Author: BMS
Independent Booksellers Week Book Award 2013: Call for Submissions
Independent Booksellers Week this year takes place from 29th June to 6th July 2013 and the Booksellers Association is now calling for submissions for the IBW Book Award. The Award is presented every year to two paperback titles which have been voted on by independent bookshops – one adult title and one children’s title.
Click here to download the Submission Form for the IBW Book Award, and publishers are able to submit as many of your titles as they would like. There is no cost for submission though there is a charge for all titles once shortlisted) To be eligible, titles have to be published in paperback between 1st January 2013 and 29th June 2013, and be available in paperback by the 29th June 2013.
The BA has said that judging for this year’s Award has been improved with two judging panels who will decide the winners, to be announced. Independent booksellers will vote to create the shortlist of 10 adult and 12 children’s titles and then the two Judging Panels will select the winner for both categories.
Send TWO copies of each submitted title, together with a submission form for each title by 28th February to Sharon Benton, BA, 6 Bell Yard, London, WC2A 2JA. For any queries, contact [email protected] 020 7421 4640.
Pan Macmillan restructures sales, marketing and publicity
Pan Macmillan’s Digital and Communications Director, Sara Lloyd, has announced the creation of a single marketing and communications department with a renewed focus on holistic promotional planning and campaigns, digital marketing and direct reader engagement.
At the same, UK Sales Director, Anna Bond, announced the consolidation of the sales team into one division, with key account and sales managers given the responsibility for selling the entire Pan Macmillan list, including Macmillan Children’s Books to their customers. Three new Sales Director positions will be created, each having overall responsibility for one of Pan Macmillan’s key publishing divisions.
The new marketing and communications structure will see the creation of three distinct communications teams each incorporating marketing and publicity functions – Fiction led by Emma Bravo; Non-Fiction led by Dusty Miller; and Children’s, headed up by Katharine Smales. Camilla Elworthy, Group Publicity Director, Literary and Brands, will continue to work across fiction and non-fiction on publicity campaigns and author care.
Three senior digital specialists, with an expanded team, will work alongside marketing and publicity. Marketing and Communities Director, Lee Dibble; Head of Web Development, James Luscombe; and Sandra Taylor, newly promoted to Online Publicity Director, will focus on building and developing Pan Macmillan’s direct-to consumer marketing and community development. Rosanna Boscawen, who has been promoted to Content and Communities Editor, will create content and build strategies for the Pan Macmillan websites, email and owned social media platforms and new roles will be recruited to enhance and extend Pan Macmillan’s approach to social media and online communications.
Together, the digital team will work to create ongoing communication and dialogue with readers that go beyond short campaign-based lifespans, delivering deeper reader engagement and building Pan Macmillan’s brand authors.
Fiction
Emma Bravo, who becomes Communications Director, Fiction and Partnerships, will work across Pan, Macmillan, Picador, Mantle and Bello. Katie James, Publicity Director, Commercial Fiction and Brands, will report to Emma. Sophie Portas will move from her current role to become Fiction Publicity Manager and will focus on Tor and Pan Macmillan’s science fiction and fantasy publishing. Marketing specialists, Jodie Mullish and Rob Cox, will join this team to deliver integrated campaigns across Pan Macmillan’s four key fiction markets: Crime, Literary, Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Women’s Fiction.
Non-Fiction
Dusty Miller takes the role of Communications Director, Non-Fiction and Events. Much of her team’s focus will be on events and the development of third-party partnerships to build audiences, customer loyalty and brand longevity. Publicity Director, Philippa McEwan becomes Publicity & Events Director and will take responsibility for “serious” non-fiction as well as supporting Dusty in her events development remit. She will continue to work with her long-standing fiction authors. Joining them are Philippa Hardy, promoted to Publicity Executive, and Fergus Edmondson, promoted to Marketing Executive.
Children’s
Katharine Smales becomes Communications Director for Macmillan Children’s Books, leading a team which already incorporates marketing and publicity. She will add consumer research to her remit.
Sales
Elise Burns is promoted to Sales Director for the Non-Fiction division; recruitment is currently underway for the Sales Directors for Macmillan Children’s Books and Fiction/Picador. Lucy Hine is promoted to Sales and Marketing Manager to run the in-house support for the sales teams. Further appointments within the Pan Macmillan sales team will be made in the coming weeks.
Sara Lloyd said: “By bringing Marketing and Publicity into a single department and increasing our digital marketing resource and investment, we’ll be able to make the most of our extremely talented team in a fast-moving digital world as we address the huge shifts in reader and author engagement. I’m very lucky to work with some of the most talented communications people in the industry and I’m looking forward to delivering ever improved, more direct communications for our authors and books as well as developing an even more vibrant and dynamic dialogue with our growing readerships.”
Anna Bond added “Our focus on account specialism, and each retailer therefore having one point of contact for all of Pan Macmillan’s titles, will make our relationships with our retail partners simpler and allow account managers to focus on providing their accounts with all of the titles that they need to create innovative promotions.”
About the team
Emma Bravo has worked in IT, radio and copyediting before joining the publicity department at Faber in 1999. She moved to Pan Macmillan in 2002 and worked on Macmillan and Pan titles before moving to Picador in 2004. Significant campaigns include Emma Donoghue’s Room, Bret Easton Ellis’s Imperial Bedrooms and most recently, Liza Klaussmann’s Tigers in Red Weather.
Lee Dibble joined Pan Macmillan in 2009, and has risen from Senior Marketing Manager to Marketing and Communities Director, during this time she has won numerous marketing awards including a NBA for Best Marketing Campaign in 2011. Prior to joining the company she worked in Marketing at the Guardian News and Media across their owned digital and print brand portfolio.
Camilla Elworthy began her career in publishing in 1995, in the Marketing Department of Reed Consumer Books, moving across in 1996 to the role of Head of Publicity for the Sinclair-Stevenson imprint. She joined Pan Macmillan in June 1997 as Head of Publicity for Picador, beginning a close involvement with the company’s literary publishing which continues to this day. Her many campaigns here include Underworld by Don DeLillo, The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, the Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn, All She Wants by Jonathan Harvey and all Jon Ronson’s books.
James Luscombe is the Head of Web Development at Pan Macmillan, developing the new Pan Macmillan web platform, web apps and digital tools. Prior to joining the company he worked for publishing, FMCG and global technology clients and has produced mobile and web content for Bauer, Dennis and IPC media
Dusty Miller has worked in publishing for over twenty years, joining Verso as Administrator to become Marketing Manager in her first full time job and continuing in Marketing at Faber & Faber, The Royal Institute of International Affairs and Titan Books before joining Pan Macmillan as Publicity Director in 2002. Her campaigns here have included award winning work on Lord Sugar and David Blaine and top ten bestsellers ranging across memoir, celebrity autobiography, TV and film, history, travel, music and pop science.
Katharine Smales joined Pan Macmillan in 2004 and worked in Rights, Sales and Custom Publishing before becoming Marketing and Publicity Director for Macmillan Children’s Books in 2010. She has run campaigns for The Gruffalo Red Nose Day Activity Book and The Bear and the Bees in conjunction with ITV Daybreak. The MCB Marketing and Publicity team was shortlisted and highly commended for three Futurebook ‘Best Integrated Marketing Campaign’ awards, for Tony Robinson’s Weird World of Wonders history series, Josephine Angelini’s Dreamless and Dear Zoo’s 30th Anniversary.
Sandra Taylor has been with Pan Macmillan since 2005, progressing from Publicity Assistant to Publicity & Digital Communications Manager. In October 2012, Sandra returned to the Pan Macmillan Press Office following a one year secondment to Pan Macmillan’s UK Sales department where she handled the company’s Waterstones account. Prior to joining the company, she worked for literary agent David Godwin.
Elise Burns joined Pan Macmillan as Custom Publishing Director in 2010, responsible for all UK Special Sales. Prior to joining the company she was at Walker Books for thirteen years with positions in UK Sales and Special Sales, eventually setting up and running the Custom Publishing Department.
Random House joins together imprints for group Christmas campaign
For the first time Random House UK is running a digital consumer campaign with ‘handpicked favourites’ for their readers this Christmas, in a group project which has been co-ordinated with half a dozen people from their Marketing and Digital teams across multiple imprints.
The group has created a dedicated microsite (www.giftabook.co.uk) which enables people to browse and shop by recommendation either for a specific recipient (gifts for her, for him, for kids, for teens and stocking fillers) or by popular gift categories (books of the year, humour, cookery, autobiographies). The campaign is a running for four weeks and is supported by online display advertising, paid search and social media targeting.
White Label Productions was tasked with designing their online creative.
Random House said: “We know from our consumer gift research and insight that people really want recommendations when they are shopping. Giftabook.co.uk showcases over 100 specially selected titles, recommended by experts and booklovers at Random House, that readers of all ages and with varied interests can enjoy.”
Why would you want to work with Independent bookshops?
By Meryl Halls
The indie bookselling sector is in a state of some flux, and is also a bit schizophrenic about how it sees itself. It’s weathering a brutal retail recession, there are pressures on rent, rates and high street infrastructure, as well as the onslaught of ebooks and discounting from what’s still quaintly called the non-traditional sector (online and supermarkets). They are small businesses, run – mainly – for love of the products they sell. Clever publishers looking for a deft, creative and energetic partner could do much worse than cultivate their relationships with them.
This is an oddly buoyant sector – as remarked on by more than one commentator after the recent BA Conference – and the thriving shops now are lean, commercially acute, business-savvy, often peopled by the chain diaspora, creative, hardworking, and committed to books. They are instinctive retailers – and thoroughly embedded in their communities. It’s here that lies the key to independent bookselling success. So fleet of foot have indies become that the strangest combinations are now almost de rigeur – books partnered with coffee, with ice cream, with homeware, jewellery, antiques, chocolate, furniture, art, theatre box offices, games, puzzles – even with hats! If you engage, delight and entertain your community, you are much more likely to prosper, and the indies know this.
I work closely with the BA’s IBF Advisory Panel, 10 fantastic independents that include Patrick Neale, Jane Streeter, Ron Johns, Andrew Cant, Andy Rossiter, Sally Johnson, Sarah Waddington, Catherine Hetherington and Matthew Clarke. Between us, we drive initiatives and projects for the indie sector, and these bookshops have some great examples of how imaginative partnering can work.
One of the most pleasing for us recently was when Ben Gutcher at Hodder decided to promote Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers exclusively through independents, a move welcome with glee by the indies I spoke to. We used the IndieBound logo on the press adverts, and a link to the site for a Bookshop Search for those keen to find their local bookshop instead of shop online – it’s not all that snazzy, but it makes the point – and we like the point being made!
Some initiatives we’ve had for Independent Booksellers Week have worked brilliantly. Walker Books ran a “Find Wally” competition this year, where the first 100 bookshops to sign up received a full pack of large Wally, 10 small Wallys and lots of stickers and participation sheets for children.
The idea was that the bookshop hid mini-Wallys in other retailers in the town, and launched the search to find them with customers. It worked perfectly in so many ways – it connected the bookshop with other retailers, it drove customers into the bookshop, and then into other shops, it created a sense of excitement in the town and a children’s activity around the bookshop. It also created costume character photo opportunities which are so important for local press coverage.
We would love more of the same (and similar) for Independent Booksellers Week next year – running 29th June to 6th July 2013 – it’s a great way to connect with a large number of indies, and really raise the profile of your books and authors in the indie sector. When indies really get behind a book, it can have a huge impact – look at the Christmas bestsellers every year, which always nestles an unexpected hit, sold quietly but effectively through independents.
Beyond the bigger campaigns, even individual shops can make a disproportionate impact. Jane Streeter at the Bookcase in Lowdham has had great success with the new Ben Fogle – she ran an event for 450 people this summer at the Lowdham Book Festival (which she helps to run), received extra discount on the paperback from the publisher, and simultaneously offered signed copies of his new hardback for pre-orders placed at the Festival. There are dozens of independents running festivals, racking up substantial sales for featured books, and they are almost always up for a challenge if you have an idea to take to them.
Mark Thornton at Mostly Books has taken an innovative step forward by partnering with Angry Robots (Osprey Publishing) and selling ebook and paper books in a bundle – exclusively in-store. Mark has attracted new custom, and the publisher is creating a marketing concept that works for a high street bookshop in a pretty counter-intuitive fashion!
The point I’d really reinforce to publishers is that you should always think about the independents in your marketing cycle – increasingly they are looking to organize author tours collectively (and the BA could help with this), they are often deeply experienced in events management – and if you take them an idea, they can make it work because only THEY have to make the decision.
If you’d like find out more about working with independents, or taking part in Independent Booksellers Week, email [email protected] or visit www.independentbooksellersweek.org.uk for information on the 2012 campaign.
Search for the book trade’s up and coming talent
The Bookseller has begun its second annual search for its Rising Stars, a listing of the industry’s next generation of leaders and innovators.
The list, to be published in the 21st September issue of The Bookseller, will look at candidates from all areas of the trade including publishers, booksellers, supply chain, publishing technology companies and new digital entrants.
Tom Tivnan, The Bookseller features and supplements editor, who is leading the selection committee with deputy features and supplements editor Felicity Wood, said: “The Rising Stars is about up and comers, but we’re not necessarily talking just about an age-based list. It could be someone brand new to the trade with tonnes of experience outside of it, or even someone who has been in the trade for a long time who has shifted gears to a new, exciting role.”
He added: “Ultimately, what we’re looking for is people who have the vision, talent and creativity to lead the industry in what will certainly be a challenging future.”
The Rising Stars do get noticed. Of the 38 entries on the 2011 list, 16 were promoted or moved companies to take on greater responsibilities. In the last calendar year, for example, Random House’s Dan Franklin stepped up from digital editor to digital publisher; Rebecca Hart went from being the buyer for Foyles Royal Festival Hall and St Pancras locations to managing and opening up the bookseller’s high-profile shop in Westfield Stratford City; and Madeleine Milburn (née Buston) moved from being head of rights at Darley Anderson to setting up her own literary agency.
Anyone wishing to nominate a colleague or themselves or is seeking information about the Rising Stars, can contact Tom Tivnan ([email protected]) or Felicity Wood ([email protected]) by 5th September.
Market for travel guides being challenged by new media and new players
World travelers continue to find more reassurance in printed guidebooks than online information sources
A recent survey by Bowker Market Research in both the UK and the US has found that websites (alongside advice from family and friends) are now the most used source of information when planning a holiday, but that websites from non-guidebook publishers are rated more highly than the online resources provided by traditional travel publishers. In the US, magazines and printed leaflets are the next most used sources of travel information, whilst holiday makers in the UK tend to use online travel forms.
“Travel publishing is at a crossroads. As consumers’ use of the Internet and digital books grows, travel publishers have been investing in developing e-books, apps and websites,” said Jo Henry, director of Bowker Market Research. “This research identifies the information sources travellers are turning to and how satisfied they are. In particular, we explored how digital forms of information compare to physical guide books.”
The research was conducted simultaneously in the U.S. and U.K. Among the revelations: guidebook buyers’ choice of foreign destinations and their pursuit of cultural activities as a major part of their vacation plans were key reasons behind the purchase of printed guidebooks.
Use of social network sites has not crossed into travel planning in either the U.K. or the U.S.; so far, they are mainly tools for sharing pictures and experiences as well as staying in touch with friend.
The 2012 U.K. and U.S. Travel Reports explore the behaviour and attitudes of travellers in three unique categories: guidebook buyers, non-guidebook buyers and non-book buyers. The reports are now available either separately or together, providing a full and detailed analysis of travellers and their information sources, with a commentary by Travel Publishing expert Stephen Mesquita.
For more information please contact James Howitt at [email protected]
BA launches “Find Your Local Bookshop” button for publishers
As part of the Bookseller Association’s Keep Books on the High Street campaign, friends and partners in the book trade are being encouraged to help support bookshops by offering consumers the choice of shopping with their local bookseller, whether on the high street or on their website.
The trade body has created a Find Your Local Bookshop button, which anyone is free to use anywhere on their website. When linked with the URL http://www.booksellers.org.uk/Search-Tools/Bookshop-search.aspx – it will take website users to the BA bookshop search page, where they can search the over 3500 outlets in BA membership. BA members range from single independents in market towns, to campus bookstores, through Christian specialists, to large national bookselling chains and supermarkets. Consumers can search for All BA members, Independents Only and/or Chain and Independent Booksellers – and can then decide whether to buy online or visit their community bookshop.
Download a copy of the button here.
Gardners to support the Indiebound Christmas Books Catalogue
Gardners has announced it will support the Indiebound Christmas Books Catalogue this year and not produce its own consumer-facing catalogue, promoting Christmas Books titles to their customers throughout the Autumn with Sale or Return and discounted offers.
In a statement to customers Gardners said: “After working closely with the Booksellers Association, customers and publishers to assess how best to support independent booksellers, we have decided not to produce a consumer facing Gardners Christmas catalogue for 2012, as we have in recent years. Instead we will be focusing on fully supporting the BA Christmas Books catalogue and IndieBound campaign.
This announcement comes after research showed that the BA’s Christmas Books catalogue was consistently rated higher by its users than catalogues used by other booksellers, particularly on customized services such as overprinting the front and back of the catalogue with shop details.
The deadline for publisher title submissions has been extended to Wednesday 11th July. For further details please contact [email protected].
J.K. Rowling’s cover for The Casual Vacancy revealed
Little, Brown has released the cover for J K Rowling’s first adult novel, The Casual Vacancy, with bold yellow and red background colours, white lettering and what appears to be a cross marking a ballot paper.
As reported in the Bookseller, the cover has been designed by Mario J Pulice, with the illustration and hand lettering created by Joel Holland.
BMS Campaign Award goes to debut novel promoted through online game
The BMS are delighted to announce that the winner of the Best Marketing Campaign of the Year Award is The Night Circus, published in hardback and ebook by Vintage. This title was one of the most successful literary debuts of 2011, achieving impressive TCM sales in hardback. The stylish and innovative campaign, conceived and managed by Vicki Watson, Roger Bratchell, Dan Franklin and Bethan Jones of Vintage, centered on an online storyworld, which attracted over 13,000 users in the first 2 months and is still gaining new readers, providing an effective launch pad for the paperback in summer 2013.
Alastair Giles, chair of the judging panel, commented:
“The shortlist for the Marketing Campaign of the year was drawn from previous 2011 BMS seasonal Awards, plus, winners from the specific annual award winners – a genuinely diverse and deserving list. In the end the judges could only focus on a campaign which met the challenges of 21st century publishing and book marketing head on: an innovative digital strategy that jointly built a new community for the book and extended the boundaries of storytelling itself online.”
The category winners were:
- BEST BLURB – Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, published by Bloomsbury
- BEST OVERALL PACKAGE – The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, published by Puffin
- BEST BREAKTHROUGH CAMPAIGN – The Night Circus, published by Vintage
- BEST PARTNERSHIP – Books and the City, conceived by Simon & Schuster
- BEST BRAND MANAGEMENT – The Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney published by Puffin
- INNOVATION – The Way I See it by Alan Sugar, published by Macmillan
You can view the shortlists in full here.
Over the coming weeks as we’ll be posting case studies and blogs which will look in more depth at our winners and shortlists.
Congratulations to all involved!
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