World Book Day's Fiona Hickley discusses the charity's rebrand
World Book Day’s executive director Fiona Hickley talks to The Bookseller about taking on the role, as well as the charity’s rebrand and plans for 2026.
When Fiona Hickley was appointed as interim executive director of World Book Day in September 2025, the charity’s chair Emma Scott said she was selected "for her experience leading high-profile brands, including within publishing, and managing complex partnerships". Most recently brand director at DC Thomson, she had previously worked as director of Harry Potter Global Franchise Development and as executive director of brand marketing and strategic partnerships at Beano Studios.
This experience has certainly been put to use in the intervening months, with Hickley (now established as executive director for at least another year) overseeing the launch of a World Book Day rebrand in December. The rebrand, developed with branding agency Why Projects, had been in the works for two years. Hickley refers to it as a “clarification” of the organisation’s messaging, explaining: “It started as an exercise in really looking at the strategy and at what World Book Day was trying to achieve, and then just boiling that down. What came out of that was the descriptor ’the reading for fun charity’. It’s how we now describe ourselves, and that really says everything.”
According to Hickley, one motivator for the rebrand was that “an awful lot of people don’t realise that we’re a charity”. She expands: “It’s been a charity since 2000 but that’s not been understood, and so we need to ram home hard that we are here in order to get children reading and to champion reading for children. It’s a whole mechanism that enables book ownership for free, but we need to remind people at every step of the way that we’re a charity, and therefore we’re fundraising.”
“Visually,” she adds, “we needed a refresh. It was looking like it had been around for a long time. There was a process where every year elements of it were redesigned with different illustrators and that was very onerous and costly on the team. Also, as somebody who knows about brand, changing the way your brand looks every year doesn’t help with consistency. This is a change to make it simpler, bolder and just really straightforward. It can stay the same now for a long period of time.”
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The rebrand has gone hand-in-hand with a new website, which was funded by Bloomberg’s Digital Accelerator Program. Hickley says: “That was another stumbling block for World Book Day – that we were working with a really old website that wasn’t doing all the things that would make our life easier. We have now got a wonderful website that is searchable and serves things up in all the ways that you want it to. It has things like a map of bookshops that take the World Book Day tokens and a map of World Book Day events. Booksellers and people who are running events can put theirs on the map. It’s got really good functionality to allow us to work smarter.”
This year’s World Book Day – taking place on Thursday 5th March – sees the charity organising several celebrations to mark the occasion, including author events at libraries in Hull, Mablethorpe and Wigan and a flagship day-long event at The Reader in Liverpool. Hickley predicts that 1,000 children will join in throughout the day, which will feature author and illustrator talks and signings, creative craft activities, competitions and a silent disco attended by MC Grammar.
Another big focus for the team this year is being a lead charity delivery partner for the National Year of Reading and “setting out our stall as the reading for fun charity”. World Book Day has been highlighted as the National Year of Reading’s first tentpole moment in the calendar and the campaign is funding the distribution of 200,000 additional World Book Day £1 books through the charity’s community hubs, “roughly doubling what we what we normally give out through community distribution in any year”.
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Hickley says of the National Year of Reading: “It’s really pleasing that there is a moment when everybody is talking about the crisis in literacy and reading. At World Book Day we don’t like to call it a crisis, because we always want to make it fun and enticing. But to have so many people saying the same thing across the sector is really pleasing, and it is also really positive that we’re talking a lot. There’s the big advisory group, but then there’s also a smaller group of the leaders of the delivery partner charities. We’re meeting really regularly and exchanging ideas and figuring out ways of working together.”
She continues: “What I find really exciting is that we’re all working in different ways in different spaces… It feels like we’ve each got our place in that world, working alongside each other. And my big hope – I know everybody’s big hope – is that, once this year has gone, that collaboration and that understanding of how we all fit together to make up the whole picture continues.”
Hickley took on her current position following the following the departure of Cassie Chadderton in August 2025 after more than five years in the role. Though the move to World Book Day was unexpected, it also ties in with much of her previous work. “Championing children’s reading has been a real unintentional thread, through my career,” she says. “Where that started for me was at Warner Brothers working on Harry Potter. That was my first time that I worked closely with the publishing industry and saw the power that a book can bring to kids. And then I had my own children, and I saw the challenges of getting them reading, which is never a straightforward journey… I wasn’t thinking this was my next step, but when I was approached about it, it felt like a really natural step.”
During her time at DC Thomson and Beano she worked on partnerships with the Summer Reading Challenge, the National Literacy Trust and World Book Day. As a result, there is much about the job which feels familiar. “I’ve come across an awful lot of people who I’ve met along the way, and that’s been really nice. And I’m dealing with so many of the same things that I have dealt with before – things like licensing and intellectual property and commercial partnerships and working with publishers and retailers.”
She describes World Book Day as “a complex beast”, expanding: “[It] is this convener of so many parts of our sector and our industry – the publishers, the booksellers, the libraries, the schools – and we convene making it happen, but it happens through the goodwill and the generosity of a lot of those partners.” So far, she is “really enjoying” the job and she praises the “really amazing” small team she works with. “People don’t realise how small World Book Day is. We’re only six members of staff most of the year, and they are so committed. I’ve always worked in commercial organisations with very committed, conscientious team members, but the charity sector, it’s a whole new level of conscientiousness and commitment.”
Now, Hickley and her team are “in the zone” as they prepare for this year’s event, while also planning for the 2028 list of World Book Day books and beyond. Looking to the future, she says: “We need to use this year as a springboard for what comes next, because the National Year of Reading will be one year, and then the rest of us have to take it forward after that. So a lot of the planning we’re doing now is about what happens after the National Year of Reading and making sure that we all use it as a step-up moment for what comes next. For us, that’s just simply getting more books for free into the hands of children, and children being able to choose those books – that’s really important to us.”
