If you love books and free things, we at Bookstr have just the giveaway for you!
In honor of reaching 50,000 Instagram followers, we will be giving away TEN free books and a beautiful tote bag!
You may know about our great website and Facebook page, but did you know that we’re on Insta? Bookstr’s Instagram is one of the best places to see original graphics, art, and pictures made by and for book lovers.
To enter, all you need to do is follow Bookstr on Instagram (scroll down for highlights!) and enter our contest!
Check out the contest here:
Still need to be convinced? Check out these amazing, unique posts created by the Bookstr team:
When you think of Bookstagram the first thing that comes to mind is book nerds, aesthetically pleasing photos of tea and coffee, book stacks arranged in rainbow colors. What a lot of people don’t know is that through this community there are endless possibilities. Some people create bookish candle shops, tour companies for upcoming releases, and much more. But today were going to brush up on (no pun intended) one of my personal favorites…the art part of the Bookstagramcommunity! Yes, book nerds paint and create art work too.
Ladyofstardust is a horror enthusiast and illustrator, who creates paintings and horror-inspired art. Her artwork reflects on the books she reads and the passion she drives. She works with a variety of supplies from paint to charcoal to ink. The paintings are minimalistic with a splash of color and then finished off with a gorgeous frame.
Thewickedreaderis book blogger who loves to paint and draw fandom-inspired pieces. Her artwork is based on the fantasy books she reads. Although she doesn’t have a website to sell her artwork, she posts plenty of them on her stories and her room is full of them! She even painted a few castles on her bedroom walls.
Mapiful isn’t exactly an independent bookstagrammer who paints and sells their own artwork but humor me for a minute. They have some gorgeous looking maps that are created by you. Mapiful is a company that turns any state of location you choose and turn it into a simplistic yet beautiful map. What does that have to do with books you might ask? Well, Mapiful has started doing maps inspired by locations from fictional worlds! That’s right, so if you’re looking for a Harry Potter, Prythian, or Ketterdam inspired map, all you have to do is request it. They have a variety of colors you can set your map to and you can even pick out the text that will be on the map itself.
Social media has had an enormous impact on the world of marketing and creativity in the last few years. What will this mean in five years? Platforms like YouTube and Instagramhave become huge influencers in the creative field. From models to animators to small businesses, everyone who’s anyone is putting their stuff on social media.
Image via PagesUnbound
As a result, this is a very exciting time for aspiring authors. In 2016, a YouTuber named Sasha Alsberg, the co-author of Zenith, got her big break when a publishing house approached her about doing a book. She enlisted a fellow YouTuber and writer, Lindsey Cummings, to co-write Zenith with her and earlier this year Zenith was published and became an instant New York Times bestseller. (Sidenote: I read the book myself and I have to say…I didn’t think it was the best thing I have ever read, but maybe the book just wasn’t for me!)
YouTuber Kim Chance also published her debut novel Keeper through traditional publishing, off the back of her online success and a lot of support from her followers.
Image via iWriterly
Even when publishing houses didn’t take interest in other peoples work in the community, writers took it on themselves to use the platforms they had and did their own marketing and promoting through YouTube, Instagram and Twitter. Authors like Natalia Leigh and Kristen Martin have successfully sold quiet a few copies of their books through indie publishing houses and resources at hand.
With that being said many people in the BookTube community, both watchers and creators, are proud that these new voices have been noticed by the publishing industry, and this pride has led to the creation of AuthorTube. Obviously this isn’t something new that sprouted over night after Sasha and Lindsey announced their book, but the community grew as more people started to gain the confidence pursue their own careers through YouTube and Instagram.
Image via abookishbaker.com
I had the pleasure of meeting a few very talented and sweet individuals who are constantly hard at work on their own manuscripts and it makes me think. Who will the next New York Times bestselling author be? People like Stardustwrites, Namastayreading, Literarykhaleesi, theworld.in.words, Honeypotwords are hard at work with their manuscripts and they heavily influence others with encouragement and they are even sweet enough to hold on their work to give tips to people who ask for it. They inspire me and others everyday to keep pushing through and ignore that ugly little voice in the back of our heads that says “You will never be good enough to get your writing recognized.” You will.
Who knows? Maybe the next aspiring author will be someone you know from Instagram. It’s nice to see that popular industries taking a leap and considering people other than popular authors so that they have a chance to tell their stories because everyone has a story to tell and no one’s is the same.
Social media has had an enormous impact on the world of marketing and creativity in the last few years. What will this mean in five years? Platforms like YouTube and Instagramhave become huge influencers in the creative field. From models to animators to small businesses, everyone who’s anyone is putting their stuff on social media.
Image via PagesUnbound
As a result, this is a very exciting time for aspiring authors. In 2016, a YouTuber named Sasha Alsberg, the co-author of Zenith, got her big break when a publishing house approached her about doing a book. She enlisted a fellow YouTuber and writer, Lindsey Cummings, to co-write Zenith with her and earlier this year Zenith was published and became an instant New York Times bestseller. (Sidenote: I read the book myself and I have to say…I didn’t think it was the best thing I have ever read, but maybe the book just wasn’t for me!)
YouTuber Kim Chance also published her debut novel Keeper through traditional publishing, off the back of her online success and a lot of support from her followers.
Image via iWriterly
Even when publishing houses didn’t take interest in other peoples work in the community, writers took it on themselves to use the platforms they had and did their own marketing and promoting through YouTube, Instagram and Twitter. Authors like Natalia Leigh and Kristen Martin have successfully sold quiet a few copies of their books through indie publishing houses and resources at hand.
With that being said many people in the BookTube community, both watchers and creators, are proud that these new voices have been noticed by the publishing industry, and this pride has led to the creation of AuthorTube. Obviously this isn’t something new that sprouted over night after Sasha and Lindsey announced their book, but the community grew as more people started to gain the confidence pursue their own careers through YouTube and Instagram.
Image via abookishbaker.com
I had the pleasure of meeting a few very talented and sweet individuals who are constantly hard at work on their own manuscripts and it makes me think. Who will the next New York Times bestselling author be? People like Stardustwrites, Namastayreading, Literarykhaleesi, theworld.in.words, Honeypotwords are hard at work with their manuscripts and they heavily influence others with encouragement and they are even sweet enough to hold on their work to give tips to people who ask for it. They inspire me and others everyday to keep pushing through and ignore that ugly little voice in the back of our heads that says “You will never be good enough to get your writing recognized.” You will.
Who knows? Maybe the next aspiring author will be someone you know from Instagram. It’s nice to see that popular industries taking a leap and considering people other than popular authors so that they have a chance to tell their stories because everyone has a story to tell and no one’s is the same.
Tragedy plus time apparently equals literature. As far as years go, 2017-2018 has been an intense one. These authors have responded with wit, creativity, and some impressively bizarre concepts that comment upon both the new and timeless topography of our psychological landscapes. Here are 5 acclaimed short story collections as weird, wild, and jarringly human as the past year has been.
The winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, Carmen Maria Machado‘s Her Body and Other Parties is “sexy, queer, and caustic.” Swinging wildly upon the axis of brutality and sentimentality, Machado’s work is a real genre-bender, less wading into the territory of magical realism and more stomping headstrong through it. In Machado’s striking collection, there are many inventive cultural references, including a supernatural interpretation of Law and Order: SVUand a literary reimagining of the infamous girl with the green ribbon story. But Machado’s work also delves deeply into the human (and specifically female) psyche, her stories always as inventive as they are visceral.
A timely commentary on social media, art, and interpersonal relationships, this multimedia collection from some of the most famous Instagram poets (includingNikita Gilland Trista Mateer) insightfully tackles both the isolation and accessibility that the Internet can provide. The collection maintains its commitment to accessibility by incorporating the work of established writers (like Amanda Lovelace, author of The Princess Saves Herself in This One) with the work of up-and-coming contributors (likeSara Bond). Even the creation of [Dis]connectedfollows an inventive format: each writer contributed three poems and then assigned poems to their fellow writers. Each contributor then wrote a short story based on one of their assigned poems. The result? A vivid and unique exploration of love and loneliness.
2016 Man Booker Prize nominee Ottessa Moshfegh has done it again… and again and again. Released in between her Booker-nominated novel Eileenand her phantasmagorical 2018 bestseller My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Moshfegh’s short story collection Homesick for Another Worldis a twisted standout. A master of the grotesque and delightful, Moshfegh finds tenderness in the dire landscape of her subject matter: always the fringes of society. To read her work is to “touch a slightly electrified fence.” Featuring vomit, unfortunate neck tattoos, and thrice-daily Burger King meals, Homesick for Another World is as stunning as it is strange.
The eccentric genius archetype—the exaggerated trope of a person who would just as likely disassemble their own household appliances for fun as write a novel—has met its match in Helen DeWitt. A mathematician and linguist (by the way, we’re talking fourteen languages), DeWitt’s hit debut, The Last Samurai, is only one of three works she’s published in the last twenty years, thanks to her distaste for the publishing industry. (Her second novel, Lightning Rods, is a brilliant, weird, and brilliantly weird satire on American capitalism.) Her third work, collection Some Trick, uses the “iron logic of a crazy person” to chip at the barrier between the private intellectual world of the individual and the social machinery of capitalism.
!['[Dis]connected' by various authors](https://live-bookstrwp.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Screen-Shot-2018-11-01-at-11.03.25.png)
