This year I have been on a mission to push myself out of my comfort zone by gaining more real-life experience. This started with the ‘Spring Forward to The Future’ event I helped to organise within my University, which has led on to various other opportunities. One of which is being involved, alongside Lily Harrison, in the book launch of Jam Tomorrow, a new book all about how to start and run a business. If you follow my blog, you may have seen that a few weeks ago I wrote a blog about what I had experienced in the early stages of the project. We bought the campaign to a close last week, and I thought it would be nice to revisit this topic and reflect on my experience.
The whole of the campaign was driven around promoting the book launch event, which happened on the 24th of March 2022. We set a target of getting 40 attendees and set about achieving this through various methods. Firstly, we flexed our creative muscles and created 24 PR packages which were jars of strawberry jam with a customised label advertising Jam Tomorrow. These were sent off to various people involved in education and business in the Hampshire area. Whilst this was a fun method to use, we didn’t think it would gain much traction or attendees to our launch because of the vagueness of the parcel. Therefore, when we saw some activity on social media, we were excited. In the future, I think that PR parcels need to be obvious in what they are promoting, and if the timescale allowed, we perhaps should have included a personalised invite to the book launch or ideally, a copy of the book.
The main method of drawing people to attend the book launch was targeted emails. Our email campaign was sent to over 80 people who the author, Wayne Palmer, knew or had worked with throughout his career. These emails resulted in around 30 people confirming their attendance to the event, which was great, but we knew we should push for a few more. This is where our personal networks come in, and through posting online, emailing fellow students or just telling our friends we were able to get 10 more attendees. For a relatively small book launch event, we were all happy with this turn out. We were also glad that a few other students volunteered their time to help us at the event by taking photos.
On the day, we fully leaned into the Jam theme by providing lots of jammy dodgers, jam doughnuts and Prosecco being provided for our attendees. Furthermore, we had 25 copies of the book available to buy on the day, and all of them were sold! Moreover, we have sold an average of 3 books per day on Amazon since the launch. Overall, I think this is a successful book launch.