Wrapping Up 30 Days of Pride at the Lesbrary!

Happy last day of Pride month! This June, I decided to put up an article every day at the Lesbrary. Some were reposts, some were brand new, and some were updated versions of earlier lists. Partly, I did it to try to promote the Lesbrary’s Patreon: its numbers have dropped recently, and I wanted to do a big push to try to promote it. In this post, I wanted to wrap up the experience.

I’ll be honest: I knew this would be a lot of work, but it was more work than I anticipated. Even the reposts needed to be reformatted, which took more time than I expected. Also, my day job is as an Associate Editor at Book Riot, and there’s a lot of overlap in the kind of work I do there and here. Ending my work day and doing more book blogging is hard to convince myself to do—it’s a dream job, and I love the Lesbrary too, but too much of the same thing can get tiring.

And I’ll be even more honest: for the amount of work that went into this 30 days of content, it didn’t have much of an impact. I gained five Patrons in June, still well short of where I was even in January. I don’t expect everyone to support the Lesbrary on Patreon, of course! But maintaining the Patreon is its own process, including writing and mailing postcards and packaging up books, so I was hoping to boost those numbers to make it worth that time.

I don’t mean to be completely negative! I appreciated the chance to write articles and lists for the site, which I haven’t done in a while. I’m particularly proud of 10 of the Best Sapphic Mermaid Books because it’s a format I want to keep doing: pulling reviews into a list on a theme. I also liked doing the The Best Sapphic Books of 2023 (So Far) and The 10 Most Highly Anticipated Sapphic Books Out in the Rest of 2023. But my favourite post is probably yesterday’s weird list: Alien Donut Shops, Cybernetic Tea Rooms, and More Sapphic SFF for Foodies!

I’m glad I did this, because I’ve been wondering if posting like this in June would drive people to the Lesbrary or just be drowned out by other Pride content, and it looks like it’s closer to the latter—though a few posts did very well! I was glad to see this list of F/F Romances by Black Authors get lots of attention on Twitter; I hope it translated into more readers for those books!

Next time, I think I’ll treat June as more of a rest month for the Lesbrary, and if I want to do a big content push, I’ll save it for another time. Still, I hope you enjoyed these posts, and we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled content tomorrow!