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HarperCollins is planning its biggest ever marketing campaign for Cathy Kelly to promote the author’s latest paperback.
Once in a Lifetime will be published on 3rd September priced £7.99. Kelly is one of HarperCollins’ bestselling female commercial fiction authors in the UK and internationally, alongside Cecelia Ahern and Paullina Simons. Publishing brand manager Kate Bradley said: “We want to build Cathy from a number one bestseller to a blockbuster brand.”
HarperCollins has a reader panel of 5,000 frequent book buyers whom they consult about their reading habits. Of these, 1,000 were surveyed by the publisher’s Consumer Insight team to find out what they liked about Cathy Kelly, and how they saw her compared to similar authors.
Marketing director Sarah Radford said: “We believe Cathy Kelly is the natural heir to Maeve Binchy and her readers agree. We undertook a huge piece of research and similarities between the two authors came out of that—Irish storytelling about real women that’s warm and uplifting.”
The jacket design for Once in a Lifetime is very different from the design for Kelly’s previous novel, Lessons in Heartbreak, which the publisher admitted did not work. Radford said: “We went for revolution, rather than evolution. We changed too many elements at once, moving from illustrative to photographic and changing the typeface.”
The jacket design for the paperback edition Once in a Lifetime is photographic with illustrative elements and a more familiar typeface with the aim of appealing to new readers without leaving Kelly’s established fans behind.
However, there are no short term plans to repackage her backlist. Radford said: “The short answer is ‘not immediately’ as the backlist was repackaged only a year ago with the full support of retailer author promotions. We felt it was too big an expectation on retailers to take on another round of re-issues so soon.”
Paperback publication of Once in a Lifetime will be supported with a high-profile marketing and publicity campaign. “It’s the biggest campaign we’ve ever done for Cathy Kelly both from a consumer and a retail point of view,” said Radford.
Television advertising will be central with a 20-second advert broadcast on ITV during the morning show GMTV for two weeks in September. There will also be digital advertising on channels including Living, Comedy Central and Watch. There will also be bus-side advertising in London and the south-east of England.