How I Became a BookTuber
This is a guest post from Rincey Abraham. Rincey makes YouTube videos all about books (and sometimes about other things too) at Rincey Reads. When she’s not reading, you can also follow her wandering around her city trying new food to eat and concerts to attend. You can follow her adventures on Twitter @rinceya.
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When I love something, I love it with everything that I have inside of me and want to share that something with everyone I know. My general goal in life is to get everyone I know to love the things I love so that way we can love it together. It is one of my favorite parts of friendships.
Getting people addicted to my favorite bands and television shows was never a real problem. However, it was harder to find people who seemed to love books like I did. I mean, lots of my friends read, but they aren’t crazy-obsessed-spend-all-their-free-time-browsing-bookstores-for-fun-and-spend-too-much-money types like me. So I did what every person who has a interest of any kind does when they are looking for a kindred spirit; I turned to the internet.
I joined Goodreads and jumped into a couple of groups on there, but I could never feel myself feeling fully engaged in the conversations. I ended up mostly using Goodreads as a personal catalogue more than anything else. There were book bloggers that I enjoyed reading on a regular basis, but I still felt disconnected from that experience. I loved being able to hear about new books I wouldn’t have heard of otherwise, but it never felt like my community. I would end up just reading posts and lurking in the comments. I couldn’t seem to make a connection, something was still missing.
One day about two years ago, I found myself getting sucked into a YouTube black hole (as often happens) and I stumbled across a video of someone doing a book review. And that led to me finding another person who talked about books on YouTube. And another. And another, until I realized that there was a whole group of people that seemed to be just as crazy about books as I was.
This community, the BookTube community, as I eventually learned they were called, drew me in immediately. I am not entirely sure why this worked for me more than anything previously. Maybe it was being able to see and hear the pure enthusiasm. Or maybe it was that looking at an actual person versus just another set of text on a page connected with me. No matter what, I knew almost immediately that I wanted to join in.
So I did. And I have absolutely loved every single second of it.
So much of the reading that I do now comes from recommendations from other BookTubers. And when I love a book, I can make a video raving about it and other people actually pick it up. I even find myself reading more and enjoying reading more since starting the community. I used to be someone who read an average of 30 books a year and only once hit 50 books, (a good number, definitely). Last year, I read 69 and I am on pace to hit around that amount again this year.
But even better than that, I have a lot of people that I consider friends that I know I can always gush about books with. Even if we aren’t always gushing about the same books, it is more about the equal levels of enthusiasm than anything else. BookTube attracts such a wide variety of readers and I am excited to be one of the many. The passion is contagious and being a part of the conversation is always a blast.
