Literary Love

Cause UK specialise in promoting literary festivals, conventions, and awards.

Our literary portfolio has been led by director, Ann, a former bookseller, with a passion for all things books. As a trained and working journalist, she also uses her copywriting and feature writing skills for clients’ website copy, promotional material, event guides, speeches, and e-newsletters.

Criminally Good PR

From 2013-2019, Cause UK was the PR agency for Harrogate International Festivals.

One of our remits was helping position the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in the media as the hottest event of its kind, placing meaningful news and features in the national and international press.

We regularly secured broadcast on Sky News, BBC Breakfast, ITV, and BBC regional news, as well as prime time radio, such as Front Row and Saturday Live on BBC R4, and the Claudia Winkleman arts show on BBC R2.

We helped secure a media partnership with the Mail on Sunday; the Independent hailed Harrogate as wearing the crown for the UK’s bookiest town, and the Financial Times picked the festival as one of the best book events.

We placed dozens of features in consumer magazines, including iconic publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire and The Spectator, alongside major broadsheets including the Telegraph, Times, and Guardian, as well as BBC Online.

Internationally, stories ran as far afield as New Zealand, America, and Japan. See more here.

Since, we’ve worked with multiple literary clients, including Ilkley Literature Festival, the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA), and CrimeFest Bristol.

Poetic Licence

Cause UK has supported the longstanding and respected Ilkley Literature Festival for a number of years now, with a three-month media campaign around its annual October festival.

Ann gets to flex her feature writing muscles, and interviews a number of authors each year for features in target regional newspapers, such as the Telegraph & Argus and Yorkshire Post.

We also place stories in wider media. 2023, for example, saw 140 pieces of online coverage (excluding print and broadcast) with 1.71m estimated views. Highlights included a feature in the I newspaper, placing authors on Times Radio, and extensive support from the Yorkshire Post and BBC Leeds.

Is that a Dagger I see…

Cause UK has also worked for a number of years now with the Crime Writers Association (CWA) in London.

We recently announced its first non-white chair (Vaseem Khan) to press, with profile in the Guardian. Our main responsibility is announcing its annual prestigious Dagger Awards; the press around its Diamond Dagger winners in January 2024 led to 200+ media stories, including the Independent, Guardian, Daily Mail, Evening Standard, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL (see our blog: How to do Book PR? | Cause UK), resulting in a total audience reach of 180.6m.

We also helped re-launch its annual National Crime Reading Month in 2022 with a major feature in the Telegraph, featuring leading authors on the crime books that inspired them.

Buzzing Bristol

Cause UK is also proud to have represented CrimeFest for several years.

PR highlights have included positioning CrimeFest as thought leaders in the Bookseller, with comment pieces on their bursary for authors of colour; securing profile in the Guardian, Prospect magazine, the Express, BBC radio, ITV West, and placing authors on BBC Radio 4’s Good Read, Times Radio, alongside hosting several podcasters. In 2024’s convention, we were thrilled to secure Tim Adams from the Observer to attend, resulting in a 3-page feature.