September 30 live author feature
A successful live featuring conversation recorded for the HaySuccess reading community on September 30, 2026.
Portfolio
What the festival is working on right now
The festival is new, so this portfolio shows current and upcoming work only — no invented history.
Live featuring
Featured author sessions
Goldilocks & Aden live feature
A recorded author presentation and book discussion shared across our festival channels.
Campaign case study
Against the Machine: Luddites — Brian Van Norman
A full promotional set produced for Brian Van Norman's novel: a headline campaign banner, seasonal creative for Halloween and festival-of-lights placements, and clean 3D mockups of the hardcover, paperback and Kindle editions. The same treatment is available to authors on both participation tracks.
Current participants
Upcoming featured authors
Tobi Nwosu
Season of Sandstorm
Fiction
Kenya
Ngozi Yakubu
A Falling Leaves
Historical Fiction
Ghana
Ivy Achebe
Songs of Silent River
Poetry
Trinidad & Tobago
Grace Reid
Letters to Silent River
Essays
Zimbabwe
Henry Yakubu
Season of Lagoon
Historical Fiction
Ghana
Amina Achebe
Whispers of Distant Drum
Poetry
Zimbabwe
Ismail Idris
Echoes of Golden Hour
Thriller
Zimbabwe
Simone Bello
When the Lighthouse
Poetry
Zimbabwe
Ronke Grant
Chasing Blue Notebook
Romance
Philippines
Zara Yakubu
Notes from Old Market
Children's Literature
India
Farida Onyeka
Daughters of Quiet Rain
Thriller
Egypt
Martin Vega
Notes from Long Road
Thriller
Kenya
Social media proof
Reach, engagement and sales we can show
Promotion is only worth what it can prove. Below are unedited screens from the channels and dashboards behind our author campaigns: spotlight posts and their engagement, paid discovery performance, and the royalty reports authors see on their own side afterwards. Numbers move in that order — a post earns attention, attention becomes clicks, clicks become orders and page reads. We publish the modest months as well as the strong ones, because a promotion partner who only shows peaks is showing you a highlight reel, not a method.
Featured book spotlight — Delicious Surrender
Luce Sutherland · Dominant Billionaire Series · February feature
A full-width romance spotlight banner built for Facebook and Pinterest placements. Trope icons do the selling — boss billionaire, sunshine heroine, lovers to enemies — so a romance reader can qualify the book in two seconds, then meet the pull quote and the buy button without leaving the image.
Campaign banner — The Unseen Hand of Peter Gyges
R.L. Richards · suspense thriller · hero banner
The lead creative for R.L. Richards' thriller campaign. One promise line at the top, four consequence beats along the bottom and a quote block that reads like jacket copy — the same layout we reuse across page headers, ad sets and newsletter placements so the book looks identical everywhere a reader meets it.
Ad variant — The Unseen Hand of Peter Gyges
Second creative · icon-led feature list
Every campaign ships at least two creatives so performance can be compared rather than guessed. This variant strips the scene back to typography and gold chess iconography, and it is the version we push into paid discovery once the organic banner has proven its hook.
Format mockup — paperback, tablet and phone
Retail-ready product render
Readers buy in three formats, so we show three. Clean device and paperback renders like this go into retailer A+ content, review-site features and author media kits, signalling a professionally produced title before a single page is read.
Facebook page — 28-day reach
57,445 views · 2.3K engagement · +61 net followers
The page dashboard for a full promotion cycle. Views peak on spotlight days and settle between them, which is exactly what a scheduled feature calendar should look like. Follower growth stays positive even in a quieter month, because every campaign leaves an audience behind for the next author.
Facebook insights — interactions by format
53,399 views · 694 interactions · photo posts leading
Breaking interactions down by format tells us where to put an author's budget. Cover-led photo posts carry 475 of 694 interactions, so book art and hook copy are built first and link posts follow once readers already know the title.
Facebook insights — audience composition
1,158 followers · +5.9% in 28 days · 57% women
A reader audience, not a vanity list. The 65+ and 25–34 bands together make up close to half the page, which is why mystery, faith and family-saga titles perform so consistently in our spotlights.
Facebook insights — follower growth curve
1,158 total followers · +8.2% · 64 net new
Growth measured day by day rather than as one headline number. The steady staircase shows audience built through repeated author features instead of a single viral post that disappears the following week.
Facebook insights — top locations and active hours
59.2% United States · 16.7% Nigeria · peak Mon–Wed
Where our readers are and when they show up. Spotlights are scheduled into the Monday-to-Wednesday window and weighted toward US and UK buying hours, so an author's feature lands when the audience is actually reading.
Spotlight graphic — No Pit So Deep
James Nathaniel Miller II · Cody Musket Series
An author-and-title card built for feed scrolling: portrait, credential line, one thriller hook and a scannable QR straight to the retail page. This is the format we publish across the page and partner reading groups.
Book club selection — The Girl in the Bird
Christine Talley · San Francisco Book Club pick
Christine Talley's romance was chosen as a featured read by a partner reading group. The card explains why the club selected it in four lines, which converts far better than a blurb because readers see other readers vouching.
Reading party feature — Un Cuerpo en el Búnker
Ramón Bassons Baña · Houston Reading Parties
A Spanish-language spotlight run for the Houston reading circle. We publish in an author's own language when the readership calls for it, with premise, structure and stakes laid out before the call to investigate.
Author profile card — Ramón Bassons Baña
Author bio · review pull quotes · social handles
Every campaign includes an author card as well as a book card. Bio, critical quotes, handles and a QR to the store give readers a person to follow after the promotion window closes.
Spotlight post — Divine Protection
186 views · 78 reposts · 37 replies
Curtis Pennyman's Divine Protection carried through the Classics Book Club spotlight feature. Cover art, hook copy and a pinned thread ran together so readers met the premise before they met the buy link.
Spotlight post — The Journey Begins
146 likes · 94 reposts · 1,642 bookmarks
Cynthia Elder's maritime family saga posted with a single-line promise and a clean device mockup. The bookmark count is the signal we chase: readers saving a title to buy later.
Amazon Ads — sponsored book campaign
$1,634.98 sales · $638.36 spend · 85 orders · 39.04% ACOS
A live sponsored-ads build for a featured title, tracked from June through September. Spend scales only when daily sales follow — the August 25 snapshot shows $11.64 in spend producing $37.22 in sales, and every day of the campaign is reported at ad-group level so nothing is hidden.
Pinterest Ads — traffic campaign
4,199,050 impressions · 18,196 clicks · $0.90 CPC
A two-campaign traffic build showing how paid discovery is scaled once organic creative proves itself. Spend only follows a creative that already earns engagement.
Pinterest analytics — ad group performance
7,252 pin clicks · 21.28% engagement rate · $0.25 CPC
Ad-group level reporting across 35 rows. Every hook line is tracked separately so the winning sentence can be rolled into the next author's campaign.
KDP Royalties Estimator — multi-title month
$795.62 approximated royalties · 10 titles compared
Comparing ten books across a full month shows promotion lifting a catalogue, not a single lucky release. Daily bars stay steady rather than spiking once and collapsing.
KDP dashboard — month to date
$129.33 estimated royalties · 29 orders · 149 KENP pages
An early-month snapshot from a campaign still ramping. We publish the small numbers too — steady, verifiable movement matters more than one headline figure.
KDP dashboard — mobile view
$281.63 estimated royalties · 70 orders · 2,053 KENP pages
Page-reads climbing alongside orders is the healthiest sign in a promotion: readers are finishing the book, which drives reviews and word of mouth.
Community share — royalties milestone
$1,016.37 across 5 books · shared publicly
Authors share their own results in the community channels we run. Screens like this come from the writers themselves, not from our reporting.
Results vary by genre, price point, category and how ready a book is when a campaign starts. Nothing here is a guarantee of earnings — it is a record of what the same promotional process has produced for the titles we have run it on.
Services
Book marketing services and packages
Every campaign above was built from the same service set — social media management, email marketing, trailers, covers, press, reviews, sales copy and research — bundled into our Basic, Standard and Premium packages.
View services & pricingPreviously featured
Swordheart — T. Kingfisher
Fantasy · Action & Adventure · Book 1 of 2 · Bramble · 448 pages · English
An Instant New York Times, USA Today and Indie bestseller, featured in our fantasy spotlight cycle earlier this season. This deluxe hardcover edition carries turquoise sprayed edges, a foil-stamped casing and custom endpapers — the kind of production that rewards cover-led social creative.
The delightful charm of The Princess Bride meets the bodyguard romance of From Blood and Ash in this cozy fantasy romance. Halla has unexpectedly inherited the estate of a wealthy uncle — along with money-hungry relatives full of devious plans to wrest the inheritance away from her. Locked in her bedroom, she unsheathes the ancient sword that has been collecting dust on the wall, and a man appears: Sarkis, an immortal warrior imprisoned in enchanted steel and sworn to protect whoever wields the blade. For a most unusual wielder he finds himself fending off not grand armies and assassins but kindly-seeming bandits, roving inquisitors and her own in-laws. As Halla and Sarkis grow closer, they overlook the biggest threat of all — the sword itself.
Rated 4.5 out of 5 from 8,622 ratings · Editors' pick, Best Science Fiction & Fantasy · Audiobook narrated by Jesse Vilinsky.
Hardcover (deluxe)
$16.10 — list price $28.99
Paperback
$14.99
Kindle
$12.99
Audiobook
Included with membership trial
Previously featured
How To Write In Plain English — Nicole Foster
Writing & Reference · Amazon Best Seller · 136 pages · English
Featured in our craft-focused spotlight cycle, Nicole Foster's guide is a practical writing handbook that strips jargon out of everyday prose. It carries an Amazon Best Seller badge in Business Bibliographies & Indexes and holds a 4.7-star rating across 36 ratings — proof that clear, uncluttered craft books find their readers when the promise on the cover matches the advice inside.
The book walks readers through simple, proven techniques for writing that is easy to read and impossible to misunderstand, aimed at professionals who write at work and students who write to be understood.
Rated 4.7 out of 5 from 36 ratings · Amazon Best Seller in Business Bibliographies & Indexes · Published January 4, 2023.
Paperback
$12.99 — list price $19.99
Hardcover
$19.99
Print length
136 pages
Publisher language
English
In progress
Book promotions
Echoes of Crossroads
Dele Achebe
Songs of Crossroads
Sade Adewale
Return of the Northern Star
Martin Bassey
Sons of Iron Hills
Noah Rivera
Beyond the Sandstorm
Camila Bassey
Return of the Harmattan
Rebecca Oyelaran
Chasing Lagoon
Salma Thompson
Season of Sea Glass
Yemi Ibrahim
Recent projects
Programs we are running
Genre Spotlight Series
Rolling online exhibitions grouping participating titles by genre so readers can discover books they already love the shape of.
Author Interview Library
A growing archive of recorded interviews with participating authors, published on the festival channels.
First-Book Program
Dedicated promotion support for debut authors publishing their first title this season.
Reading Circles
Small moderated reader groups that discuss a featured title each cycle and feed questions into live sessions.
Media highlights
Coverage & announcements
Festival announcement
Launch of the HaySuccess Literary & Arts Festival and opening of author registration.
Participation call
Digital Placement ($250) and Virtual Participation ($400) tracks opened to international authors.
Author directory published
The first 100 confirmed participants listed with their titles.