We’ve been thinking about digital marketing a lot recently (more on how mastering digital: a toolkit for marketing books in Aotearoa, is progressing here).

We caught up with Tandem Collective, a global book marketing collective, which works with Bookstagrammers and BookTokers, to get their insights into the readalong, listenalong (and more) formats they’re using with publishers, authors, readers, teachers and influencers all over the world.

We’d love to hear any observations you have on the Aotearoa New Zealand Bookstagram and Booktok communities.

We’ve done a bit of research with book content creators in Australia and New Zealand (take a look at our infographic for an introduction to who book content creators are, where they’re creating online, what they’re reading and how they’re buying books, as well as using libraries and engaging with festivals).  

A few top line observations include:

• Instagram is the platform they are using most – that’s true across all age brackets

• When it comes to format, their preference is for paperback (though fantasy readers covet hardback editions)

• They buy books in bookshops (approximately 60% say they purchase a book ‘whenever they see a shop’) but they also buy second hand (25% said they ‘buy mostly second hand’)

• They’re keen library users (77% use their local library).

Fact sheets for publishers, librarians, festivals and booksellers — view the pdf here

Tell us a little about the readalong format

A readalong is a week-long activity on Instagram that gathers bookstagrammers together to celebrate a book, a series, or a selection of titles. The publishers we work with provide copies of the book (and sign offs on a few things) and we do the rest. That includes planning, production, and execution. We see strong engagement on Instagram through these campaigns – but importantly we also see book sales increases that can be connected directly back to the campaigns too.

Our philosophy is that micro-influencers are far more effective than macro, and can still deliver the same reach collectively. That’s particularly true on Instagram where accounts with large follower numbers tend to have lower engagement rates with their content.

Take a look at the table setting out engagement rates and follower counts for some of the creators we have worked with on campaigns.

So, what happens in a readalong?

We select a group of bookstagrammers and send them the book. We also send a series of questions and content creation prompts relating to particular points in the readalong reading schedule. We circulate a participant list and create an Instagram direct messaging group so everyone can meet, chat and get to know each other before kicking off reading.

Then … everybody reads the book (at the same time) chats about it and completes the prompts! The result is compelling content from passionate bookstagrammers celebrating the book and engaging other readers in it too.

The aim is to really immerse our readalong participants. For example, when we hosted a readalong for The Last Passenger we tapped into a character known as the Admiral: a commanding voice who delivers instructions to the ship’s passengers throughout the novel.

We used this character as our readalong Admiral. As our cohort of bookstagrammers were reading the book, every day at 6pm, we delivered a pre-recorded Whatsapp voice note with the next set of content creation instructions.  Take a look at the content prompts here.

At the end of the reading we had a final surprise in store. The Admiral’s last voice note handed over to author Will Dean for an additional creative challenge.

Does the format work for non-fiction?

An immersive participatory format is something that can work really well for a variety of formats and categories. We regularly host audiobook-based listenalongs, cookalongs for cookery books and work-outalongs for some of our fitness titles.

You can read a case study about a campaign we created for a non-fiction science book recently here on our website too. 

If you’d like to find out more about the work Tandem does or to get in touch take a look here.