What if you could prevent aging? What if you could stay healthier, longer? What if “getting older” was actually just a choice and not a genetic destiny?
These are the big questions that Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn works on every day – and that led to her Nobel Prize in 2009 for discovering telomeres’ role in the aging process. Co-authored with renowned health psychologist Dr. Elissa Epel, The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer is Drs. Blackburn and Epel's attempt to make this revolutionary science accessible.
Our task, working with Grand Central Publishing, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, was to get this message to the masses and fuel a successful book launch. Inspired by this brilliant team, we immediately set to work.
With two accomplished authors, we needed to focus on building a brand and a platform around The Telomere Effect itself. We turned this challenge into an opportunity by creating strong and active social media and email platforms that borrowed from the expertise of both principals. Our personality-driven content both bounced between the doctors, and well as often showed them together in harmony.
Big and bright content helped us share the important and revolutionary message behind The Telomere Effect. We kept the focus on mixing hard science with empowering motivation, and the payoff was an engaged and evangelical audience.
Pre-orders give a new book the best possible launching pad to catapult onto first-week bestseller lists. To that end, we developed and delivered engaging multimedia incentives for our early adopters and promoted this campaign to our audience in the weeks leading up to launch day.
The strategy was a hit, the content was a hit, and, ultimately, the book was a hit. Steadily climbing the Amazon Bestsellers rankings for weeks, once The Telomere Effect hit shelves it immediately shot onto the pages of the New York Times Bestseller List.
Selling books is great, and being named best social media campaign of the year by Sprout Social was pretty nice too, but the real reward here has been seeing how this book has shaped and changed the lives of those who pick it up. We’ve handed off the keys to this platform to the authors and their team now, but it has already helped them successfully launch a paperback and audiobook follow-up.
