PPC reveals awards shortlists

28.01.14 | Sarah Shaffi - The Bookseller

The Publishers' Publicity Circle (PPC) has announced the shortlist for its annual awards, with campaigns for titles including Lean In, Mad About the Boy and The Ocean at the End of the Lane all in the running.
The awards celebrate book promotion and campaigns are judged according to the publicist’s use of imagination, careful thought and effective planning.

The campaign for Helen Fielding’s third Bridget Jones’ novel Mad About the Boy (Jonathan Cape), run by Christian Lewis, with Sophie Mitchell and Anna Redman at Jonathan Cape, alongside Kim Maskill, Chloe Healy, Natalie Trye and Hattie Adam-Smith at ThinkJam is in the running for The Hardback Fiction Award, supported by The Reading Agency.

It is up against campaigns for Samantha Shannon’s The Bone Season (Bloomsbury) by Jude Drake, Eleanor Weil and Katie Bond; Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites (Pan Macmillan) by Sandra Taylor; Gill Hornby’s The Hive (Little, Brown) by Tamsin Kitson; and Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane (Headline) by Sam Eades.

This year there is a new category, Best Direct to Digital Campaign, which is being sponsored by Net Galley. Other awards include the PPC Award for Hardback Non-Fiction and the Paperback Original Campaign: Fiction or Non-Fiction, sponsored by The Bookseller.

Another notable feature of this year's shortlists is that every one of Penguin's communications - Anna Ridley, Poppy North, Jenny Fry, Lija Kresowaty, Celeste Ward-Best, Matt Clacher, Julia Murday, Mari Yamazaki, Tania Vian-Smith and Hannah Macmillan - has been nominated in the various categories. Publicity director Amelia Fairney commented: "I feel this must be unprecedented! I am so proud of them and the wonderful campaigns they did for these amazing books, which all went on to achieve great sales in a difficult market."
The judging panel for the awards will comprise of representatives from each of the sponsors, which include Nielsen and Foyles, and the winners of each category will be announced at the PPC Annual Awards dinner on 5th March 2014.

The full shortlists