Apt Portfolio

John Murray came to us for ideas for James Frey, one of their best-selling authors.

In 2003, they published his debut work, A Million Little Pieces, which went on to sell millions of copies worldwide. Then in 2005, just as the follow-up, My Friend Leonard, was being published, and MLP was making it even bigger thanks to the support of Oprah Winfrey’s book club, The Smoking Gun website published a long list of queries about Frey’s supposedly factual ‘memoir’.

John Murray were looking for a way to capitalise on the ongoing publicity surrounding Frey’s work, to draw attention to themselves as his UK publisher, and to attract readers of A Million Little Pieces on to Frey’s follow-up works.

We built a website at james-frey.com (and co.uk) to encourage debate around Frey’s books, and to provide a focal point both for readers and for John Murray’s publicity.

The site includes long extracts from the books laid out to encourage commenting, as well as an updateable News & Events section. As part of our research we undertook a focus group of Frey’s fans and detractors, to see how they felt about the debate, and about the follow-up book, and included these videos on the site, as well as seeding them on YouTube to draw extra visitors to the site.

Client: James Spackman at John Murray.
Design by Charlie Hanson and James Bridle.
Programming by James Bridle.
Built using Wordpress.

Visit james-frey.com.