Atlantic launches 'stellar' paperback campaign for In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

Atlantic has launched a "stellar" marketing and publicity campaign for the paperback edition of Martin MacInnes’ In Ascension, which is being published on 1st February. 

The book was the 2023 Blackwell’s Book of the Year and the Scottish Fiction Book of the Year 2023, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. It is the Waterstones Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of the Month for February 2024, and rights have been sold in 10 territories to date.

In hardback, In Ascension was championed by booksellers, and the trade marketing campaign is aiming to "give them the tools to continue [to] support the novel in store and online". The publisher is running a competition for indies to name a star after their bookshops, and has turned major Waterstones and Blackwell’s storefronts into "starry space-scapes" with galaxy projectors, posters and window clings.

The author is doing several bookshop events in February, including at Toppings in Edinburgh, Blackwell’s in Manchester and Daunt’s in Hampstead, as well as Waterstones in Salisbury and Trafalgar Square. Point of sale material has been developed for Waterstones, Blackwell’s, and independent bookshops, along with social assets.

The book has been selected for the New Scientist Book Club, beginning in mid-February, which includes email promotion to over 6,000 members, as well as other activity.

There will also be advertising across the Guardian’s website, running for the entire month of February, and a 16-sheet poster on North Bridge in Edinburgh- where the author lives – as well as a video trailer for Youtube, Instagram and TikTok advertising.

Atlantic’s senior publicity director Kirsty Doole said: "The campaign for In Ascension started months before the hardback was published with in-house early readers raving about it to anyone who would listen. To see it get such an amazing level of recognition in both the trade and the media is incredibly gratifying and nothing less than Martin and this extraordinary novel deserves. We are thrilled to be launching this exciting next phase of the campaign."

Drummond Moir, m.d. of Atlantic Books, added: "A novel as mind-expanding and perfectly executed as Martin’s calls for a publishing team with daring degrees of ambition and imagination. The Atlantic team have brought all of this and more to In Ascension, by an author James Roxburgh and his colleagues have championed from his earliest writing, in an inspiring example of what is possible, and how global a book can become, when a passionate, expert team rallies behind it."

Atlantic is also releasing MacInnes’ previous two novels, Infinite Ground (Atlantic) and Gathering Evidence (Atlantic), with refreshed cover looks. In Ascension has been sold in nine languages and North American rights were bought by Morgan Entrekin at Grove, to be published on 2nd February.