The Work
We led the campaign by securing blanket media coverage across the tabloids with feature interviews running in the Mail on Sunday, Sunday Mirror, Daily Mirror and Daily Star, with interviews also appearing across women’s magazines including Heat, Best, New! and My Weekly and a four-page feature in OK! magazine. Melanie’s interview in the Sunday Mirror led to several other platforms including The Sun, Mail Online and Daily Mail running follow-up stories, while book reviews ran across outlets including Daily Mail and The Sun.
Melanie’s incredible rags to riches real-life story was used to secure Melanie interviews on national broadcast including BBC Breakfast, ITV 1: Zoe Ball, BBC Radio 5 Live and Sky News.
For the book launch Midas managed a glittering guest list of over 100 people, which included celebrities Coleen Nolen, Stephanie Beacham, Gaynor Faye, Gillian Taylforth, Sherrie Hewson and Stephanie Waring. Our team organised for diarists from tabloid newspapers, magazines, LGBT media and newswires to attend the party and interview Melanie and the guests, these included: The Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Daily Star, Now, Heat, Woman, My Weekly, Gaystar News, Gaydio, Entertainment News and EFE.
We conducted a PR campaign around Melanie Blake, positioning her as a celebrity agent and business woman, securing interviews for her with BBC News TV: Word Life, Media Matters Podcast, Broadcast Magazine and The Bookseller magazine.
Melanie lives in London but hails from Manchester and we worked hard to ensure coverage in both cities landing interviews on local TV including ITV 1: London Tonight, ITV 1: Granada Reports, BBC Radio Manchester, BBC Radio London, Manchester Evening News and Metro newspaper.
As part of the campaign Midas PR secured wire interviews for Melanie Blake with the Press Association, Bangshowbiz, Entertainment News and EFE which were syndicated out nationally.
The Results
The campaign led to The Thunder Girls becoming an Amazon No.1 Bestseller in the Kindle charts for four weeks, selling over 10,000 copies in paperback over the first four weeks following publication reaching No.33 in paperback on the Amazon charts.
By selling over 4,000 copies in its first week alone, The Thunder Girls sold more copies than high profile authors with new novels out the same week including Maeve Binchy, Nadine Dorris and Devil Wears Prada author Lauren Weisberger in its launch week – a direct result of our publicity driven campaign.
The publicity resulted in more than
- 60 individual pieces of coverage
- Coverage in ten national newspapers
- 15 magazines
- 16 broadcast interviews
- 15 pieces of regional media
- 15 pieces of digital coverage
Melanie’s interview with BBC Online reached 22.5 million people and overall the campaign had a media reach of 118 million.