written and posted Oct 3 by Mallory Mariano
Q: What audience have you been imagining thus far? How has that imagined audience informed your design and editorial decisions?
Intrinsically, I knew that I wanted my site to emulate the aesthetics of a feminine, minimalist, Pintrest Board coupled with all things bookish. I was inspired by the vast amount of TikTok/BookTok and Instagram (‘Bookstagram’) accounts and creators that combined soft femininity with bookish content. Reviews, reactions, hauls, and the like. The opportunity to craft an online space for the bookish kind of content seemed like one I shouldn’t let pass by, and hence this site is the result.
Audience is a consideration that I have also – slowly – begun to take into account specifically when drafting my weekly content. The bookish world on TikTok and Instagram is an interesting, insular community that very much reflects the dynamics of fandom. Much in the same way that the Publishing Industry is delineated by genre – contemporary romance, high fantasy, literary or general fiction, horror, sci-fi, thrillers, and the like – there are fans or readers of each of these sects. Reflecting on my three selections so far for my weekly content, my reviews have spanned literary fiction and high fantasy. Does that mean I am writing my reviews to be pivoted for readership within those two general areas of fiction? Not at all.
I am a mood-reader at heart. I am largely compelled by my mood when it comes to investing hours into the books I choose to read. This in turn, makes it so that I possess some internal machination that deters me from creating specific reading lists and following them line-by-line.
But what does this specifically mean for my site? It means that my selection of books that I choose to devote time to meticulously compose reviews for, will largely be guided by my sense of mood reading as well. I find that this approach makes the whole process exciting, alluring, and intriguing enough for me to sustain the practice at least for the next few months.
In short – my readership for this site is not constrained by a specific subset of readers for a genre. My reviews are not designed to be catered for romance readers, only. The same could be said for fantasy, sci-fi, literary fiction, thrillers, non-fiction, and the like. Perhaps the site is for anyone that has an appreciation for feminine aesthetics coupled with bookish content, just as I mentioned previously? Intrinsically, this feels like a good place to start from.