Jenter på do or Girls in the bathroom

by Helene Jelsø Spanthus

Helene Jelsø Spanthus was an MA Publishing Media student at the Oxford International Centre for Publishing from 2019 to 2020. When she went back to Norway after Covid-19 hit, she was employed as a summer intern at Gyldendal Publishing. Due to some unforeseen challenges they needed help throughout 2020, so she stayed on, and in January 2021 was hired on a one-year contract as Head of PR and Marketing at the imprint Tiden Norsk Forlag. This is where the amazing project of Girls in the bathroom took place. 

'In January 2022 I started a new job as a communications associate at Gyldendal Publishing Group. Which luckily allows me to keep working on amazing projects such as Girls in the bathroom!

First some info about how Gyldendal’s goals for these projects. We work towards reaching new markets and new audiences. Particularly an audience that relies heavily on digital solutions for entertainment. We work with creators and help them engage with their audiences across platforms, and across formats beyond the book format. Jenter på do – Girls in the bathroom is a poetry collection written by Ida Lórien Ringdal, published by Tiden Norsk Forlag (imprint) in the fall of 2021. This author, with her modern style of poetry and feminist themes, attracts a female and sometimes younger audience. Therefore, we decided early on to focus our marketing efforts on Instagram and social media, which resulted in great feedback from established and new readers.

In order to reach a larger and even younger audience than we had on Instagram, we decided to make Girls in the bathroom into a Snapchat show. Gyldendal’s partnership with Snapchat allows us to create shows featured on the Discover page. As Snapchat is a highly visual platform, we worked on turning the traditional poetry collection into a visual form with animated illustration and audio, both music and voice over. In order to create a playful, impactful and entertaining show, we partnered up with a team of female creators: Sofie Frøysaa, a comedian and social activist, lent her voice to the show; the illustrations are by Nora Fikse a GIPHY artist whose work has been viewed over 60bn times, and the music is by R&B artist Farida. They are all strong voices in their field of art and women who use their platforms to promote equality and social justice.

Over 8 weeks, we published one episode per week containing one or more parts of the poems.

Long story short, the project is a success. We have reached our target demographic of those aged between 13 and 24, and we see the audience engage with the content, with more than 5.5k subscribers. Our initial goal of reaching 100,000 viewers in total was met after just one episode.

In 2020 Gyldendal published the world’s first Instagram-book, This stays between us, or @dbmo_2020, and engaged a whole new audience gravitating towards a more digital form of literature and entertainment.'

Edited by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 08 Feb 2022 around 12pm

Last edited: 03 03 2022