Let's talk about book marketing...

An interview with Vicky Palmer about different levels of campaigns, how authors can support their marketing, and that time she filmed a trailer for When God Was A Rabbit...with a rabbit.

Hi everyone,

Happy Easter and happy bank holiday to those in the UK. I hope you all have lovely plans ahead. I’m heading to Brighton, hoping for sunshine but will no doubt be met with torrential rain…!

Today I’m so excited to welcome Vicky Palmer, Creative & Marketing Director to the Substack. Vicky is amazing - she runs the Marketing and Art teams at Hodder & Stoughton, and previously worked at Penguin Random House and Headline, where she was an integral part of the genius marketing campaigns for blockbuster hits such as Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, When God Was A Rabbit by Sarah Winman, and The Body by Bill Bryson. At Hodder, she worked on campaigns for bestsellers including The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, You Are Here by David Nicholls, and Story of my Life by Lucy Score. She talks below about her role, discusses how books are given different levels of marketing campaign, and gives some great advice to authors below.

1. Welcome to the Honest Editor, Vicky! Please can you tell us about your current role and what it involves?

Thank you for having me! I am the Creative and Marketing Director for Hodder & Stoughton, where I’ve been since the end of 2023. The purpose of this combined role is to oversee the creative strategy and delivery for Hodder & Stoughton across both the Art and Marketing departments, and it’s what attracted me from my Marketing Director role at Transworld, where I worked very happily for 6 years before moving to Hodder. I love that we have this combined role - few publishers have it and I love the distinct viewpoint it gives us in being able to draw a creative thread, which starts with the cover brief conversation and runs right through a publication into Marketing and also our brilliant Publicity team’s work alongside.

I feel incredibly fortunate to do what I do and I always say that I’m often wearing the opposite hat when I sit down with each team: I bring a clear market and audience focus to our conversations about book covers to help us not only nail it but push boundaries with our design choices, and I bring a high creative bar for our Marketing output to ensure we always look great as well as focusing on clear, data-driven, sales-focused campaigns with a great message at the heart. My favourite moments are when Art create a gorgeous cover which is amazing in its own right and also a dream for Marketing to work with.

A campaign where you can look at it, see no book cover on there and still know what book it’s for is often something I refer to when we’re talking about how important visuals are in storytelling.

2. You have worked on some incredible marketing campaigns; what do you think makes a strong campaign and why?

Never being afraid to break the ‘rules’. I started my Marketing career promoting textbooks to university professors via email, and I remember just doing what I thought was a good idea and my colleagues were surprised at some of the things I wanted to try. But crucially I was given space to try - and I am sure get a lot of things wrong - whatever I thought might work, and looking back now I can see this gave me a lot of confidence to keep doing what came instinctively to me in a creative space. I moved into New Media Marketing (New Media!) in a joint role across Transworld and Random House Children’s Books, and again because no-one really understood how new media marketing worked, I didn’t have any rules to work with so I just did what felt right, and chased what works.

The one thing I’ve definitely learned, from a former boss who had a background in advertising, is that every successful marketing campaign has one central message, or brand story as I like to call it now. No campaign should be a list of unconnected activity, like a checklist - you need to simplify your message into a clear way of talking about your book so that you find a way to connect with readers and make them care.

My favourite campaigns, which tend to be the most successful ones and I feel strongly that this is also connected, are the ones where I’ve had that lightbulb moment of working out how we talk about a book which makes you get the good sort of goosebumps!

The first one I really felt this with was my campaign for When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman - we filmed a live-action trailer with two children and a house rabbit one Sunday in London, which colleagues thought we were mad to do as book trailers weren’t really a thing then, but I just had a good feeling about it.

The love we all had for that campaign was so special and it became a launchpad which saw all of us go on to more success in our roles. Shoutout to my PR partner on that campaign, Maura Wilding, who is now Group Communications Director at Hachette. We were young, didn’t know the so-called rules of how to break out a book, so we didn’t know we were breaking them, and we’ve both come a very long way since! I like to keep that spirit in my campaigns and creative leadership all these years later.

3. What can authors do to help support a marketing team?

Every great campaign starts with a great book and a trusting author. It sounds trite, but the book is our inspiration for everything we do, so we owe everything to our authors for trusting us to take their hard work and shape it into a campaign. So on that basis I would say that trust is absolutely essential. I also know that I always deliver the best work when I’m enjoying myself so authors being prepared to come along for the marketing ride and have fun is also invaluable to any author/marketer relationship.

Every one of my most successful campaigns has had a very close author relationship at the heart of it, and I know that this has allowed me to deliver campaigns which ultimately help sell a lot of copies of many books over the years.

That’s not to say every one of my favourite campaigns has had a huge budget - my most well-used saying is that an idea costs nothing so it’s about creating that connection between you, the book and the author, working out what you want to say to readers and why it matters.

The best campaigns happen when you have space to try, innovate, make things happen, and put your own spin on an author’s work, and this is why trust matters. I have a lot of special, successful authors to thank for trusting me even when my creative brain has been at its most wild, but I hope that they all feel their trust in me paid off as I’m still in touch with many of them now, several years after I’ve moved jobs/publishers.

4. We all know that books receive different levels of marketing and PR support - can you say a little about how a publishing house decides this?

Ah, yes. The complicated question! The most important message I want to say here is that whoever you are in the publishing process, whatever the size of the campaign, we’re all on the same side and we all want every book to sell - that’s a promise.

I believe that every author deserves a great publishing experience, as does everyone working on the book, and that comes from good communication throughout the process and clear setting of expectations on all sides to avoid the wrong sort of surprises.

Whether I’ve been an assistant or a senior leader, this philosophy is the same and I know it’s the same for anyone who works in publishing, as none of us wake up in the morning and come to work hoping that the books don’t sell.

The simplest answer is that most publishers will allocate resource in line with the sales expectations of the book, but of course there are a number of factors outside of this as it’s important too to remember that resource or support doesn’t just mean budget. Our time, our expertise, our ideas (which are free remember!) are all part of why an author trusts their publisher to publish their books, and this all counts towards what we think of as resource/support.

For a non-fiction author who might have a large social media platform, we will work with them to work out the best possible plan to reach their audience and convert them to sale of the book, which is more likely to be about our ideas and publishing expertise in collaboration with an author’s own knowledge of their audience. For an author who has chosen their publisher because they have a specialist genre list or imprint, we bring the value of our existing reader community and the huge amount we know about these readers and what they love to read and buy. For a brand new author we might be working with them on a way to break their book out to readers, working alongside our wonderful colleagues in Publicity to amplify what we each do and find the key points where what we do is connecting with readers. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to campaigns and every publisher will absolutely chase a book which is selling well, regardless of the expectation was when that book first published.

5. How do you think book marketing has changed in recent years?

For a start we don’t call digital marketing ‘New Media’ anymore…! Ultimately I don’t think the essence of Marketing has changed. Great ideas capture people’s attention, great campaigns require passion and persistence, and that will be the case forever. However the amount of media channels has exploded exponentially and the ways of working with digital platforms changes almost every week…

In my 20 years in Marketing, we’ve faced massive changes in the fragmentation of readers’ attention, the changing retail landscape, and the sheer number of different activities Marketing are now responsible for. This is where things have become much more challenging for Marketing teams, as we’re all working on a lot of different priorities at any one time and we need to be expert in a vast range of channels and able to spin a huge number of plates at one time.

There always has been and always will be more we can do (every marketer’s favourite question is ‘what more can you do?’) so the hardest part is knowing when you need to explain that what you’ve done is right for now and be able to move onto your next project.

6. What advice would you give to an aspiring writer?

Write the book you really care about. If you care about and love what you’re writing, that will absolutely come across to the reader. You can’t write to meet a trend if you don’t love it and read in that area already, so focus on what you love. You’ll also have to talk about your book and work on it for a very long time, so make sure you enjoy it. Everyone who works in publishing is a reader before anything else, and some of your first readers are likely to be your publishing team, so if they can read your book and feel the love you put into it, it’s pretty certain they’ll each find their way to create a campaign which they love as much as you do.

Thank you so much, VP, for your insights. Your authors are lucky to have you on board!

I hope you all found this helpful, please feel free to pop any comments or questions below and I will do my best to answer.

Happy Easter and if you’re using this weekend to write or do something creative, good for you and I hope it flows.

Phoebe x