Project archive: Series and imprint websites
Our most recent projects are shown first
The Hampshire United Trilogy
A website for a triology of books about football, with a spiritual dimension – by US-based independent author Alex Phakos.
“Working with Simon Appleby and Bookswarm was a positive experience, start to finish. He captured my vision perfectly and created an author website that is beautiful, professional, and truly me. Creative, responsive, and a joy to work with—Simon exceeded every expectation.
I don’t recommend people lightly. Simon is exactly the type of person you will never want to stop working with. Hire him today.”
Alex Phakos, author of The Hampshire United Trilogy
Reading Riddle
Reading Riddle is the home of Kate Cunningham, author of books for children and Young Adults, including the A Flea In History series, featuring Vlad Flea. Kate also specialises in school visits, encouraging children to learn about history through Vlad’s adventures.
The books are illustrated by Kate’s son, Sam Cunningham, and we make liberal use of his drawings in the site design.
“When I reached out to Simon about creating my new website I had two sites that had evolved in random and confusing ways, and I had absolutely no idea how to make sense of it all. Luckily Simon and his team did! I now have an amazing new site that I’m proud to shout about, and direct people to. I am still amazed every time I look at it, that a tangled mess could become such a thing of beauty. More than that, it made me consider what, and how, I communicate with my audiences and has really boosted the content and how I interconnect all the elements.”
Kate Cunningham, children’s author
Rocket Bird Books
An e-commerce website for newly launched picture book publisher Rocket Bird Books.
The Rocket Bird Crew has one mission: to turn children into booklovers before they’re able to read a single word. We work with the most amazing authors and illustrators (both well-known names and soon to be so) to create picture books that live beyond the page. Retold and remembered on bus journeys and woodland walks, these are stories to returned to time and time again. They will challenge, entertain and comfort.
Rock the Boat
Rock the Boat was launched in 2015 with the goal of publishing bold, diverse and thought-provoking books for children and Young Adults. We created an imprint site for Rock the Boat at the same time as we were redesigning the website of parent publisher Oneworld.
SmartLab Toys
Since 2004, SmartLab Toys’ STEAM products have earned more than 50 of the toy industry’s most prestigious awards, including multiple Oppenheim Platinum awards and the Good Housekeeping Best Toy awards. Now part of the Quarto Group, their passion is creating toys and games that inspire creative thinking while providing opportunities for children and adults to learn and play together.
Walter Foster
Brimming with tips, techniques, and step-by-step lessons, as well as practical exercises, unique projects, and creative prompts, Walter Foster’s engaging and inspiring books have helped people around the world discover their creative talents, learn new mediums, and achieve their artistic goals. This new website showcases their books as well as providing a wealth of additional inspiration and resources through the Art Studio.
Revise SQE
Revise SQE books have one purpose in mind – helping students pass the new SQE1 law exam. They focus only on the topics you’ll be assessed on, making sure that you don’t spend time on unnecessary subject matter, and they will prepare students for the multiple-choice questions they’ll face in SQE1 and show how to answer them successfully.
“Right from the very first phone conversation I felt I had an ally in Simon. He wanted to understand what we were about, how our market worked, what the priorities were, how quickly we wanted to be up and running, and he created a plan to deliver it on time and cost-effectively. Once we were underway progress was good, and the Bookswarm team were helpful and responsive, happy to engage in robust debate about design and functionality. The finished product is excellent and has been extremely well received by authors and prospective customers. Highly recommended!”
Jonathan Harris, Director, Fink Publishing
Pequeño&Grande
Spanish language version of Little People, Big Dreams, created for the Spanish publishers Alba Editorial. The site includes design and technical variations from the original US / UK site.
Woodville Parish Council
Probably best to let author Mark Stay explain this one! Here goes…
“What the blinking flip is the Woodville Parish Council you might ask (not unreasonably)?
Woodville Village is the setting for my new Witches of Woodville books, and not a completely made up place, no siree. It is here that you will find everything you need to know (or at least everything we’re allowed to tell you) about the strange goings on in the village of Woodville.
On the Notice Board you’ll find all the latest blogs from me. Sign-up and join the Village Library for free eBooks. Pop into the Village Bookshop to buy any of my books. And drop me a line via Writers’ Notes.”
We tried to design what we thought a website might look like if the technology had existed in about 1940 – which was great fun!
Flint
Flint is a new imprint from The History Press dedicated to publishing non-fiction books that spark. We have created a simple Divi-based site to showcase the books and provide a blogging platform and data capture mechanism independent of the main publisher website.
Little People, Big Dreams
Bookswarm has created a new digital home for Little People, BIG DREAMS, the best-selling biography series by Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara.
Users can discover the lives of outstanding people, from designers and artists to scientists and activists. All of them achieved incredible things, yet each began life as a child with a dream. Told as a story, with a facts and photos section at the back, this sweet series for kids celebrates triumph over adversity through some of history’s favorite characters.
The Prime Trilogy
Set in an alternate universe, The Prime Trilogy is a gritty, albeit comedic coming of age tale that poses a serious question, “Could the greatest heroes from inspired texts and world mythology, even begin to fill the shoes of a modern teen?”
Orchard Series Books
Hachette Children’s asked us to create a framework within which it was possible to set up microsites for a number of different middle-grade children’s series, including Beast Quest, Rainbow Magic and Unicorn Magic – with many of these series running to hundreds of titles.
The brief was to allow the client to create each new site and control the look and feel without requiring any design or technical input from us, which we achieved by setting the site to use a range of design parameters, including masthead images, pre-defined typography styles and numerous colour options. The result is a scaleable solution where a new website can be set up very quickly, using only a handful of design assets that are produced by the in-house team, and including a full book listing, organised by series and sub-series.
Orchard Series Books has launched with four series, with a number of additional series sites due to launch soon.
Awesome Reads
Awesome Reads believe reading should be a fun, entertaining, and life-long pursuit. In short, it should be awesome.
We enjoyed making this simple website for Awesome Reads. And it meant we got to say ‘awesome’ a lot. Which was… awesome.
Princess Ponies
The Princess Ponies books are written to give adventure-loving little girls an alternative to Barbie and Disney Princesses. The heroine of the series, Philippa (Pippa) MacDonald, is a head-strong action heroine who makes friends and strives to save the day.
We created a new microsite for Princess Ponies using WordPress and the Divi Builder plugin.
Hodderscape
Updating the Hodderscape blog to use a new version of the brand, with a new-look mascot (Pickwick the dodo).
This was an update to a previous iteration of the site, which we created several years before, with the same underlying architecture.
“When a project comes along I can work with Bookswarm on I immediately feel more relaxed. Communication on projects from start to finish is outstanding (and so important) which helps to move things along at a good pace and get the results we all want. Simon is always on hand for questions and advice throughout the project, and is incredibly tolerant of the unrelenting change requests and tweaks from our many stakeholders.”
Amy Dolman, Digital Marketing Manager, Hodder & Stoughton
Grishaverse UK
Data capture landing page for UK fans of Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse.
Introducing
Migration of the site for Icon Books’ well known series of graphic guides to a WordPress back-end, while retaining the existing look and feel.
Updated in 2017 to celebrate Icon’s 25th birthday and tie-in with the look and feel of their main website.
Wildfire
Wildfire is part of the Headline Division of Hachette UK, a vibrant and dynamic publishing company which is also one of the biggest in the world. Wildfire publish a broad range of quality commercial fiction and non-fiction.
BKMRK
Young Adult portal website for Hachette Children’s. We took over the construction of this project part-way through and brought it to a successful conclusion, using a brand identity and outline designs provided by another agency.
Faber Social
A new iteration of Faber Social – books and music at the heart of independent publishing.
The Future Bookshelf
A home on the web for Hodder & Stoughton’s range of books for writers – including a fully content-managed home page feature the client can update each month.
Black Horse Westerns
A new website for the Black Horse imprint, which in 2015 became part of The Crowood Press, a family owned publishing house, which is committed to continuing with the Black Horse imprint and to working with both new and established authors and editors.
Chambers
We updated the design of the existing Chambers website and migrated the underlying technology to WordPress for ease of management, whilst retaining the key features of the existing site: the dictionary search and Word Wizard.
H for History
H for History is the historical fiction and non-fiction community from Hodder & Stoughton, Headline and Quercus. Bookswarm designed and built this responsive website to allow both books and blog posts to be explored using a range of classifications, including Period and Genre.
“When a project comes along I can work with Bookswarm on I immediately feel more relaxed. Communication on projects from start to finish is outstanding (and so important) which helps to move things along at a good pace and get the results we all want. Simon is always on hand for questions and advice throughout the project, and is incredibly tolerant of the unrelenting change requests and tweaks from our many stakeholders.”
Amy Dolman, Digital Marketing Manager, Hodder & Stoughton
Hoopoefiction.com
Website for Hoopoe, the new fiction imprint of The American University in Cairo Press.
“Working with Bookswarm on both the branding and website development of our new fiction imprint, Hoopoe, was both a pleasure and a breeze. The Bookswarm team understood our needs with least effort and promptly came back with ideas that were just what we were looking for but could not conceptualize ourselves. They combine technical experience with creativity, and love for books with a deep understanding of the publishing industry. You can’t wish for a more innovative, supportive, and responsive team!”
Tarek El-Elaimy, Marketing Manager for North America, The American University in Cairo Press
Six Tudor Queens
Campaign microsite for Alison Weir’s new Six Tudor Queens series, which will encompass all six of the wives of Henry VIII in six books.
Rebel of the Sands
Parallax-based microsite for Alwyn Hamilton’s debut YA novel The Rebel of the Sands, published by Faber. The site is designed to evolve and be updated as future books in the trilogy are published. Features include a video gallery and a social media aggregator which gathers all Twitter content using the hashtag #rebelsands.
Post-launch, we updated the site for the second book in the series, Hero at the Fall.
Modern Books
Modern Books is a new imprint which publishes beautiful and original non-fiction for mindful and creative living.
Kelpies
Kelpies are Scottish books for children everywhere. The Kelpies imprint is published by independent publishing company Floris Books, which is based in Edinburgh, Scotland. We created this responsive, e-commerce site for them using WordPress and WooCommerce, integrating with their distributor, Booksource, to seamlessly send out orders.
Predator Cities
Microsite for Philip Reeve’s genre-busting Predator Cities series, which begins with Mortal Engines.
Tinder Press
Blog and catalogue website for Headline’s fiction imprint Tinder Press, a place where classy, intelligent writing thrives.
Faber Modern Classics
‘Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.’
Alan Bennett
A responsive one-page microsite for the launch of Faber’s Modern Classics list. Designed and built in one week from initial briefing.
The Hunger Games
Creation of a new responsive website for The Hunger Games books, for Scholastic Children’s Books UK. Scholastic can set the site to use either the Classic or Rebel theme.
“The team at Bookswarm were brilliant and totally understood what we needed out of The Hunger Games website. Simon was quick to point out things that could work better even from the first chat and was tweaking and fixing things even after the job was complete. The whole process couldn’t have been smoother and that’s all down to Bookswarm’s attention to detail, great ideas and endless patience.”
Fi Evans, Marketing Manager, Scholastic UK
Jo Simmons / Pip Street
Author website for Jo Simmons, creator of 7+ children’s series Pip Street.
“Bookswarm have a strong understanding of the role websites play within the publishing industry and, specifically in my case, within the world of children’s fiction. They created a site that perfectly captured the playfulness of my stories, was easy to navigate, colourful and intelligently designed.”
Jo Simmons, author of the Pip Street books for children (Scholastic)
The Thought Fox
Responsive re-design of Faber’s blog, which is named after a famous poem by Ted Hughes. Back in 2009 Simon worked on the first iteration of this project – technology has moved on since then, but the appetite for quality content on the web has not diminished!
Little Histories
WordPress-based site for Yale University Press that includes integration with both the Little Histories Twitter feed and with relevant articles from the YUP blog, as well as a database of some of the remarkable people featured in this expanding series of books.
Faber Finds Blog
Blog design for Faber’s print-on-demand imprint Faber Finds
Saltyard Books
Two generations of this website for Hodder & Stoughton non-fiction imprint Saltyard Books
