Bloomsbury Children's, Cornerstone and Zaffre recognised at Book Marketing Society Awards

Campaigns by Bloomsbury Children’s, Cornerstone, Penguin Michael Joseph, Zaffre Books, Headline and Canongate have been recognised in The Book Marketing Society’s Q3 2023 Awards for campaign excellence and commercial creativity.

Winners for campaigns across six categories conducted in the period July to September 2023 were announced at a meeting last night, Wednesday 29th November. Alesha Bonser and Sophie Rosewell at Bloomsbury Children’s won the Children’s category for Katherine Rundell’s Impossible Creatures, which the judges said “established a new benchmark within the industry”, while the Adult Fiction category was won by Cornerstone with “a veritable masterclass of strategy and innovation” for their Lisa Jewell None Of This Is True campaign. Penguin Michael Joseph’s Multi-Title win for their Romance Readathon was “shrewd, strategic [...] a delight”.

Chair of judges, Miriam Robinson, said of the submissions: “Marketers made brave, nuanced and often counterintuitive choices in their campaigns this quarter – all the more impressive given the pressures that comms teams are facing – which paid off time and again. This high level of creativity combined with robust strategy and a dynamic approach to retail relationships has made this a truly stunning set of submissions to judge.”

Spotlight winners included Fourth Estate for what the judges described as a “standout” campaign for The List and the team at Collins for building a “distinctive brand identity” for the latest edition of the Collins English Dictionary and successfully reaching a younger audience.

The full list of winners were:

Multi Title
Highly Commended: Hercule Poirot 2023 Reissues, Maddy Marshall (HarperFiction)
Winner: Romance Readathon, Stephanie Biddle (Penguin Michael Joseph) 

Guerrilla
Highly Commended: The Pumpkin Spice Café, Chloe Cummings and Emma Petfield (One More Chapter)
Winner: My Roommate is a Vampire, Issie Levin, Cornerstone 

Children’s
Highly Commended: Lottie Brooks’s Totally Disastrous School Trip, Lauren Floodgate (PRH Children’s)
Winner: Impossible Creatures, Alesha Bonser and Sophie Rosewell (Bloomsbury Children’s) 

Debut
Highly Commended: Kala, Felice McKeown, Aimee Oliver-Powell, Sophie Walker and Sawda Pirbhai (Atlantic)
Winner: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, Ellie Pilcher (Manilla Press)

Adult Non-Fiction
Highly Commended: I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, Genista Tate-Alexander (Bloomsbury)
Winner: Let the Light Pour In, Rachel Quin and Alice Shortland (Canongate) 

Adult Fiction
Highly Commended: Kill For Me Kill For You, Lucy Upton  (Headline)
Winner: None of This Is True, Sarah Ridley and Claire Bush (Cornerstone)

Spotlight Awards:

Audience Development: Collins English Dictionary, Rachel Quin, Rebecca Jones, Marta Juncosa (Collins)
Innovation: Mob 6, Lara McLeod and Demeter Scanlon (Ebury)
Creativity: The List, Niriksha Bharadia (Fourth Estate)
Graft: Brilliant Black British History, Evelyn Opoku-Agyeman (Bloomsbury Children’s Books)