Penguin Books
THE BRIEF
To plan, commission, edit and write editorial content about one of my favourite subjects - books! - for Penguin.co.uk, Penguin Random House’s website for book-lovers. Check out some examples of things I wrote and commissioned below.
THE RESULTS
The content I created and commissioned led to a 45% year-on-year increase in traffic to the site. I've rounded up some of my favourite pieces below.
WHICH CLASSIC IS YOUR PERFECT MATCH?
To help me plan great content for penguin.co.uk, I needed to find out what visitors wanted from the site. So I took a look at what they were typing into the on-site search box. It turned out that classic books and authors were by far the most searched-for terms, so I wrote a personality quiz matching readers to their perfect classic read. For added shareability, I featured the website’s six most searched-for books in the results, and commissioned beautiful images of each of them. My hunch paid off handsomely, with the quiz quickly amassing 100,000 visitors and becoming the most successful piece of content on the site to date (as of April 2018).
CAITLIN MORAN: HOW BOOKS MADE ME A FEMINIST
In the lead up to International Women’s Day, I thought about what my dream piece of content would look like. It didn’t take long - I knew that there wasn’t much that could beat an essay by Caitlin Moran on how books and reading shaped her thinking as a feminist. Caitlin took up the challenge, supplying me with this inventive essay in which she makes the case that girls should only read books by women until they’ve had chance to grow up and become ‘battle ready’. Needless to say, it proved something of a talking point, helping Penguin to stand out and spark intelligent debate on a subject that the brand could really own.
WHY 2017 IS THE YEAR TO READ THESE 11 TOPICAL BOOKS
This was one of my first bits of content for Penguin, and it’s all about making the most of one the brand’s best-loved attributes - it’s ability to recommend a great book for every occasion! With one eye on the growing trend for creating and sharing reading challenges online, I wrote this new year piece especially for people making new year's reading resolutions, providing a snackable summary of the year’s biggest literary moments, and a guide to the topical reads connected with them. It proved to be our best-performing piece of new year content.