The Writer

​This prompt has been giving me anxiety ever since I first saw it as a future blog we would be writing, and I’ve struggled to respond to it honestly.
I haven’t had any interactions with writers during my internship. If you count my relationship with Kayla who is in charge of some of the social media posts and writes the majority of them and Elle who is in charge of marketing emails, then I suppose those would be my main interactions, but I’m not sure that’s the kind of writing we’re meaning here. Content and marketing writing is invaluable, and a lot of work goes into crafting the emails and tweets that they create, but that’s not the writing we’ve worked on in my time at Bay Path, and the emails and tweets I know about not because I have had anything to do with them but have seen them myself as a Bookshop affiliate and customer.
Truthfully, it’s difficult to see from my vantage point where the book writer would fit into Bookshop since it is more of a marketplace for other bookstores to be connected than a place where authors would directly interact. Obviously, authors are responsible for writing the books that are being sold and without them, Bookshop wouldn’t exist, and therefore writers play an essential part in the need for a place like this.
Writers could potentially sign up to be an affiliate for Bookshop and then create their own Bookshop lists that they could then curate and share with their readers and followers. This might be a way to strengthen connections with readers as well as earn a bit of money since we know authors often are scraping together what funds they can to allow them to go on writing. They might also participate in marketing with Bookshop through its online presence, but since it isn’t a physical bookstore, it isn’t as though authors can host readings and things in it.
So much of my work has been curating book lists and researching content creators, and I suppose these things have had an indirect effect on my work in that researching books to put on these lists has added to my TBR list (because it wasn’t long enough already 😉) and that gives me a better idea of what is out there already and where my work might fit in. The content creator side has shown me how authors might interact with creators to help get more attention for their books.
Really, though, I feel like all these things are a bit of a reach. “The writer” doesn’t really feel present in this situation. Much that I’ve learned has been interesting and is a bigger part of the whole that is publishing, and of course I need to understand how that works as a writer. To say that my writing itself has been affected, though, or that my approach to writing has been would just be dishonest. Tara the human has learned a lot that is of value, particularly in my work running social media, but Tara the writer has been off elsewhere kicking around.