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Children's publishers' digital Christmas strategies are already being unwrapped, with plans to engage consumers over the festive period in order to gain readers across all formats for 2013.
Random House Children's Publishers (RHCP) is launching a new range of enhanced e-books and apps, with the releases including three enhanced e-books each from the classic Little Red Train and Princess Poppy series, designed for Apple devices, but also available as apps for Android platforms. Also just being released are Father Christmas Needs a Wee by Nicholas Allan, and The Dinosaur that Pooped Christmas read by its authors, Tom Fletcher and Dougie Poynter, both for iBooks. Interactive versions of You Choose and Just Imagine, both by Pippa Goodhart and Nick Sharratt, feature sound clips of every item on each page, and Tree Fu Go!, will be the first enhanced e-book released to accompany the TV series, "Tree Fu Tom", with all three for iBooks. Additionally, a range of Christmas titles are being promoted on Apple until 18th December, which the publisher said it hopes will encourage parents to experiment with reading in new formats with their children for the first time.
Meanwhile, Hot Key Books is celebrating its first Christmas with a "Nine Days of Christmas" physical books promotion through its website, offering 50% off its nine print titles as well as gift-wrapping and free delivery. In the digital arena, the publisher is following up its 99p promotion on New Adult/Crossover title The Vincent Boys: Uncensored e-book in November with its sequel, The Vincent Brothers, to be promoted at 99p from 13th to 17th December, accompanied by social media competitions and a promotion.
Hot Key Books sales and marketing manager Sarah Benton said: "We were very keen to run some fun, lighthearted promotions around not only gifting for other people this Christmas but also for yourself too." She said: "With the Vincent Boys series [we] have seen a huge amount of online buzz building ahead of the print edition arriving in bookshops in January."
Among Bloomsbury Children's plans is the release of e-book editions of some new January 2013 titles on 20th December, "to encourage new e-book readers to purchase". Titles will include Shiverton Hall by Emerald Fennell, and key backlist titles are being discounted in digital throughout December to encourage new readers. The publisher is also planning an e-book promotion to run on five titles to begin on 26th December.
Walker Books is planning to put its key titles into promotions across all e-book formats, concentrating especially on promoting the e-books of Oblivion by Anthony Horowitz, A Monster Calls and the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness, and Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments series.
Macmillan Children's is planning to drive festive buying by "ramping up Christmas promotions online", targeting parents and grandparents on sites such as Mumsnet, as well as teens on Macmillan site MyKinda-Book.com. Nosy Crow is also planning a piece of wintery content, with the release of its latest Rounds app, Rounds: Parker Penguin, at the end of next week, just ahead of Christmas.