Gollancz festival 'reaches three million on Twitter'

Gollancz’s one-day physical and digital festival reached nearly three million people on Twitter, the publisher has said.

The festival, held on 13th August, took place on platforms including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Google during the day, before shifting to Waterstones Piccadilly in the evening for a series of panels and readings, plus a signing.

It resulted in the sale of 123 books at Waterstones Piccadilly; the number of likes to Gollancz’s YouTube channel increased by 20%. Gollancz said the festival reached three million people on Twitter, and was delivered into nearly nine million timelines.

Gollancz, which held its festival in between two major SFF events in London – Nine Worlds Convention and the World Science Fiction Convention, Loncon3 – said the physical event sold out, partially because of the price (tickets for the physical events were £6).

Senior marketing executive Jen McMenemy said: “The price of festivals can sometimes be off-putting, and we wanted ours to be affordable.”

Gollancz’s publicity manager Sophie Calder said: “It was a very exciting time in the genre festival world with two genre festivals bookending our event. We had a lot of authors from all over the world here. I think everyone was, during that week, wanting to get involved with all the genre activities they could, and Gollancz Festival appealed because of the breadth of authors there, from horror to hard sci-fi and so on.

“With SFF readers, they are one of the most digitally engaged communities so I think they’re more likely than your average book buyers to visit their favourite author’s social media channel and to know who has published a book, and this [festival] was a way of linking everyone up. It was a way of getting authors and publishers and readers together.”

One of the most successful parts of the day was Gollancz’s One Star Reviews video, which had 800 views in 24 hours, and became Gollancz’s most tweeted video with more than 122 tweets in the first 12 hours.

Gollancz’s YouTube channel had more than 3,604 views last week, with 12,423 minutes of video watched.

All content produced for the festival will remain live on Gollancz’s social media accounts.

“We wanted to make sure the festival had life beyond that one day,” said McMenemy.