June was Pride Month! Read on to find out how Penguin Random House celebrated Pride around the company, from in-person events to book lists highlighting queer voices.
Penguin Publishing Group
Penguin Publishing Group celebrated Pride Month this year with a new campaign called Pillars of Pride, designed to showcase how Pride means so many different things to people. Each week of the month focused on a different core “pillar” of Pride. Week one focused on activism and included a partnership with and a $2,000 donation to the Audre Lorde Project. Week two was about free expression, featuring a partnership with BookTokker @zoes_reads, who shared some of her favorite queer reads, music, bookstores, coffee shops, and more ideas to honor all the ways queer people express themselves. Week three’s theme was love and relationships, celebrating the different manifestations of love among queer people with a reading roundup from BookTokker @booksthatslay. Week four concluded the month with a focus on self-care. We partnered with the gender-inclusive skincare brand good light for a self-care giveaway and book swap event, which took place on June 23 at Mood Ring.
Random House Children’s Books
Random House Children’s Books ran a digital-forward campaign for Pride Month this year. We celebrated Pride in our stories by elevating a wide range of titles for readers of all ages, from board books to young adult fiction. Titles were featured on our dedicated Pride splash webpage, which served as a hub for parents and gatekeepers to browse and discover books written by LGBTQIA+ creators and/or featuring LGBTQIA+ characters. The campaign included paid social media advertising on Facebook and Instagram all month for both young readers and young adult books. The advertising was supported with robust organic promotion, including email marketing and social media across the RH Kids and Underlined channels with dedicated content including video, round-ups, author guest posts, and more. School & Library Marketing promoted LGBTQIA+ books and resources for teachers and librarians at in-person and virtual events and through the Random House Teacher & Librarian newsletter, website, and social media channels.
Penguin Random House Audio
At Penguin Random House Audio, we #ListenWithPride! We celebrated Pride Month with audiobooks featuring LGBTQIA+ authors, narrators, characters, and storylines for all ages on our landing site. We updated our social accounts with cover images that highlighted Pride Month titles including Coming Home, Blood on the Tide, and The Guncle Abroad on PRHAudio, and Dear Wendy, Gorgeously Me!, and Every Time You Hear That Song on Listening Library.
Twice per week, we highlighted on our social accounts curated playlists featuring different Pride Month categories, such as Queer Fiction, Trans and Nonbinary Characters, Queer Authors of Color, and more, featuring more than sixty-five titles. We promoted Pride Month–themed blog posts that focused on kids & teens or romance titles. Our PRH Audio influencer @Sally_Reputation created a YA Pride Month Listens TikTok and Reels video. Lastly, we curated a collection on the PRH Audio app featuring twenty of our favorite titles, which we highlighted to our influencers in our monthly outreach email.
Crown Publishing Group
We celebrated Pride by showcasing titles written by authors in the LGBTQIA+ community! We kicked off the month with a book stack to highlight the titles we would feature throughout the month, and then nearly every week, we shared a lifestyle photo of a specific book, plus a selected quote from that title that speaks to the author’s experience as a part of the LGBTQIA+ community. Most recently, we posted about Olympic figure skater Gracie Gold, who wrote about being asked to hide her bisexuality. We shared these posts widely across our channels. Working in concert with corporate Pride initiatives, we also drove our audiences to the Pride In Your Words landing page. We were excited to see our followers engage positively with our content!
Random House Publishing Group
The Random House Publishing Group led an organic channel-driven campaign across email marketing and social media platforms. Although Pride campaigns are heaviest in June, the RHPG consumer engagement teams promote our queer authors throughout the year across about twenty email programs and social platforms including Instagram, Facebook, and X. Social activations in June (to 600k followers) included quotes from queer authors such as Prentis Hemphill; a giveaway with partners across a variety of genres, including titles such as The Spare Room by Andrea Bartz, Oye by Melissa Mogollon, A Sweet Sting of Salt by Rose Sutherland, and more; and dedicated posts for titles such as Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg. In email marketing, we followed a slightly different approach by including books by queer authors in our largest email program, the Random House List; our book club program, Random House Book Club; and several imprint-specific programs, ultimately reaching 140k subscribers.
Consumer Marketing
The Consumer Marketing team celebrated Pride this year with the third edition of our annual Pride In Your Words zine. The zine featured excerpts from queer authors, spotlights on queer book clubs and banned books, an LGBTQIA+ reading list, and an exclusive sticker set celebrating queer stories, commissioned from artists at the queer-owned and -operated High Hopes Tattoo. We celebrated the zine’s release with readers at a launch party at Housing Works Bookstore in New York City. Attendees were invited to pick up free copies of the zine and stickers, make their own zines, and get a free (real!) tattoo from the artists of High Hopes Tattoo. The free event sold out in forty-eight hours, and sold out again after adding more tickets the following week. On the day of the event, some folks arrived four hours early in hopes of getting their free tattoo and snagging a copy of the zine! Check out the recap video at the link here, and download a free digital copy of the zine and sticker sheet—plus find hundreds of LGBTQIA+ book recommendations for Pride Month and year-round at PRH.com/PrideReads.