The other day I was browsing Waterstone's (Kent has a really sad lack of independent bookshops but the local Waterstone's is pretty lovely so it's not all bad) and was pretty impressed with how many independent publishers I could identify from the spines. I mean, it shouldn't be surprising given how I've been running the box for over a year now and the book club for five months but it's nice to see the knowledge in reality.
Anyway, it made me think about how I've lapsed in awareness of what I buy since I finished my year of reading indie in 2016 and how I'd like to set myself a challenge to see if I can be more mindful again.
After some thought I've decided that in 2018 I'll only be buying books published by independent publishers. Yes, 100% indie. No exceptions, no get outs. I'll be making an indie only wishlist to use for things like Ninja Book Swap and I'll be adding any non-indie books that come across my radar to another, secret wishlist for us after 2018 is done.
To start the year off right I've got a 2018 subscription to Tilted Axis Press again as well as continuing my two book subscriptiont to And Other Stories. I'm anticipating that it will be most difficult to control my book buying on the London Bookshop Crawl because other people's recommendations usually play into what I buy pretty heavily, but I'm just going to have to have lots of indie inspiration before that point!
We'd like you to join us...
We're challenging you to join in! You don't have to be as mad as us, just pledge to buy more independently published books than you currently do in 2018. We'll be issuing monthly prompts throughout 2018 to get everyone thinking about the greatness of indie publishers, and we'll also be posting about our Indie TBRs and Indie Book Hauls more regularly than we currently do. We'd love to have you join us and blog/tweet/whatever it is you do about it. Feel free to leave links to your posts, thoughts and plans below so we can visit and say hi! Also we're using #indiechallenge at the moment on twitter but are open to suggestions of better hashtags...
We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments or on Instagram or Twitter - we're @ninjabookbox on both so feel free to hit us up there!