Simon & Schuster Children's Books Announces Partnership with Box of Awesome and Box of OMG

Simon and Schuster Children's Books UK today announced a partnership with Box of Awesome, a unique new initiative delivering boxes of free goodies to children across the UK. Described as 'a free Birchbox for kids', Box of Awesome aims to solve the discovery and noise problems faced by consumer companies targeting children and teenagers.

As well as collaborating with major brands aimed at the youth market, Box of Awesome has a policy of including a book in every box, to encourage a culture of reading amongst the target audience. The company has teamed up with Simon & Schuster Children's books to feature books from bestselling authors and series, including Zom-B by Darren Shan and Dork Diaries by Rachel Renee Russell.

Launched in February this year, Box of Awesome (aimed at both boys and girls) and its sister-product, Box of OMG (for girls only), has been met with a wildly enthusiastic response from the 8-14 year old community. Both boxes are advertised via a range of TV channels, but the company are also seeing a huge viral effect from word-of-mouth buzz and 'unboxing' videos posted by consumers online.

Dylan Collins, CEO of Box of Awesome, said: "The reaction to Box of Awesome has been pretty astonishing. During our Weekend of Awesome event, kids were claiming physical and digital boxes at a rate of one every fifteen seconds. Clearly we're solving a problem for our clients while also making kids very happy. By putting a book in every box, we can improve literacy in a way which continues to delight. We're incredibly excited to be working with Simon & Schuster on this."

Elisa Offord, Marketing & Publicity Director for children's books at Simon & Schuster, said "Box of Awesome and Box of OMG give us a platform to get some of our best books for tweens and teens straight into the hands of their target audience - a notoriously tricky age group to reach. We've selected books by our most popular authors who write series or have new titles coming out with Simon & Schuster in 2013, with the hope that the reader may discover the author and get hooked on the series and reading for pleasure."

There will be six boxes released per year under each of the two strands, to coincide with key seasonal activity such as back-to-school, Halloween and Christmas. Children and teenagers (or their parents) can sign up for a free physical and digital box of curated products from both established and new brands at www.boxofawesome.tv and www.boxofOMG.tv.

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