What It's About
Seeing a need for more representation in book sales, a cancer researcher launches their own subscription book service.
Words of Wisdom
Georgia says that she had to fight through some of her fears in order to create her side hustle. “I spent most of the time being so nervous and scared of failure that I felt nauseous, but the only thing worse than failing would have been watching someone else create something that I wanted to create instead.”
Fun Fact
Gay’s the Word is the only LGBTQ+ specific bookshop in England and has been open for over 40 years. It was even featured in the film Pride as the site of the first meeting of the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners group. (source)
Notes from Chris
Episode 1340
A few years ago, British cancer researcher Georgia Mannion-Krase, who identifies as queer, began to intentionally read more books that featured people like her. She loved being able to see herself in the characters, but more than that, she appreciated being introduced to the experiences of people she would otherwise have never known about. Reading these books impacted her life, and she wanted more! Unfortunately, finding books like these became more and more difficult. Georgia searched for an LGBT+ section in her local bookstore and couldn’t find one. She then turned her search online, but in her words, the selections were “woefully uncurated.” Most of them just included covers of shirtless men on horses. Georgia wanted something more. After she exhausted her network for recommendations, she started spending more and more time finding new books to read. She quickly found herself really wishing someone would just send her an interesting new book to read every month. Unfortunately, such a thing didn’t exist. At least, not yet. Now Georgia was faced with preparing to launch her first box. As a longtime listener of Side Hustle School, she says that she knew she needed to set up an online landing page and build up social media buzz. She designed a logo and also signed up for MailChimp, Shopify, and Buffer. This was all new for Georgia, and she was afraid of failure, but she was even more scared of someone else beating her to this idea. She pushed through the discomfort, and near the end of 2018 she was ready to launch Queer Book Box. She billed it as an LGBT+ book subscription dedicated to getting the best queer books into the hands of people who want them. The service’s second birthday is coming up later this year and Georgia has plans to keep it growing! Although Queer Book Box already ships to Europe and North America, Georgia hopes to expand to the rest of the world. She is also looking to create more customizable boxes, or including more fiction books in the box. Georgia is also about to buy a house, and she hopes that Queer Book Box will provide her with extra income to put toward the mortgage payments.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
- Check out Georgia's subscription service at her website, Queer Book Box.
SEE ALSO:
- Call Center Employee Uses Patreon to Fund LGBTQ Podcasts: A call center team lead uses Patreon to support two LGBTQ activism podcasts, earning over $800/month in contributions.
- Expat Creates LGBTQ+ Events and Community: She was living the digital nomad dream, but something was missing: community. When she discovered there were no conferences for LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs, she made one.
- Queer Punk Artist Starts Personal Finance Workshop: A manager for a non-profit organization who describes herself as a queer punk artist creates a series of personal finance classes.
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Resources
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