Waking Up Anna O: Companion Podcasts with HarperCollins UK

For the ‘hottest thriller’ of the year from HarperCollins UK, we celebrated loudly for six months.

We produced not only a 100-person readalong complete with case notes of our main character, letters and NDA’s from the Ministry of Justice, emails from characters, and other in-world replica items, we also produced a five-episode podcast series which included deep-dives into the research behind Resignation Syndrome and Matthew Blake’s writing around it.

In this pre-promotion campaign, we lead a completely unique readalong which involved pitting 100 readers against each other - were they #TeamAsleep or #TeamAwake? We had each creator receiving a bespoke send-out package, either caffeine-charged or lullaby-laden. We saw them battle it out across IG & TT to fight their corner - posting sister graphics to ‘cast their jury vote’ on the fate of Anna Ogilvy.

Our readalong campaign brought in 12.75% engagement alone, which is 3 x the average Instagram campaign. There were 264 feed posts created, and shared to a collective follower count of just over 266k accounts.

In the last three months of the promotional campaign, I hosted a ‘true-crime’ podcast alongside interviewing author Matthew Blake, and some of the biggest supporters of the book across IG & TT.

With our built-in superfan audience of readalong’ers, we had the perfect launch moment for our podcast which acted as a companion to the novel, for those who love falling down their research rabbit holes, but also a transitory media point of note for true-crime podcast fans who might have an interest in adjacent fiction.

We also had targeted social promotion, and influencer backing, to support Kindle Daily Deals, World Sleep Day, Publication Day and more.