At Convert Culture, we provide a range of strategic services tailored for publishers to fully harness the power of social intelligence. Our expertise helps publishing teams unlock valuable audience insights to drive campaigns, enhance engagement, and boost book sales.
Genista Tate-Alexander, Bloomsbury Head of Marketing
“Caroline has conducted brilliant market research for some of our top authors, which has really cut to the heart of how to reach the best audiences for our books.”
Laura Willis, Marketing & Communications Director, Quadrille (Penguin Random House)
“Caroline’s approach to audience research is incredibly innovative; she doesn’t just analyse data—she brings it to life in ways that are both insightful and actionable for the team.”
Sam Lachter, Operations Manager, Granta Magazine
“Engaging, creative, and highly dedicated, Caroline built an in-depth audience profile to shape our strategy. A pleasure to work with—highly recommended!”
About Us
Founded in 2023 by Caroline Butler, Convert Culture helps publishers build stronger, more direct relationships with their readers. We've worked with multiple independent major publishing houses on numerous research campaigns for bestsellers in fiction and nonfiction, drawing on an extensive career in publishing spanning over a decade, across research, campaign delivery, and training.
In 2024, Caroline became the first person from the arts and cultural sector to be named to the Social Intelligence Lab's prestigious Insider 50 list, recognised alongside leaders from brands like Ogilvy and Mattel. We were also nominated for Futurebook's Start Up of the Year award in 2025.
Joel Ricketts, MD, Ebury & Quadrille (Penguin Random House)
‘An incisive strategic thinker who helped shape and push forward our work across consumer insights, digital campaigns and many more areas. One of the strongest campaign marketers I have worked with.’
Marketing & Communities Director, Thames & Hudson
‘Caroline has a unique skillset; she conducted in-depth research into one of our core publishing areas, which is helping to inform our strategy and how we approach the marketing for the list.
Her insights-driven approach is grounded in deep digital research and offered many surprising points for us to take forward in our work.’
Services We Offer to Publishers
1. Audience Development
Sometimes this is short and targeted — working out the positioning and audience for a specific book, to reach the readers most likely to want it. Other times, it's about using audience data for smarter paid targeting — sharper lookalikes, more efficient spend. Where it's relevant we are increasingly also helping teams to develop the strategy to progress audiences onto direct relationships, like email and WhatsApp, scaling communities quickly that you can return to again and again. Get in touch if that's of interest.
2. Audience Research
Audience development is often supported by audience research. Sometimes that's at a category level. Just as often, it's book by book. We often come in at paperback stage, or to look at a key title, building a piece of social intelligence research that shapes how best to connect with that book's audience. Once the insights are pulled together, we present them back to the team as a workshop — a chance to get departments aligned and pool ideas around what we know about the audience, to help shape a strategy that drives success.
We have often worked in non-fiction across categories like smart thinking and wellbeing. A major piece of cookery research earned global recognition within the social intelligence and research community. However, this approach applies just as well in fiction — we've conducted audience research for Sarah J. Maas, and literary fiction audience work for Granta.
3. Workshops and Masterclasses
What sets our training apart is that it's genuinely bespoke. Even for something that sounds straightforward — Meta ad training, say — we start with stakeholder interviews, so we understand the business, the strategy, and the audiences a team is actually working with before we train them. That means teams don't just learn how to build an ad; they learn which tactics within a platform like Meta actually work for their specific goals and audience. Every session is backed by supporting documents and planning tools the team can keep using after we've left the room.
We cover both the fundamentals — digital advertising and data-driven marketing — and the strategic shift we think publishers now need to make: building first-party data techniques.
Sessions with Quarto, National Book Tokens, Thames & Hudson, and Granta Books have been instrumental in developing cohesive strategies for campaign planning and advertising.
For teams starting to use AI tools, we also offer masterclasses on how to use them to support campaign work and planning. Many teams are handed these tools with little guidance on how to actually use them well — get in touch if that's of interest.
4. Campaign Support
We also offer campaign support for publishers — stepping in to run a campaign end-to-end, or taking on a specific element for a team that's already stretched. Having run busy in-house teams ourselves, we know how much extra work a freelancer can create if they need constant hand-holding — so we focus on being genuinely easy to hand things over to, freeing up your team rather than adding to their workload. We've earned numerous BMS awards for this work, both as a consultancy and in-house at Penguin. You can find out more about our experience here. You can find out more about our experience here.
Our Mission
Our mission is to help publishers understand their audiences and use that understanding well — whether that's sharpening how a single book or genre is positioned, or building the kind of direct, lasting relationships most publishers haven't yet tapped into. Either way, it's grounded in real research and evidence, and shaped into strategies and campaigns that are genuinely engaging.
Ready to explore working together? Book a call.
