsible for 23% of my orders – sure, it has slowed down, but a couple trickle in every day...
They have a content submission form if you look at the bottom of their web page. There are many contributing authors – I think the trick is finding one of their authors that regularly cover the area you're trying to promote. I found a guy who had previously reviewed Kickstarter wallets and sent him an email with a couple short paragraphs of my story. Included a link to my campaign. Within 24 hours, they posted a review article and it just took off...
I think self-promotion is the way to go. I paid a "PR firm" around $200 to get me some PR exposure. I can't say that it was a waste of time – so far, it has probably broken even. That means they helped me get maybe 20-30 of my nearly 600 Backers. Not a terribly effective use of valuable cash. However, they literally did what they said they would – helped me write a PR piece, blasted it to tons of publications (I think it was picked up in 100+ pubs) and sent me fancy reports showing how widely my PR was distributed. Here's the problem – no one reads PR pieces...
I did pick up a couple Google Adwords coupons – I'm testing those now... Not sure how effective that will be...
Here's our campaign!
http://kck.st/1sWuluN