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- Shelves and the City, Annotations, and Rewriting Your Rules
Shelves and the City, Annotations, and Rewriting Your Rules
Stephen Curry, Morgan DeBaun, Randy Winston
Kyle Colley
April 01, 2025
Happy Pub Day!
And happy April! In perfect April fashion, we are going to shower our community with some great new Bookum features, book clubs, and events!
Founders Club is starting Rewrite Your Rules by Morgan DeBaun, and guess what… we had her on the podcast for a special Book Club edition talk!
Morgan DeBaun is the founder of Blavity and AfroTech, and her media company reaches 100 million customers per month!
If you are an entrepreneur, founder, or builder, you are going to love this conversation and have a lot of "aha" moments!
The Tale of the Table:
📚 Annotations
📺 Shelves and the City
📖 Book Picks from Randy Winston
This Week On Bookum:
NEW FEATURE (might I add, one of my favorite features we've released so far on Bookum!):
This one is for:
The Re-Readers
The Note-Takers
The Tabbers
And… THE ANNOTATORS!
Introducing Book Annotations on Bookum!
With Private or Public Notes!
How to find/use:
Add a book to your "My Reads."
Tap the three-dot drop-down menu.
Select "Annotations."
Tap the '+' in the top right corner
 |  |
From there, you can add your book notes, thoughts, and insights.
The best part? These book notes can be public, shared, or private—just for you!
Can post your annotations to the community feed!
A great way to keep your thoughts, insights, and favorite quotes organized.
Whether you're revisiting a classic, keeping a character list, jotting down key points, or marking pages with your own notes…
Excited for you to try it today at www.bookumapp.com!
This Week in The Book World:
For the newcomers, you might have missed our mantra, so let's say it once with emphasis…
WE SHOUTOUT CREATORS.
Sunset Blvd was honorarily renamed "Bookshelf Blvd." because book content creator took over Los Angeles.
Back for the second year, Shelves and the City hosted a three-day book creator meet-up celebration. (Last year, we wrote about the one in New York—NEWSLETTER).
To recap, Shelves and the City is a book content creator event put on by Epic Reads (HarperCollins) and AvonBooks. Here's our conversation with Maya (@mnmbooks) about last year's event:
If last year was a dress rehearsal, this year was a Broadway premiere. Attendance jumped from around 60 creators to about 115.
This year included:
Author panels (featuring R.F. Kuang, BK Borison, and more) with ARCs.
Supporting local bookstores like Reparations Club.
Supplying MyFreeLittleLibraries.
Volunteering at a food bank to support those displaced by the LA fires.
And, of course, partying in style on the Fox Studio Lot (all expenses paid)!
Attendees praised HarperCollins for including creators from diverse backgrounds and with varying audience sizes. Book content creator and attendee @TrayReadThat shared (via threads):
"Thank you for including creators of various backgrounds and social media journeys. Implementing community service to aid communities affected by the fires was so important and wholesome. I've made lifelong friends because of this trip!"
Although invite-only, if you're looking to secure a spot at the next one, a friend of Bookum, Hannah Lisa Lohr, asked the team who hosted it, and their response was:
Post the content.
Be consistent (you don't need a big following, but post quality content regularly).
You don't necessarily need to be on HarperCollins' existing influencer team, but it helps.
Our Take:
We always love a good creator collaboration, and this might be one of our favorites of the year!!
From a business perspective, it'll be interesting to see how they analyze the ROI (return on investment)—especially since they scaled up from last year. It’s definitely a strong brand play; however, people don’t necessarily go to a bookstore today and ask directly for a HarperCollins or Avon book by name.
Maybe the hope is that more creators will support their authors in their posts and buy their books in the hopes of getting invited to this or similar brand trips in the future. Nevertheless, HarperCollins has caught people's attention!
We'll share more creators' posts below:
@epic_reads can’t wait to see your unboxing videos 🫶📚 #shelvesandthecity #shelvesandthecityla @William Morrow Books @Avon Books
This Week in Publishing:
Alright, switching it up this week!
During our Bookum Podcast episodes, we always ask our guests about their Last, Now, and Next books.
This week, we're sharing Randy Winston's (Creative Director of The Black List Fiction) picks:
Add these books to your TBR on Bookum!
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!
Share this newsletter on Threads, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, or via email.
Happy Reading!
See you next week!
Footnotes (Aka other articles we are reading and Bookum content):
Tune into the Bookum Author Talks Podcast Live Thursday with Writer Randy Mills on his book As If By Magic -
Tune into the Bookum Creators Talk Podcast Live Friday (Nook) with USA Today’s Book Report Clare Mulroy at 1PM EST - www.bookumapp.com
The First Ever Aspen Literary Festival Announced Sept 26th - Sept 28th - https://aspenliteraryfestival.org/
