See it, say it, sorted

Reading is good for you. It can help you work, rest, or play. Reading can make you belong anywhere, or think different. Indeed, once you pop, you probably cannot stop. This is the sweet you can eat between meals. The biggest snack pennies can buy. Exceedingly good texts. Central thinking for kids. The quicker, picker upper. Breakfasts of champions.

To paraphrase, there are words that melt in the mind, not in your hands. Snap, crackle and pop. Guaranteed to make a drama out of a crisis. The real thing: the read thing. Words refresh the parts that other distractions cannot reach. The pen is, after all, mightier than the stream. Beware of expensive imitations. You can read them this way, or listen your way. Because you’re worth it. All of the words that are fit to use (in one crazy square). In fact, you’ll never put a better bit of blather in your brain. Pure gold. All gold.

When we all had to lock down, words were the wings that took you away (from it)

You can go to work with a book. Vorsprung buch technik. The ultimate reading machine. P-P-Pick up a paperback. Your flexible friend. Books are forever: they keep going, and going, and going, soft or strong and oftentimes very, very long. Some are literally waffly versatile. Pure happiness, they are built to last, good to the last drop, their purchase a way of saving money and living better. They’re grrreat! I bet you can eat three. Finger-flickin’ good.

You might think, at this point, that I need to calm down. But let’s carry on, because none of the above slogans, or the campaigns they came from—simply the best—were created for reading, and yet here we are a business built on words with a moment to find the right ones for ourselves: the greatest show on earth. Probably the best sector in the world, in with a chance to be all it can be. Because reading is never going to give you up. During lock down words were the wings that took you away (from it). Face. Space. Race. To a better life, a better world. Have a read and a smile. Lovin’ it .

So when we ask at The Bookseller’s Marketing & Publicity Conference what a new kind of campaign for reading might look like*—one that extols the benefits of reading at a time when that upside is still remembered—you might want to give it some thought. Books Are Our Bag, but what else are they? It ain’t easy being cheesy. And this is about more than a slogan.

We’ll be letting our voices do the walking, connecting people, finding the super shakers. It’s good to talk. Challenge everything. Pure genius! The appliance of science. So think big. Make yourself heard. An idea can change your life. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. You might love it, or hate it. One instinctively knows when something is right. Either way. Just do it. What’s the worst that can happen? The future’s bright. The future’s?

*The penultimate session of the Marketing & Publicity Conference is a group brainstorm, asking the audience to collaborate on a big, industry-wide initiative for reading, something with ambitions to lift books as a category to the dizzying heights of other entertainment sectors.
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