Author: BMS
New half-day workshops to boost skills and increase campaign impact
The Book Marketing Society has created a new series of workshops that will boost skills and increase day-to-day campaign impact for those working in book marketing and promotions.
The sessions are designed to get the maximum out of a half-day with loads of practical tips, insights and examples specifically tailored for book comms.
SEO & Search Marketing with Peter Phillpot
Thursday 28 Sept 2017, 9.30am-1pm, Nielsen Book offices
This course is for digital marketers and sales teams with experience of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and those looking to jumpstart their SEO practice. Learn the latest strategies and tactics used by digital agencies to optimise digital content and increase visibility in Google. From keyword research to competitor analysis, technical considerations to earning links; following the practical tasks included in each section of the course, you’ll take your SEO expertise to the next level.
Full detail and bookings:
https://www.bookmarketingsociety.co.uk/seo-workshop
[previous]
Creativity & Social Media with Julia Kingsford
Thursday 13 July 2017, 9.30am-1pm, Nielsen Book offices
Julia Kingsford presents a practical workshop offering real-world creative takeaways that will immediately boost your day to day marketing as well as bigger ideas for long term strategy. Aimed at anyone who wants to get more out of their book marketing and promotion whatever size of company or stage of career, whether promoting books is your full time job or a side hustle.
Sharper Copywriting with Richard Spencer
Thursday 29 June 2017, 9.30am-1pm, Nielsen Book offices
Whether your aim is to create better AIs, snappy web copy or more successful emails, Richard Spencer (A Thousand Monkeys) will send you back to work with a head full of useful tips and techniques to boost sales. In each of the modules, Richard will take examples of successful copy and explain how the techniques could work for publishing. At every step of the way, you’ll get hands-on practice writing using the various techniques.
Bookings & Venue information
All workshops are priced at £65 for BMS members // £120 for non-members
Venue Address:
Nielsen Book
5th floor, Endeavour House
189 Shaftesbury Ave
London WC2H 8JR
BMS Marketing all-day & Primer returns 24 May 2017
BMS comprehensive and intensive all-day BMS Primer workshop for book marketers is back on Wednesday 24 May.
Targeted at those in the early years of their career, as well as those hoping to join the industry or just wanting a refresher. The full day offers an in-depth overview of book marketing, with new insights and the latest thinking around campaigns, available tools and resources.
Featuring a breakout session where participants will get the chance to to create their own marketing campaign working with others across the industry.
Confirmed speakers include:
- Matt Haslum (Consumer Marketing Director, Faber)
- Steve Bohme (Research Director, Nielsen Book Research)
- Katie Roden (Content, publishing and marketing strategy consultant)
- Julia Kingsford (Director, Kingsford Campbell Marketing)
- Jon Hibbit (SEO Analyst, SiteVisibility)
- Richard Spencer (Creative Director, A Thousand Monkeys)
- Lucy Upton (Marketing Director, Hachette Children’s)
- Penny Took (Managing Director, Total Media)
- Suzy Carter-Kent (Customer Success Manager, Adestra)
- Lucy Howkins (Marketing Director, Hodder & Stoughton)
- Tory Lyne-Pirkis (Associate Director, Midas PR)
Sessions will include:
- How does book marketing fit into the 2017 consumer landscape
- How to plan and evaluate a campaign
- Targeting your audience
- Email marketing and segmentation
- Get the most out of working with authors
- How to make the most of your (often non-) advertising budget
- The importance of good SEO, and how it can boost visibility and drive sales
- Writing compelling copy that will stand out
- Social media do’s and don’ts – being creative and getting the basics right
Tickets are limited and will be sold on a first-come, first-served basis.
WHEN: Wednesday 24 May 2017, 9.30am-5.30pm (registration from 9am)
LOCATION Nielsen offices, 66 Porchester Rd, London W2 6ET (map)
COST: BMS members & students £125 / Non-members £199 (includes lunch and end-of-day drinks)
SPECIAL MULTI-BUY OFFER:
Buy one full-priced ticket, get the second and third ticket at half price per each
For example, for BMS members:
3 tickets = 1 ticket @ £125 + 2 tickets @ £62.50 each = total £250 (save £125)
6 tickets = 2x £250 + 2x £62.50 = total £500 (save £250)
or for non-BMS members:
3 tickets = 1x £199 + 2x £99.50 = total £398 (save £199)
Bookings
Without strong visuals everything becomes more forgettable, audience hears at annual BMS/PPC book fair gathering
by Sue Stephens
The Publishers Publicity Circle and Book Marketing Society joint event at the London Book Fair was absolutely packed and this year the subject was The Visual Life of Campaigns. Thanks to everyone who came – you can see the conversations around the event on #visualcampaigns but some brief notes below if you weren’t able to attend:
Preena Gadher chaired (MD and co-founder of the award-winning arts and culture communications agency Riot Communications), leading first onto…
Jack Smyth (a designer from Dublin who has worked in-house and freelanced for Little, Brown Book Group, Tower Records, Wagamama and Cath Kidson amongst others. He currently designs book jackets for Simon and Schuster)
Jack addressed visual language and how we can bring our books to life using visual techniques. He had particular concerns about how we often tend to create our own camouflage.
Jack states that nobody wins in this scenario and that we lose ingenuity, fun and sense of experimentation; it’s creating an environment which is incredibly difficult to navigate around. He also takes exception to pack shots.
Packshots are on virtually all book advertising. This says we are selling a product when what we really should be doing is selling a story. We don’t need to shout; be more brave, be more subtle – be more inventive. We don’t need to give all of the information: there needs to be a bit of mystery to make people want to find out more. There is obviously sometimes merit in riding a market that is newly created to benefit from a cultural phenomenon, but these tend to have a lifespan and then: how do you go beyond that? What you can do is just take a small divergent path to create something entirely new.
Jon Slack (presenting for Naomi Bacon, freelancer and co-director of a consultancy specialising in Marketing, PR, Social Media, and Creative Strategy)
The Power of Pop-ups and immersive events
Visual campaigns can take many forms, Naomi refers to ways in which events can make a difference. She encourages everyone to create events that you yourself would like to go to. We’re all used to a glass of warm wine in a bookshop for a launch and this has its place and will attract the usual book crowd.
But to bring in a wider readership, make more use of partnerships – not just drink sponsorship but lifestyle brands that might be able to create a launch that appeals to a different set of people such as the art, fashion or music crowd.
Two examples that she pointed to were the launch she organised for The Muse; as well as focusing on the book, the event included poetry and discussions, and allowed for shareable content through Snapchat filters and Instagram cards.
And the amazing launch at the Hackney Empire for debut author Robyn Travis – read more about the event here
Julia Kingsford (co-founder of Kingsford Campbell, a literary agency and marketing and publishing consultancy launched in 2014. Prior to this, she was Marketing Director at Foyles before helping found the reading for pleasure charity World Book Night and becoming its CEO in 2011. Julia has also worked at Random House, the BBC and the Barbican).
Julia talked about the smallest and simplest ways in which you can create visual engagement. There are some brilliant online tools that anyone can easily use to make a difference visually. Julia wrote a great blog piece afterwards read here about her presentation and, inspired by the subject, says she will be doing a workshop in the near future with the BMS (stay tuned!)
The big mistake that many make is not to be aware of the space in the timeline when tweeting an image. So you can get unintentional results… an unfortunate example below:
A way to avoid this is to make more use of quote cards and respect the safe space:
Also, to be aware that what really engages is emotion:
Make the audience engage and want to know more:
Experiment with video by creating enchanting visuals through stop motion and BookTubers.
GIFs allow for the life of a book and its marketing campaign to be extended by generating conversations around it.
Find good tools and utilize them, such as Pablo and Stop Motion Studio.
Analyse social media data and decide whether your content should be driving impressions or engagement.
Key Takeaways:
- avoid the camouflage
- sell the story not the product
- be more brave – don’t need to give all of the information, create elements of mystery, less SHOUTING
- cropping – think about the safe space
- events – don’t just target the book crowd, find elements that have a wider appeal and create new environments for new audiences
- ‘immersive’ is a bit overused but create events you would like to go to – Hackney Empire for debut author Robyn Travis – read here
- make it more than the sum of its parts
- visual storytelling
- make use of online tools such as Pablo to create more shareable images
You can link to Naomi Bacon’s slides here
and download a copy of the event’s full presentation.
(thanks to Siobhan Rothwell for her notes contributing to this report)
Why email marketing really does sell books (and 21 other things to think about while we’re at it)
In a recent post on Twitter, marketing whiz and self-declared ‘book champion’ Sam Missingham shared a full suite of her own #bookmarketingtips for the great and the good to share widely. We brought them together for you here, because we’re nice like that.
- Email marketing sells books. Build an email list. Then use it properly (more than once a month).
- BookBub sells books by the shedload – if you can get your book(s) on there, it’s 100% worth the money.
- Put some effort into the design of your emails (most are ghastly). Please, please, please optimise for mobile!
- If people never click on your emails, delete them. Then segment the remaining to optimise open & click through rates.
- Every other industry in the world uses email marketing at the heart of their activity. They don’t do that for fun. It works.
- Every single book marketing campaign should have at least two data capture opportunities (most have none).
- Competitions will return the worst quality data. They are also lazy (although we all do them). Think bigger.
- More generally, if you have no idea where to start with marketing, look very closely at the activity of similar authors.
- Things you should look at – their social feeds, website, email newsletter and the categories they choose on Amazon.
- Authors – your website should work for you. What one thing would you like a visitor to do? Sign up? Download free book?
- You DO NOT need a big budget to do great book marketing. You need ideas, time and energy.
- If you don’t believe 11. let me list the books with big budgets that didn’t sell.
- Facebook offers extraordinary targeting with paid-for ads. Follow @pbackwriter and learn how – look at his courses.
- Never, ever waste money on a book trailer. They DO NOT sell books.
- Social media sells books (nowhere near as well as email) but you should choose social channels you can use properly.
- Do not spread yourself across all social channels and do them all badly. Choose two or three and put energy and time into.
- Not sure what to prioritise? Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads would be my top three. But, different genres work different channels.
- Wherever you choose to focus your social energy, you must commit and engage regularly.
- Working with book bloggers, booktubers and bookstaggramers. Yes, do this. A lot. Use this army of book champions.
- Blog tours work and will reach the most concentrated audience of book-lovers of all of your marketing.
- Encouraging readers to talk about your book as early and as much as possible is key. Georgina Moore (@PublicityBooks) is a master at this.
- If you are worried that someone is ripping you off with secret marketing sauce and trying to get you to spend money, DON’T!
Think you have others to add, or disagree? Join the discussion with Sam back on Twitter or let us know in the comments below.
Winter Season Campaign Award winners
The Award winners for the all-important Christmas season, encompassing campaigns run between September and December 2016, were announced at the Book Marketing Society’s member meeting on 17th February, held at HarperCollins’ offices. With nearly half of all consumer book purchases taking place in the period, many being bought as Christmas gifts, there were some major titles jostling for the Awards.
The Guerrilla Marketing category (campaigns costing less than £2.5k)
- Jodie Mullish and Jessica Farrugia of Bluebird/Pan Macmillan received a Highly Commended for their campaign for their take on the current obsession, How to Hygge with a curated Hygge Weekend.
- The Winner’s laurel went to Aimee Kitson of Constable/Little, Brown Book Group for her exemplary campaign to promote Ian Wright’s latest autobiography, A Life in Football, with great success.
The Children’s category
- Highly Commended for Hannah Sidorjak of PRHC for her cat-lead promotion for the newly discovered Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots, illustrated by Quentin Blake.
- Highly
Commended for Hannah Bourne and Andrea Bowie of Puffin for their crumpet-rich campaign for Tom Fletcher’s The Christmasaurus.
- The winning campaign was for another YouTuber star, DanTDM and his book Trayaurus and the Enchanted Crystal, which Anna Bowen of Trapeze/Orion lead to success with effective promotions around the author tour and an online Top Trumps game which achieved over 1 million plays in the first 48 hours.
The Adult Non-Fiction category
Rose Poole of Viking/PRH received a Highly Commended for impressing the judges with her stylish work on Ben Macintyre’s SAS Rogue Heroes.
- Katie Bowden of Michael Joseph/PRH was also awarded a Highly Commended for her highly targeted campaign for the GCHQ Puzzle Book.
- The Winner in this extremely strong category was Paul Martinovic of Penguin/Viking for his hugely successful campaign for John le Carre’s autobiography, The Pigeon Tunnel – only a year after the biography, and without any personal promotion from the author himself.
The Multi-title Campaign category
- The team from Pan Macmillan (Katie Roden, Sara Lloyd, Lee Dibble, Tom Noble, Sophie Painter and Eleanor Jones) received a Highly Commended for wowing the judges with their ambitious and technically challenging digital-first campaign to encourage gift book buying, Wrapped with Love Campaign 2016.
- The first of the joint Winners were Alice Morley and Fleur Clarke at Hodder & Stoughton, who put together an impressive day of online events to celebrate Stephen King’s birthday and 8 very different backlist titles in King for the Day.
- The second winning campaign was by Bethan Ferguson and Jeska Lyons of Quercus Books who achieved tremendous success with their highly targeted campaign
for Enid Blyton for Grown-Ups, complete with a specially commissioned short story Five Go Bookselling to gain trade buy-in.
The Adult Fiction category
Hannah Gamon and Katie Moss of HarperFiction were Highly Commended for their campaign for The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, full of terrible puns and 12 sheet displays at EWEston, BAAAmondsey, LiverWOOL Street – you get the picture!- The Winners in this category were Vickie Boff and Fleur Clarke of Hodder & Stoughton for their strategic reinvention of Jodi Picoult with an anonymize campaign #readwithoutprejudice for Small Great Things.
BMS & PPC to explore visual and immersive campaigns at LBF 2017
Join us at our annual joint event with the Publishers Publicity Circle where we will be asking what is the trick to creating emotive and memorable campaign moments that spark a narrative in the reader’s imagination, long before they open a book.
In a session entitled “The Visual Life of Campaigns“, our assembled panel will take a comprehensive look at the importance of visual language in the digital age, and demonstrate how books are more relevant than ever as ready-made sources of sensorial content. How is the trend for immersion in content and the dominance of imagery being used to engage audiences? And how can we translate this into new ways of bringing more readers to the book?
Chaired by Preena Gadher (Managing Director, Riot Communications), Julia Kingsford (Director, Kingsford Campbell literary agency), Jack Smyth (Designer, Simon & Schuster) and Naomi Bacon (freelance consultant) will bring together a wealth of examples and practical ideas spanning social media and advertising, retailing, visual language, pop-ups and immersive events.
Event details
Tuesday 14 March, 14:30 – 15:30
Olympia Room, Grand Hall
Further details for getting to the event on the London Book Fair website.
Note: Entry to this event is free but requires a ticket to LBF to attend
Speaker profiles
Preena Gadher is MD and co-founder of the award-winning Arts and Culture communications agency Riot Communications. Having started her career in PR at Penguin Books, she set up Riot Communications in 2009. Eight years on, in their home in East London, the agency continues to flourish. Clients include: Arts Council England, Southbank Centre, World Book Day; Moomins; Luna Cinema; Mammoth Screen; The Royal Society; Alice’s Adventures Underground; Penguin Random House; Book Trust and Waterstones. Riot Communications is the most decorated agency in its field.
Naomi Bacon is a freelancer and co-director of a consultancy specialising in Marketing, PR, Social Media, and Creative Strategy. Prior to this, Naomi was Digital Communications Manager at Pan Macmillan, advancing the company’s YouTube strategy and developing their approach to content creation by hiring a YouTuber as their Creative Producer. Aware that discoverability continued to be a major issue in publishing, Naomi also established relationships with brands such as Topshop and ASOS, working with them on 6-month content strategies which enabled cross-promotion.
Julia Kingsford is the co-founder of Kingsford Campbell, a literary agency and marketing and publishing consultancy launched in 2014. She specialises in helping companies, brands and authors connect with consumers and run their strategy in a consumer-centric way. Prior to this she was Marketing Director at Foyles – where she developed her consumer marketing expertise – before helping found the reading for pleasure charity World Book Night and becoming its CEO in 2011. Julia has also worked at Random House, the BBC and Barbican.
Jack Smyth is a designer from Dublin, Ireland who has worked in house and freelance for Little, Brown Book Group, Tower Records, Wagamamma and Cath Kinston amongst others. He currently designs book jackets for Simon & Schuster. He has an MA in Graphic Design from Kingston University where he teaches from time to time.
Nine things we learned at the BMS Masterclass on backlist marketing
by James Spackman
Marketers should learn to write like booksellers talk. Caroline Maddison and Claire Wilshaw, creators of the #ByBook multi-title campaign, channeled their inner retailers to persuasively recommend books on their site. The difference to conventional book blurb is striking…
A hashtag is a better listening device than broadcasting tool, said Justine Gold, ex of Little, Brown, in relation to the I [heart] Atwood campaign. If your message is clear and shareable, you don’t necessarily need a hashtag.
A novel is like a plate of food. Inspired by Zainab Juma at Penguin, Caroline Maddison suggested describing books as though they were dishes (ingredients, flavours, size, etc). An extremely handy idea, which I think we will all steal.
… by the same token, Mills & Boon novels are bars of chocolate to their readers, according to Emma Pickard. An indulgent treat that they absolutely know will be enjoyable.
A little Facebook ad spend goes a long way if you’re very specific indeed with your keywords, said Justine Gold and Rachel Wilkie.
Programming Nostalgia is a thing. Matthew Young, designer at Penguin and one of three creators of their groundbreaking Richard Dawkins anniversary campaign, told us that people’s fond memories of obsolete code (Dawkins’ evolution modeler) was a crucial PR draw.
Adopting readers’ vocabulary from their Amazon reviews is a useful shortcut to get just the right voice for a campaign (Caroline and Claire again).
Three is the magic number: designer + programmer + marketer = stunning backlist campaign. That’s how the Dawkins campaign was created, and Matthew Young thought the three-person, three-specialism dynamic was crucial to its success.
The physical presence of books is a powerful draw. The #ByBook video used giant books, being carried, held, used, by human beings. Not so much glorifying the object, but showing it in use.
Spackman also rounded up learnings from the first Spackman masterclass breakfast on marketing adult titles in ‘Nine things we learned at the BMS Marketing Masterclass‘.
Masterclass series with James Spackman continues with children’s and teens focus in April
The BMS Masterclass series with publisher and consultant James Spackman continued this Spring as he interviewed the marketers behind three original and very different children’s campaigns, each hand-picked for their various approaches to children’s and YA marketing.
As ever, the sessions were an in-depth look at what made them successful, the key learnings from each as well as useful takeaways that can be applied to other campaigns.
BMS Masterclasses – which will return in Autumn 2017 – are a great opportunity to gain fresh insights and inspiration. Anyone who is part of a BMS member company is able to attend.
Information about our Masterclasses in October and November is available here.
The speakers and campaigns were:
- Kirsten Grant, Director of World Book Day, talked us through the marketing campaign for the stunningly successful 20th anniversary WBD
- Andrea Bowie, PRH Marketing Officer, on Tom Fletcher’s ‘The Christmasaurus’ and the challenges and opportunities of working with pop star authors and crumpets
- Jenny Fry, Communications Director of Canongate, on their campaign for ‘The Girl Who Saved Christmas’ by Matt Haig, which deftly addressed retailers, parents and teachers
Before the session, James Spackman commented: “Following a superb Masterclass in January on backlist campaigns – insights from which I have been quoting ever since – I’m delighted we’re turning our attention to children’s publishing. These three campaigns were all outstanding and demonstrate the scope and quality of children’s book marketing in the UK. We have much to learn from them.”
Spackman rounded up nine key takeaways from the masterclass on marketing adult titles as well as from the session on backlist marketing.
Where are the readers?* and do we still call them readers?
Authenticity in the age of big data
by Niamh Murray
Data, data everywhere – no time to stop and think.
If we’re living in the data age, where consumer metrics and engagements rule the roost, where readers are being called ‘users’* and where we’re constantly measuring performance, what numbers actually matter? And which can you trust?
Let’s take a look at 2016. It’s worth remembering that a data-led approach to human behaviour can be a risky business. At Profile we’re liberated from the tyranny of a data-focused approach by our publishing, which rarely sorts our books into silos of digestible genre-based chunks. But as for 2016: here are things that the numbers, for the most part, promised us would be impossible.
Data and data analysts failed to tell us that 2016 would bring about unholy upset in the form of …
… Trump
… Farage
… and Brexit
In an age of big data and big data fails, it’s worthwhile being skeptical. Readers – and yes, us folks at Profile Books still call them readers – are also humans. Irrational, unpredictable, like-Gilmore-Girls-while-also-loving-thrash-metal, change-their-minds-several-times-over-the-course-of-a-conversation, humans.
We’re living in an increasingly loud, busy, and overwhelming age. It’s no coincidence that mindfulness and colouring-in are two of the stories of our era. So, tweaking that newsletter subject line and repeatedly A-B testing to gain a 1.7% increase in open rate is one way to reach an audience; but, another approach is to remember that what makes us different, awkward and unpredictable will always be a factor, and it is to be celebrated.
We’re not one size fits all.
Things in 2016 which are not driven by (and if you ask me, not necessarily improved by) metrics:
- Having a distinctive, engaging voice
- Knowing your audience
- Publishing brilliant books and making them look like beautiful objects
- Concentrating on surprising and aweing readers
- Realising that there’s no substitute for word of mouth. There is no metric that can show which books will achieve it.
It is okay to realise that not all of your books are for people who like contemporary fiction. Or even that all of your crime books are not just for people who like crime fiction. Or even that all of your Scandi crime books are not just for people who like Scandi crime fiction. And that’s okay.
There’ll always be another Girl-Gone-From-A-Train-In-An-Airport-Dead-In-A-Dark-Wood. (Aside: what is it with all these pesky girls and why do they keep dying?) Or even another Norwegian Wood – although that case is more interesting as an example of true oddness standing out and triumphing. You can even flog next year’s spotty teen trying out American snackfood or leisurewear from the luxury of their bedroom via YouTube. But then that savvy audience begins to realise it’s just a moment – and soon they see what is fake and sponsored and ultimately has nothing meaningful to say.
I think people will always search out authenticity. It’s that which makes Mary Beard so brilliant on the telly and forms queues of 2k fans around the block cheering her on when she takes on Boris Johnson (insert pantomime boos here), debating whether the Ancient Greeks or Romans did it better. It’s that which makes Sarah Perry the absolute superstar she is, both on the page and off. It’s that which lends itself to surprise and awe. Authenticity is that experience you can get from browsing in a well-stocked, beautiful bookshop. You can sometimes get it from a lively twitter conversation or emotive YouTube clip. Authenticity is what Lena Dunham delivers brilliantly via LennyLetter, what Melville House does so well, what I am yet to experience in any way from a corporate newsletter – and I’m not just talking about publishing here. Enough of the corporate cotton wool.
Authenticity is best served live – hence the resurgence in events – or in the author’s own voice. That’s why Chris Kraus’s I LOVE DICK found its niche. That’s why there is no substitute for a brilliant author who is willing to engage.
As for finding new audiences – which is not the same as new markets – you need to go low. Around knee height in fact – your new audiences are the same little people who start out with Booktrust’s bundles, sign up for their local libraries, embrace the Gruffalo and graduate to David Walliams, spend a few years in the dark wastelands of the YA novel and emerge on the other side as fully formed readers. If you want to start developing new audiences, look for more kids who aren’t white, middle class, and from north London. Look for the people who eventually grace the pages of books like Nikesh Shukla’s The Good Immigrant. Look for the next incredible, ferociously smart, unapologetic Zadie Smith. Get them early. Treat them like the smart, irrational, creative, brilliant unpredictable humans they are and will become. Nurture their love of reading.
Because we’re people, not metrics. We like stories, and things that are real and personal to us and speak to us on a deep emotional level. We like stories that are real – because we’re real. And that might ultimately define what makes us readers*.
(*The question as to whether we still call our customers ‘readers’ nowadays was posed thoughtfully by James Spackman in a recent post on the Facebook hub of the Book Marketing Society.)
Niamh Murray is the Marketing Director of Serpent’s Tail (now part of Profile Books) driving marketing strategy and managing the marketing teams for both the fiction and non-fiction lists. Successful brand partnerships are a key part of her role as Profile publishes books by Wellcome Collection and The Economist.
Summer season Campaign Award winners
The Book MarketingSociety announced the winners of the May-August 2016 Marketing Campaign Awards this evening at the members’ meeting held at Faber & Faber’s offices.
The BMS runs three Seasonal Awards each year to reward the very best campaigns within the industry. For this latest season, entries were judged under a raft of new and redefined categories: Best Adult Fiction and Best Non-fiction above £2.5k, Best Children’s Campaign above £2.5k and Best Shoestring Award (previously for campaigns costing less than £5,000, but now re-focused on campaigns of under £2,500) and a new category: Best Multi-title Campaign.
Campaigns are judged on three main criteria: innovation and creativity; identifying and reaching the target audience and return on investment.
THE WINNERS:
The pure ingenuity of the campaign for Richard Dawkins’ anniversary – promoting three 
of his lesser known backlist titles – undertaken by Claudia Toia of Penguin Books, saw her gain the Award for Best Multi-title campaign. Reviving an algorithm the author had written 30 years ago to stimulate evolution, every single copy of these three books was published with a unique cover design based on the algorithm.
The visually arresting campaign for Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter, complete with a Shoreditch billboard of a crow with real features, saw marketer Katie Hall of Faber & Faber receive the Best Adult Fiction campaign Award
An intuitive link to the author’s obsessions and a skillfully conducted social media campaign saw Caroline Butler of Ebury gain the Best Adult Non-fiction campaign Award for Fingers in the Sparkle Jar by Chris Packham.
The triumph of the YouTubers continues, with Naomi Berwin of Hodder & Stoughton receiving the Best Children’s Marketing campaign Award for Generation Next by Oli White, complete with 2,100 signed copies released to celebrate the authors 21st birthday and an animated visual announcement perfectly capturing his personality.
And last – but by no means least – Faber & Faber triumphed again by winning the Award for Best Shoestring campaign for Tim Book Two by Tim Burgess, with marketer Lindsay Terrell leveraging some perfect partnerships and social listening tools to create a very effective campaign for under £2,500.
In addition, the following campaigns were Highly Commended:
- Sarah Arratoon of Pan Macmillan for Love you Dead by Peter James in the Adult Fiction category.
- Caroline Maddison and Claire Wilshaw of Penguin, Puffin and Ladybird for their campaign to promote a disparate set of 22 books related only by being about diverse countries and cultures under the title #ByBook in the Multi-title category.
- Beth Cockeram and Claire Bush of Michael Joseph for their Shoestring campaign promoting Dear Amy by Helen Callaghan.
Follow us on X
Receive our newsletter
Sign up to our newsletter for all the latest BMS updates, events, job notices and industry news.
Join us on Facebook
All BMS Members are entitled to sign up to the BMS Facebook group and join our online community of book marketers.
The group is the best way to be in know about our events, hear about our promotions and ask other BMS members for advise.