Awards submission

The next Awards will be for July to September 2025. Submissions must be received at the very latest by midday on Friday 24th October 2025.

 

Awards are to reward marketing campaign excellence and commercial creativity across the publishing industry.

Judging will seek to reward imaginative, effective and innovative campaigns and are looking for evidence of compelling results against these criteria:

  • Impact, effectiveness and return on investment
  • Audience understanding and growth
  • Bespoke approaches to different formats
  • Creativity
  • Strategy and media planning
  • Innovation 
  • Evidence of expanding the market or ways in which your campaign has taken the industry forward

Who can enter:

Anyone working in marketing at a UK publisher, bookseller/retailer, book organisation or charity who is a member of the BMS.

How to enter:

  1. Please complete the web form below
  2. Attach a single PDF outlining your campaign (max upload size 8MB), including any campaign visuals (please keep within 2500 words and approx. 10 pages); PDFs can include live links to supporting videos
  3. Please also add two jpeg images – one book cover and one image to represent your campaign on social media and meeting slides

No copies of the book are required for this Awards period.

The judges are looking for evidence of well-planned and executed marketing campaigns with clear objectives and tangible results. You should provide key data to support your entry and claims, including marketing budget (and whether consumer only, or trade AND consumer) PLUS sales and chart achievements. Please split these sales out by format (physical, ebook, audio). We ask that you be as transparent as possible around digital/social media analytics, reach stats and where sales numbers include a heavy split of low price ebooks, etc. All information submitted is kept confidential.

We advise that your PDF commentary covers the following areas:

  • Campaign objectives and context or marketing challenge
  • Audience targeting and insight
  • Campaign execution summary
  • Innovation and creativity
  • Any format specific approaches
  • Sales / results – and return on investment
  • Effectiveness against objectives 
  • Campaign impact, why you should win campaign of the season

 

** You should receive an email notification of entry. If you don’t, or you have any problems with this web form, please complete the submission form as a word document and email with your pdf and cover/campaign images to [email protected] **

Download word doc here: BMS Award submission form