Happy Pub Day!

It's officially Halloween week (also known as "organized candy robbery day").

Send us your Halloween costume photos (bonus points if you dress as a book character)!

The best costume will get a shoutout in the newsletter!

This Week’s Treats:

• 📚 Author Talk with Sharon McMahon

•  📺 Creator Spotlight: Building in Public

• 📖 Gather Me by Glory Edim

This Week On Bookum:

We are taking it back to the classroom this week.

Join us on Nov. 4th (the day before the election) for a special Authors Talk Podcast with America’s Government Teacher, Sharon McMahon.

We’ll discuss her new book The Small and the Mighty (the book we highlighted last week)!

Additionally, we'll cover civics, the election process, and American history questions, so if there’s anything you've been dying to know, send it in!

You can listen live & ask questions on Monday at 1PM EST on Bookum [Nooks]

This Week in The Book World:

There’s a saying in the entrepreneur and creator space that we want to highlight in this week's Creator Spotlight: "Building in Public."

By definition, building in public "is a business practice where people or organizations openly share their experiences and progress while developing a product or service."

In practice, this can look like BTS (behind the scenes), Ask Me Anythings, sharing chapters of a book before launch, live streaming etc. The purpose of building in public is to engage with your audience, gain feedback, and build community.

Two creators in the book space who are doing this are Jack Edwards and Haley Pham.

Haley, known for her creative vlogs and unique video themes, has built a dedicated community around books. After years of book content creation, she’s working on her dream of becoming a published author (a New York Times bestselling author, to be exact).

Haley is using this principle of building in public by sharing her writing process.

Her first video announced her dream, followed by a genre reveal, and now her latest video shows her completing the first draft and entering the editing phase.

• Book announcement

• Genre reveal

• Finishing first draft

These three videos have accumulated 2.3M views on YouTube in the last 3 months.

Building in public works here for two main reasons:

1. To market and get people excited about the book.

2. When you venture into new or adjacent markets, this approach allows your audience to adjust to your new content and interests. People often try to box creators in, but an artist must continue to reinvent themselves. This content allows the reinvention process to happen organically.

Next, let's look at what Jack’s up to.

Jack Edwards, known as the internet’s resident "librarian," is one of the biggest book content creators around. And what’s a librarian without a library?

That’s exactly what Jack is working on.

In a recent move, he’s taking his audience through the process of building his library from scratch, showing his design process and how he’s organizing the shelves (a BIG deal in the book space—by the way, shoutout to the “by height” and “by series” folks!).

In a three-part series (two episodes released so far), these videos have already amassed over 352K views in just 13 days. Even more exciting, the community is buzzing about the books, beloved series they’d forgotten about, and their own bookshelf dreams.

• Jack's Library Part 1

• Jack's Library Part 2

Building in public is simple but effective way to build community.

Creators, ask yourself: how can you build in public and engage your community on a long-term project? How can you bring them along for the journey?

Let us know what you’re building on Bookum!

This Week in Publishing:

Founder of the very successful Well-Read Black Girl book club, Glory Edim, is out with her new memoir this week, Gather Me.

Summary:

"For Glory Edim, that ‘friend of my mind’ is books. Edim, who grew up in Virginia with Nigerian immigrant parents, started the popular Well-Read Black Girl book club at age thirty, eventually reaching a community of half a million readers. But her own love of books stretches far back.

Edim’s father moved back to Nigeria while she was still a child, marking the beginning of a series of traumatic changes and losses for her family. What became an escape, a safe space, and a second home for her and her brother was their local library. Books were where Edim found community, and as she grew older, she discovered authors and ideas that she wasn’t being taught in class.

Gather Me is a glowing testament to how the power of representation in literature can gather the disparate parts that make us who we are and assemble them into a portrait of discovery."

Add this book to your TBR list on Bookum & get your copy of Gather Me today!

As always, if you enjoyed this week’s newsletter, please share it with others. Every share helps and keeps us growing!

Definitely share to a book content creator friend that might enjoy our newsletter!

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Happy Reading!

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See you next week!

Footnotes (Aka other articles we are reading and Bookum content):

How Substack's Follow Feature Betrays Users - https://www.usermag.co/p/how-substacks-follow-feature-betrays

Book Content Creators Ashlynn Calee and Ian Gubeli: Buddy Reading With My Husband for a Week - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpX-TGWwxfI