Summer Reading Challenge Throwback
Each season, we pull our biggest and best client titles and channel their individual star-power into one hugely amazing reading campaign. What you might not know is that these campaigns all stemmed from the Summer Reading Challenge. Remember how back in grade school, you’d get a “summer reading list” each year from your teacher? This brilliant memory from our CEO sparked what has become our biggest campaign series ever.
In honor of #BookSparksTurns10 and the #SRC2019 launch this month, we’re looking back at past Summer Reading Challenges to see everything that happened in order for us to get to the amazing place we’re at now.
#SRC2009: Your Summer Reading List
The first summer reading challenge was nothing more than a blog post by BookSparks founder & CEO Crystal Patriarche with the books that she was most excited about reading that summer (which of course included a few of her clients!). The post included The Family Man by Elinor Lipman, Dark Places by Gillian Flynn and Follow Me by Joanna Scott.
#SRC2011: Summer Reading
The 2011 Summer Reading Challenge was the first year that we partnered with two fellow traditional publicity firms: Get Red PR and Little Bird Publicity. The lineup featured 12 books plus three “PR Picks” from each of the three publicity firms involved.
#SRC2012: Summer Reading Menu for Every Reader’s Tastes
The 2012 Summer Reading Challenge was the first of the themed SRCs our community has come to love. It featured a hot lineup in a fun menu-style way, encouraging readers to order based on their reading tastes and preferences.
#SRC2014: Read More Books
#1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Giffin helped us kick off the 2014 BookSparks Summer Reading Challenge. This was the first campaign where we partnered with a team of book bloggers to serve as our campaign ambassadors and the result was a social media campaign of epic proportions.
#SRC2015: Summer Reading and Travel Challenge
The 2015 Summer Reading and Travel Challenge continued to shine a light on our fantastic blogging community with nearly 250 bloggers participating in the challenge. The lineup included authors like Taylor Jenkins Reid, Jane Green and Alice Eve Cohen.
#SRC2016: Best Summer Ever
Our 2016 Summer Reading Challenge had incredible coverage with features by Brit + Co, Redbook, InStyle, Us Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, People and more.
#SRC2017: Summer of Secrets
The Summer Reading Challenge 2017 had a lineup so big we couldn’t spill all the details at once. We revealed each book in the lineup one-by-one all summer long, perfectly aligning with two of our biggest client books that summer: Paula Hawkins’s Into the Water and Mary Kubica’s Every Last Lie.
#YASRC2018: Read by the Sea
We had our first YA Summer Reading Challenge with the hottest young adult titles of the summer in 2018. We had an absolutely mer-mazing lineup that our team of 20 bloggers dove right into.
#SRC2018: Margareadaville
BookSparks partnered with POPSUGAR for the 2018 Summer Reading Challenge. This was our biggest and most diverse challenge yet, and our team of bookstagrammers read along with us all summer-long with the hottest books from the biggest authors.
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