95% of our books are New Adult romance, and we would love to branch out and have different genres. (Note: if you go to the main website and scroll down, there is a list of featured authors to check out!)Ĭolleen: We are in great need of more books for the bookstore.
It’s inspiring to see these people donate without wanting anything in return. The most surprising thing is when the authors donate books and ask that I not post about it. There are way too many to count! We’ve had a tremendous amount of support from the book community. Who are some of them?Ĭolleen: Oh, goodness. We were one of just a handful of bookstores to host EL James for a signing for her Grey release, so that was our first author signing! We are setting up a schedule to hold more author signings in the future.Īestas : You’ve had so many awesome authors donate books to this project. All the books are donated by the authors and they’re all signed, so it makes it a one-of-a-kind specialty bookstore. The first subscription boxes went out in March, and as of July, we’ve donated $120,000 to various charities.Īestas : It seems to have grown quite quickly! Do you have a main location now?Ĭolleen: We do! We actually opened a bookstore as an extension of the online store. The entire project is ran by volunteers and all profit goes to charity. That’s 4,000 books I have to coordinate with authors and publishers each month, so even though we could probably open it up to more, we are at our max for our workload. We now sell 2,000 boxes a month and our subscription list is full, but we have cancellations, so we open up for sales one day each month. I thought it would take about a week to sell, but we sold out in four minutes! The same thing happened the following two months, even though we kept doubling the amount of boxes. The boxes ship out monthly and are $39.99, which is a great deal considering the books are signed.Ĭolleen: How has it been doing? The first month, we had a cap of about 400 boxes. Each subscriber gets a box with two signed novels, at least one of them a guaranteed bestseller, and book swag. We then hold a “packing party” where all the books and donated swag are packaged into subscription boxes. The only catch is that the books have to be signed by the author. Then when I turned in Confess, I had a little time on my hands, so I called up my sister and said, “Let’s do it!”Īestas: Can you tell us briefly how it all works? And what would be included in a “bookworm box”?Ĭolleen: I contact authors or publishers and either get donations or, depending on the amount of books I need, purchase the books at cost. I thought about doing a subscription box last year, but never got around to it. I knew I wanted to do something that would make readers happy and also be able to support charities. I’ve had such a tremendous amount of good luck in the past three and a half years and I’m a big believer in paying it forward. HELPING PEOPLE DISCOVER GREAT BOOKSĪestas: Hi, Colleen!! The Bookworm Box is such an amazing project! How did it all get started?Ĭolleen: I’ve wanted to do something for charity on a larger scale for a long time.