Bookmark Blogs

Bookmarking a New Page

May 5, 2022

Our project began simply with the agreement that Goodreads could be better and readers are looking to connect with other readers. What once was going to be an app, and then just a website, became something way more than we could have ever initially expected. Our final project, Bookmark, encapsulates all we saw was missing in the market. Our website Bookmark is the place to go for all things books for Gen-Z readers. Whether you’re looking for book recommendations, to find events where you can meet other readers in your area, pop culture related to reading, Bookmark is a great place to go! You can check out our website here! After hosting a focus group last month we were able to both put our product in front of female Gen-Z readers and model a book club experience. If we were to continue this project we would be more than just a website. Starting with Austin as our home city, we would host events and hope to eventually narrow things down by genre.

At this point, we feel that the best thing our product has to offer compared to similar products like Goodreads is a friendly and targeted tone. We are starting out by focusing on a very specific group of people (Gen-Z readers, mostly women) and we did everything we could to make a product that we thought would appeal to them. This group is very prevalent in book spaces right now and having a website centered around their taste specifically is a great way to tap into a pre-existing audience.

We learned a lot over the course of the semester. From our focus group, we realized the importance of providing strong online content and creating a tone that appeals to our target demographic of young readers. This helped us learn to emphasize the casual nature of our website, which will hopefully come off as fun and easygoing to users that visit Bookmark. Now, our site acts as a jumping-off point for readers to use to create their own book clubs, but the idea of a book club is defined in a loose, unstructured way. The main goal is for readers to find community when talking about their favorite books in whatever way works best for them. We also learned from our focus group the need to cultivate two primary aspects for our product: an online site where readers can go to view trending content and guidance on holding in-person book-centric meetings. Our website now features several listicles about pop culture as well as foundational articles about going to book events in Austin and starting your own book club. Lastly, we learned from our focus group the need to mimic various aspects from other book communities on the Internet. This includes a good system of book recommendations (something TikTok is dominating in right now), an upvoting system where people can rank popular reads (similar to Reddit), and a place where users can trade books between themselves. Moving forward with our project, these details would really help Bookmark be a strong competitor on the market and provide the service of book-related community to the best of its ability.


 

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March 31, 2022

In the past few weeks, our team has sprinted towards bringing the idea of a new book-based website into fruition. While we had originally focused on creating a social media website specifically for book-lovers, more recently we’ve pivoted to a hybrid model that will help us connect readers both in-person as well as online. We still want to be a hub for all news book-related — updates from authors on works they’re publishing, engaging articles about novels that are trending, etc. — but we’ve altered the model we plan on using to accomplish this. Now, in addition to these articles, users will have forums where they can congregate to have conversations with each other about the books they’re reading. This will provide the online community-based aspect we set out to create when we first invented Bookmark.

 Perhaps most importantly, the biggest change we’ve made to Bookmark in the following weeks has been the introduction of a live-event aggregator for all book happenings around Austin. This will bring readers together in-person and give them the chance to meet in a real-life setting. Social distancing has made it harder than ever for readers to come together and see each other face-to-face, and Bookmark wants to remedy this as people begin to come back together. This aggregator will start out at a local level but, if our platform was to grow, we could see it expanding to other cities.

Another key aspect of our project is having a clear and recognizable brand for Bookmark. We also changed our title from Bookworm to Bookmark because we felt it fit our project better as we move into our updated model. We’re currently still making decisions about our brand specifics and plan on consulting those who participate in our focus group this month on what they feel our site’s greatest strengths and weaknesses are. In this group, we’re inviting Gen-Z readers who filled out our initial survey and expressed interest in being participants to use Bookmark themselves and tell us what they think. This group is still our target audience, so getting feedback on how they feel about our website should be very useful. In regards to our branding, we are considering both the visual and written attributes that all make up our brand identity. Words we’ve used while brainstorming our brand’s tone include cool, fresh, fun, a little bit dorky, cute, and inviting! So as we write copy for our website, plan captions for Instagram and Facebook posts, and come up with taglines, we will be taking all of these tone words into consideration to create the desired atmosphere for Bookmark.

 Visually, we want it to look clean and professional, but are still in the process of deciding what colors and fonts will make up our stylistic personality. We also are in the process of working on a logo mock-up that looks inspired by a bookmark. Lots of exciting things are happening as we move forward with our site, and we’re looking forward to creating a cohesive brand and place that brings people together. By the end of this semester, we will have the brand fleshed out and a click-through demo will be available for users to try for themselves.

 

Bookworms Unite

February 18, 2022

After a couple of classes spent discussing our interests and ideas for projects, the three of us found a shared interest we weren’t expecting: books! We’re Brooke Barrett, Matt Bowlin, and Jessica Mick. Jessica is a senior Journalism major and Brooke and Matt are both Journalism/RTF double majors. Like many others, we found ourselves bonding over our love of reading and swapping titles of books to see what common novels we’ve read. We found community through this love, but also saw an opportunity to create something more. 

The experience of reading a good book does not have to stop once you finish reading it. Instead, for many readers the end of the book marks the start of a new chapter, one where they get to share their thoughts and connect with others who have read the same books. But where do you go to connect with other readers? BookTok is proof that young readers exist and want a place where they can express themselves and connect with other readers.

When we think of places for readers to talk about books online Goodreads comes to mind first. However, Goodreads has been around since 2006 and when you look at the website it doesn’t feel like it has changed dramatically since then. With the rise of book-related content on platforms like social media, people have even found names for them like “BookTok” and “Bookstagram.” Despite all of this, readers still lack one centralized place to find community.

If you want to read a book review, Goodreads can get the job done, but what if you want to post a 25 second video about your top 5 reads of 2021? Or if you’re searching for memes about the latest YA novel you’ve read? We’re creating a community online for younger adults to come together and create connections from what they are reading. 

This online space would provide readers the opportunity to connect with other readers in a way they haven’t been able to prior. The site, as well as our Instagram page, will showcase content produced by readers, including art and reviews, as well as personalized quizzes that will help readers determine what to read next.  When a user is reading a book, they will be automatically plugged into a community of others in the process of finishing the same novel. Additionally, authors will have the opportunity to promote upcoming works of theirs and connect with readers directly about what they’re writing.

To get started on our product, we’ve begun basic market research to determine what in the field looks most similar to what we have so far. We’ve also started creating personas of our future users in order to determine what best appeals to them. Our next steps are to survey those in our target demographics to see what they feel is lacking in products such as Goodreads, and to detail how to make our product address what is currently lacking in the market.

 

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