Community Beyond the Page | Bookish Candle Making with Kristen
Reading is not an isolated activity. While the consumption of words is between the reader and the page, communities have formed around written work since ink first dripped onto a page. Instagram has become a place for many book lovers to post aesthetically pleasing photos of books and to talk about their current reads. This community is known as “bookstagram.” I sat down with Kristen, a “bookstagrammer” and bookish candlemaker, and asked about her experience with the Instagram book community and her candle making business.
LEX: Do you feel like you’ve influenced people to read a certain book, or have people influenced you to read a certain book? Can you talk about that type of influence in the book community?
KRISTEN: When I go and look at books on Instagram, usually the things that pull me out of just like, “‘Wow, pretty picture,’ scroll” versus, “Wow, I’m going to read that post, or I’m going to check out that book, or I’ll add it on Goodreads.” The difference between those two: One is, do I know that person? If it’s someone I know and I talk to a lot and I engage with, I absolutely am more likely to put it on my to be read list. And two, if I really like them and trust their “book sense.” When they post a review and the review is really honest, I feel like it’s not just “everything is great.” I love when they’re like, “No, no, I have a real problem with this book, but it’s still really great”; I really appreciate that honesty. If it’s a person I trust and it’s a person I like and I engage with a lot, I absolutely pay a lot more attention.
As a small business, I don’t make a ton of candles, so what I do make I have to be very purposeful about. As much as I’d love to make candles for every really exciting book that comes my way, those don’t sell. So I have to mostly stick to the big names that people really recognize, because if people recognize it, they’ll buy it. But every now and then I’ll get a book that I’m like, “This is too good not to have a candle for.” Or I’ll just get really emotional about it and I just need to go design a candle to get over my book hangover.
The funny thing about those books is they never sell very well—they don’t. But they're also the ones that have the most conversation. People will come and they’ll say, “Oh my god, I've never heard of this, but it was obviously good enough that you wanted to make a candle. What's it about?” And so those almost get a little bit more influence just because it’s boosting awareness. If it’s a book no one’s really heard of, they’re like, “Oooh, what’s that? It’s good enough to have a candle made for it.” There have been a few people who will buy books based on that. I think that awareness factor really makes a difference in just being able to see it. And then if someone shares it with you if they don't have the book, and they're sharing a candle—that conversation keeps going. I think it does influence, maybe not a ton, but sometimes it's just a game of getting in front of people's faces. And finally they start to recognize, “Oh, I know what that book is!” As opposed to: they've seen one post and it’s great—that doesn't really convince people. So when they start seeing it multiple times, it starts something in their brain where they're like, “Maybe I do need that!” And it goes that way. Yeah, that's kind of the game.
To read the full interview, visit Lex’s blog here.