Beginning this week, Penguin Random House Canada staff are standing by on the Penguin Hotline, waiting to offer recommendations to Canadian readers stumped about which books to buy for their friends and family. It’s a program that PRH’s U.S. division launched successfully in December 2014, receiving 32,000 page views and 3,600 requests for recommendations during its first month alone. That program has continued in the U.S., and this week it launched north of the border just in time for Mother’s Day.
The idea for the Penguin Hotline originally came from the longstanding Butterball Turkey Hotline, where cooks can call a toll-free number to receive real-time advice about cooking their turkeys. Although Penguin’s isn’t a true telephone hotline, readers can fill out a form at PenguinHotline.com and answer a few simple questions — including age, interests, hobbies, and favorite writers — to receive personalized book recommendations from a real PRH Canada employee via e-mail. And not only will they suggest titles by any publisher (they’re not confined to their own titles), but everyone on staff is participating, including the CEO.
“Our goal really is to be 100% authentic and for our volunteers to recommend books they have personally read and loved, whether they are PRH Canada titles or not,” says Beth Lockley, PRH Canada’s v-p of marketing and publicity. “This is publisher-agnostic, as our goal is to recommend the very best books that match the interests.”
Lockley believes that people are searching for a personal connection during book shopping that Amazon algorithms can’t give them. When the U.S. version launched during the last holiday season, PRH even had authors such as Khaled Hosseini and Ken Follett provide tailored recommendations to some readers.
