Today 42% of all online women and 13% of all online men use Pinterest. Those numbers make Pinterest one of the world’s most popular social networking sites — and they’re attracting publishers hoping to reach more readers.
In case you’re not familiar with Pinterest, it’s a virtual pin board where you can pin images from other sites, linking back to the original source. Other users can re-pin those images to their boards, thus sharing it with their followers. Just like Facebook or Twitter, it can be a great way to attract new audiences.
To give you a sense of how publishers are using Pinterest — and to provide inspiration for your own Pinterest use — we collected 16 examples from publishers’ Pinterest boards below.
The publisher Pinterest boards that we selected each have their own content strategies, executed with unique goals in mind. Although we don’t have metrics on each campaign’s performance, we hope these examples can provide inspiration for book marketers, publishing houses, literary agencies, publicists, and authors alike who decide to experiment with Pinterest.
Note that in each example below, you can click on the publisher’s name to go to their main Pinterest profile, and click on the image to navigate directly to the board shown in the screenshot.
Kensington Publishing Corp. – Genre themed boards
Kensington has created a separate board for each of their sub-genres, and also provides recommendations for reading groups and other literary themes via individual boards.
Penguin Random House – Book recommendations
Many of the publishing houses, including Penguin Random House, have a board for sharing the top book recommendations from their imprints.
Simon & Schuster – Dedicated blog promotion
Simon & Schuster created a Tips on Healthy Living blog. Each post on this blog shares valuable and educational information about health and fitness, and promotes a relevant book at the bottom of the article. This Pinterest board is dedicated to sharing tips from this blog. This is a great example of using content marketing to promote books.
HarperCollins – Relevant book suggestions
HarperCollins created this popular Pinterest board for fans of Downton Abbey, so people searching for Downton Abbey might find this board featuring books that suit their interests.
Bloomsbury Publishing – Individual book boards
Bloomsbury has created several boards dedicated to specific books that fans can follow, containing contest news, sneak peeks, and bonus content.
Harlequin Books – Discount alerts
Harlequin has a board dedicated to alerting followers to sales and free giveaways for their books.
DK Books – Interactive content
DK Books created a board containing downloadable and printable activity sheets for kids, each with a tie-in to one of their books.
Candlewick Press – Socially relevant campaign
Candlewick Press created a board dedicated to the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign, showing how they support the movement by publishing books with diverse characters.
Scholastic – Shareable content
Scholastic created holiday cards that anyone could send to their friends, each with a tie-in to one of their books. They compiled these cards on one Pinterest board.
Disney Hyperion – Sneak peeks of upcoming titles
Disney Hyperion created a board dedicated to sneak peeks and excerpts from their upcoming releases to build buzz early.
Macmillan Kids – Quotes and fan art
Macmillan Kids created several boards dedicated to specific books, each including visual quotes from the book and fan art.
Tor Books – Pictures from events
Tor created a board to showcase their authors’ and books’ presence at popular conferences and events.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books – Book trailers
HMH created a board dedicated to displaying their book trailers, so readers could easily find all of them in one place.
Chronicle Books – Relevant lifestyle tips
The Chronicle Books Blog features articles on style, food, design, culture, DIY, and more, and each article has a tie-in to one of the books they’ve published. To drive traffic, they create unique Pinterest boards for each individual blog post.
Little, Brown and Company – Fun bookish tie-ins
Every publisher on this list created boards that weren’t self promotional, including this fun board from Little, Brown showcasing fashion items with a bookish theme.
Crown Publishing – Animals with books
Animals are a popular theme across publishers’ Pinterest boards, and here’s a cute example from Crown.
What are your favorite boards from publishing houses? What would you like to see them pin more of? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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