John Murray Press to launch ‘Encounters’ campaign showcasing 2024 fiction

John Murray Press is launching its upcoming new fiction talent campaign with a week of promotion and author activity, including a tour with lead debuts by authors Scott Preston, Jiaming Tang and Madeline Doherty.

JMP Encounters Week, held between 13th and 20th October, will see the comms team at John Murray highlighting key fiction titles for 2024 with a rebranded proof package in new livery, matching tote bags and a zine showcasing their authors. They will also run coordinated social media activity and a tour of three "proof parties” at Cheltenham, Durham and Ilkley literary festivals.

The author tour will include Preston’s The Borrowed Hills, Tang’s Cinema Love and Doherty’s Gender Theory. At each “proof party” every member of the audience will receive a special goody bag with copies of the proofs offering them the chance to read the debuts.

John Murray Press will launch the zine digitally with a curated calendar of online activity throughout the week. Each day will see between two to three titles and authors highlighted with readings, extracts, cover animations and proof giveaways, driving awareness to indies and the NetGalley platform. This will be supported by the publisher’s community of ambassadors across Instagram and TikTok.

Physical copies of the zine will be sent to booksellers across the UK and made available via the publisher’s indie newsletter, which launched last month.

This will be the fifth year John Murray Press have showcased their upcoming fiction across print, online and in-person events. This year’s "Encounters" theme aims to reflect the opportunity stories offer to pause and reflect.  

Jocasta Hamilton, executive publisher, said: “We have an incredible range of emotionally astute and ambitious new novelists joining the list in 2024. The zine and proof parties give us a brilliant opportunity to begin introducing their writing – elemental, subversive, tender – and the landscapes and experiences that inspired them, with readers both physically and virtually.”