Author: BMS

Marketing and Cover Design conference on June 21

Thursday June 21st will see the largest gathering of book marketing professionals this year as 170 leading designers, publishers and marketers join together at The Bookseller’s first Creativity Day. The day-long event pulls together two separate conferences covering design and marketing and ends with the presentation of the new Book Marketing Society Annual Awards.

The first half will be dedicated to the big topics of interest to marketeers, with speakers from the likes of Nike and Polydor as well as from the book industry, and will look at areas such as audience data, s.e.o. optimisation and the looming impact of “freemium” content.

Sam Missingham, head of events for The Bookseller said: “the big battleground in publishing over the next few years will be in marketing. Publishers have had to transition quickly from being trade marketers to being consumer-facing, and requires very different skills. Also, publishers have been trapped in book-by-book three-month marketing cycles, which in the digital space makes less and less sense, and all at the same time as budgets are being squeezed.”

The programme for the day has been overseen by marketing consultant and Bookseller columnist Damian Horner. “We need to see how other ‘content providers’ are adapting to the same challenges we face, people who work in music, video games, television and film, as well as finding out what has worked within publishing. I’ve aimed to pull together the most diverse collection of marketing and design experts ever to speak at a book industry event”, he said.

Full programme details can be found here: http://bit.ly/DesignMarketing.

BMS Awards: Another notch on the bedpost for Fifty Shades, and success for Tony Robinson’s new children’s series

More success this week for the best-selling Fifty Shades of Grey series, as Sarah Page and the team at Random House won best Adult marketing campaign for the seasonal Jan-April 2012 BMS Awards, with Amy Lines at Macmillan winning the Children’s category for Tony Robinson’s new Weird World of Wonders series.

For Fifty Shades…, the components that impressed judges the most included the incredibly quick turnaround of the campaign – a month from acquisition to books in shops, with ebooks available immediately, and a very focused effort to harness and build on existing buzz. The team’s digital campaign worked across markets and platforms, including enhanced profile on Twitter, a partnership with Mumsnet (perfect targeting), and the UK’s first Google+ hangout the author E.L. James.

The Tony Robinson campaign drew praise for creating a strong digital campaign with a specially designed game from Aardman Creative. There was good coverage of key retailers with bespoke promotions for each, and a strong range of partnerships targeted with the younger audience in mind, including Supercamps, Centre Parcs and Fun Kids radio. All in all it was an impressive engagement that helped launch a potentially very strong series with excellent sales and a great return on investment: 4 million game plays and 150,000 web visits all in one week!

Other campaigns highly commended were:

  • The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King (Marketer: Jane Rose, Hodder & Stoughton)
  • Me Before You by  Jojo Moyes (Marketer: Viviane Basset, Penguin)
  • The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson (Marketer:  Lee Dibble, Pan Macmillan)

 

 

 

 

Shortlists announced for the inaugural BMS Annual Marketing Campaign Awards

The Book Marketing Society has announced the shortlists for the inaugural Best Marketing Campaign of the Year Awards, to take place on the 21st June at the British Library, at the end of The Bookseller’s revamped Marketing and Design Conference.

It was decided to develop these and launch a new series of Annual Awards to reward the key components of a successful marketing campaign in the 21st century.

Each of the new Annual Awards will be judged on its innovation and creativity, its ability to reach and engage with the target audience and a good return on investment. The judges have been looking for the most effective work in the following categories:

  • Best Debut Campaign
  • Best Brand Management
  • Best Partnership
  • Best Innovation in Marketing
  • Best Blurb
  • Best Overall Package

The winners of the first five categories, together with the winners of the three 2011 seasonal Best Marketing Awards, will then be eligible for the Best Overall Campaign Award, to be announced at the end of the event.

Shortlisted in the Best Blurb category are the campaigns for The Final Testament of the Holy Bible by James Frey (John Murray); Tiger Motherby Amy Chua (Bloomsbury) and The Wrong Pong by Steven Butler (Puffin).

In Best Brand Management, the shortlisted campaigns are those for Diary Of A Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney (Puffin); Gruffalo Red Nose Day by Julia Donaldson (Macmillan Childrens); Lord of the Flies Centenary Edition by William Golding (Faber); and the Vintage 21 campaign (Vintage Books).

In the Best Breakthrough Campaign, the campaign for Emma Donoghue’sRoom (Pan Macmillan) is up against those for The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (Vintage Books) and When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman (Headline).

The Best Partnership award will be fought out between the Birmingham’s Big City Read campaign for Before I Go to Sleep by S J Watson (Transworld/Reading Agency) and the Books and the City campaign by Simon & Schuster.

In the BMS Innovation Award, the campaign for Will Hill’s Department 19 (HarperCollins Childrens) will be up against that for The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (Vintage Books) and the campaign for Alan Sugar’s The Way I See It (Pan Macmillan).

The award for Best Overall Package will be contested by the campaigns for Andrew Miller’s Pure(Sceptre), Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs (Little, Brown) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (Puffin).

Previous BMS Award winners, shortlisted for the Overall Best Marketing Campaign of the Year Award, are Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Keaney (Puffin), How to Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran (Ebury) andRoom by Emma Donoghue (Pan Macmillan).

The awards will be judged by marketing consultant Damian Horner; Dominic Gettins, head of writing at global agency Euro RSCG London; Booksellers Association president Jane Streeter; Jon Woolcott of Waterstones; The Bookseller‘s head of events and marketing Sam Missingham; Mark Taylor, director of external relations at CILIP; BookBrunch joint editor Nicholas Clee; and Alastair Giles of the Book Marketing Society and agency Agile Marketing.

Giles commented: ‘The BMS Marketing Awards were originally set up to help raise the profile of the great marketing work being carried out within the publishing industry. In these difficult economic times, the creativity and thoroughness of the various marketing teams across the industry is of even greater importance and we want to help point the way by highlighting the very best of these. It’s a fascinating time to be in marketing as methods for reaching consumers and readers have exploded in number. Assessing the varied ways of attracting an audience to books is now a complicated business and this year’s entries prove how successful marketers in publishing are managing that transition.’

Tickets to attend the Awards reception only are £15 (+VAT).

Click here to book your place

 

 

Whose job is it anyway? BMS teams up with the PPC for an inaugural London Book Fair event

BMS is very pleased to announce a new event at London Book Fair on April 17th, in collaboration with the Publishers Publicity Circle. Aimed at tackling the very modern challenge faced by publicists and marketers alike, it asks who is responsible for social media and the online promotion of books? In the old days things seemed much simpler. Publicists dealt with the ‘free’ media – the papers, the TV, the radio, the book tour. Marketers orchestrated paid advertising campaigns and got the book trade buzzing.

But now with the lines between marketing and publicity becoming ever-blurred, what are the new skills being called into service, and what value can traditional roles bring to the table? As organisations, how are publishers, agencies and other creative industries adapting in order to cope?

The event includes a fantastic speaker line-up: Claire Armitstead, Books Editor from the Guardian; Joanna Ellis, Marketing Director of Faber and soon to be Associate Director of The Literary Platform; Amelia Fairney, Communications Director at Penguin and Michelle Goodall, freelance communications and social media specialist. The session will be moderated by BMS Chair Martin Neild.

This will be a packed one-hour session featuring case studies and practical examples, and will look to address the burning questions facing publicists, marketers and freelancers at the frontline of book promotion.

See here for more details.