NYT Bestselling Book Campaign
Promotional Book Trailer featured on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday
Nicholas Kramer
Campaign Credits:
Publisher: Convergent, a Random House imprint
Creative Director: Nicholas Kramer
Campaign Lead: Ben Keesey
Film Credits:
Written and Directed by Nicholas Kramer
Videography by Patrick Gal-Szabo
Original Music by Dan Lee / Co-Audio Productions
Partnering with Convergent (A Random House imprint), we set out to establish a classic read, a book that would rise with a slow burn rather than a flash. Instead of promote the book as a product, we focused on creating stories that taught its primary themes. It became Convergent’s top seller in its first year and hit #11 on NYT within its first month. The promotional trailer was a named an Oprah favorite and featured on Super Soul Sunday.
Key Challenge
For over four decades Richard Rohr has been distilling complex theology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and other discplines for the everyday reader with little care for academic convention. With this book, which Richard describes as his most important, we wanted his rigorous scholarship to be more visible to present it not only as readable theology, but also as a research tool accepted in academic circles.
The book also needed to bridge a large demographic split in readership: 65+ liberal catholics and 20-40 year-old post-evangelical “spiritual but not religious” millennials. We needed something to show the relevancy of the message to a younger audience without alienating the older generation with something “too new.”
Approach
Although the author was resistant at first, we included footnotes in the book (previous books had not) and rather than a promotional website, we created a “resource guide” that could be returned to again and again, year after year. The website is filled with hours of video, responses to common divergent opinions, a visual explanation of the tradition’s lineage, and more. It received continual and increasing engagement through the book’s paperback release 1 year later.
To introduce the book to a younger audience, we launched a podcast alongside the book featuring Richard in conversation with two millennials. This was the first time Richard was heard in a context other than lecture and with a familiarity that invite jokes and personal stories. It rose to #1 on Apple’s Spirituality podcast chart within it’s first month.
Finally, in order to emphasize the relational impact of the book, we held an in-person conference in Albuquerque for 5k attendees. The large convention center room was designed with an art gallery entryway and all attendees were seated around tables of small groups to increase a feeling of intimacy.
My role included overseeing all creative, developing the content for and designing the website, writing and directing the promotional trailer, co-designing the book cover with the publisher, photographing the author, consulting on book title and subtitle, and directing socials.