Michael Joseph Romance Readathon
When Michael Joseph came to us looking for a way to spread the word about their romance offering, we knew we could create something really special - that’s how we ended up with an immersive, custom branded romance book club with over 250 creators taking part, built around 12 titles, featured in over a 1.5K pieces of content throughout the summer across both Instagram and TikTok. This included paid TikTok content (with Read With Me Lives hosted 5 times a month, each month for the duration of the campaign), regular newsletters, events on our Tandem channels etc.
The campaign did so well that it was recognised in The Book Marketing Society’s Q3 2023 Awards for campaign excellence and commercial creativity. It was the winner for the multi-title campaign category.
Before the campaign started, we decided to create a bespoke, custom design that would give the creators a true sense of belonging to a special club, and give the whole campaign an immersive feel. The design was featured not only across social media but also in POS content, with posters, bookmarks etc being printed and showcased. The campaign partnered with Waterstones, who offered a 20% discount to anyone who purchased any of the 12 titles throughout the duration of the Readathon using the code ROMANCEREADATHON.
Our callout to recruit creators was launched at the start of May, and included Instagram posts and reels, Story sets, TikToks, newsletters. We asked for people to sign up to the VIP spots with custom made ‘date with a book’ cards to fill in, which were also filled in by all the authors, to make it even more immersive and unique. Thanks to this big launch strategy, we had over 200 pieces of content showcasing the books before the Readathon even started, and we had over 250 signups for the VIP spots alone.
Each month’s reading list was structured around a theme: One Night Stand (books to read in one night), Out Of This World (romantasy), Long Term Relationship (authors with a long backlist to dive into), and Dating Goals (miscellaneous love tropes). This approach resulted in a cross-pollinating of content (multiple books per post, use of templates in Stories and on the grid, etc). Focusing on themes and grouping several titles in one campaign, rather than recruiting participants for individual titles, boosted the total number of posts compared to a standard Readalong.
All of the activity included a Discord server with a true book club feel, with over 12 channels and a sense of community that outlasted the campaign (with creators staying in touch even after themes are concluded).
The Readathon formula could be tweaked to expand to other genres that also have strong subcategories with their own following, e.g. Thriller Readathon (legal, psychological suspense, horror); Fantasy (high fantasy, urban, magical realism, etc) as we had feedback from our non-romance reading community that they would love to see a similar campaign style for their favourite genre.
I really loved having the Discord channel for this readalong. I also loved the concept of the themed readathon! - @Sarahinreaderland
I've had a fantastic experience taking part in the first month of the Romance Readathon as a Tiktok VIP. @ateachersguidetoreaching
LOVED THIS CAMPAIGN! Honestly my favourite campaign so far I have joined. @bookishwiccan