I usually wake up in the morning to the sound of Harry Styles or Fleetwood Mac blaring from my wireless speakers. It will be something soft to help me start the day or a song that really encourages me to get up.
I started my company, Books That Matter, a monthly book subscription business that advocates for female authors, five years ago. I’d always been fascinated by female-led fiction, but academy was too expensive for a working-class student like me. And it’s a sad fact that men tend not to read women writers. Even when it comes to the best known, such as Jane Austen and Margaret Atwood, more than 80% of the readers are women. She wanted to empower women to lift up other women, democratize feminist literature by delivering it right to the door, and also offer an element of surprise to reading. Each month, subscribers receive a box with a new book and freebies from other women-run businesses. And business is booming, especially after I appeared on Dragons’ Den. I didn’t get investment from the dragons, but after the segment aired we made £10,000 in 10 minutes on signups.
I like to start my day by meditating for a short period and setting my intentions for the day. I used to immediately turn to social media, but now I have limits when it comes to my phone or, should I say, my phones. I have two: the Galaxy Z Fold4 for work and the Galaxy S21 for personal use. During the pandemic, I had a lot of difficulty setting limits with social media, so I turned to Samsung’s settings to manage my notifications and apps and set limits. There’s also now a feature on Android called work profile, which helps people get offline completely. It does this by limiting distracting notifications when you need to focus on work, and improves your work-life balance by turning off work notifications during your free time.
That’s not to say I don’t get distracted, yes, with our five cats. It was not intentional to have so many. When my partner and I moved in together, he already had three cats and I had two. Often in the morning I take lots of photos of them to post on social media later or to send to my partner. My phone is full of cat photos.
When I get to the office, which is in a co-working space in Bristol, I sit down with my team and we chat about what we have planned for the day. Until recently, we worked exclusively with new releases, but this year we partnered with a used book store to save books from the landfill. These go in our “mystery” boxes, and I’ve personally discovered some gems this way: special-edition copies of Hilary Mantel’s books, as well as gorgeous orange Penguin classics, like vintage editions by George Eliot and Zora Neale Hurston.
In addition to Books That Matter being a platform for people to discover female writers, we also want it to be a way for them to connect with other readers; to provide an escape and a feeling of community. This year, we plan to launch events that are exclusive to subscribers – it is very important to bring women together and share stories.
In the morning, I usually try to focus on content creation, like filming our The Chapters podcast on my Galaxy Z Fold4. Because it folds up, it stands on its own, so you don’t need a tripod, but if you have one, like we do, there are even more creative options. Images are becoming more important to business – you have to constantly think about them, even with a podcast. I recently used my Galaxy Z Fold4 for all my company visual work because it has an excellent camera. And my team always picks it up to use for other things; for example, it has excellent functionality for taking notes. You can have a video meeting on one side of the dual screen and be able to annotate things on the other directly in Google Docs or using virtual Post-it notes, Google Keep. It has been built with multitasking at its core. And the new S Pen is so precise that it makes it a breeze to add captions and annotate documents. My team uses social media a lot, and since our marketing and photography are done in-house, using my Galaxy Z Fold4 means the editing processes are faster and smoother.
I would say that conversation is at the heart of what we do. Books are a conversation with the reader, and book lovers want to talk to each other. I turn to Google Meet for any of my industry conversations, whether it’s with an editor or another team member, and I couldn’t be without Google Docs for our website and social media copy needs, as it allows people participate. , add notes, collaborate and chat.
I regularly juggle many conversations at once and on many platforms. When he’s busy, I like to record my thoughts as a voice memo in the Voice Recorder app, which is converted to text for storage in Google Docs.
What is really important when it comes to my phone is security. The encryption in Samsung Knox and Android feels airtight: it’s best-in-class security, which you need when you run a business and store a lot of personal data.
A lot of thought goes into coordinating our subscription boxes. We produce moodboards to perfect them, thinking about what works with the book covers and what color wrapping paper to use. Our December box was a deep green and it was a delight to see people posting their boxes on Instagram as they opened them.
We are always looking for ways that people can express their love of books. Last year we launched a range of feminist book lovers t-shirts and hoodies. One of the T-shirts has a slogan that simply reads “Reading is sexy”. Because, well, it is.
Our office is located in a beautiful part of Bristol called St Nicholas Market, where I usually have a falafel wrap for lunch. And I like to take a walk near the River Avon. With so much communication every day, it’s important to get outside and find some quiet time.
After lunch, I plug in my headphones and enter my own world, focusing on more personal work. At the moment I am writing, but other times I can be reading. I tend to end the day around 5 pm and usually call my fiancé on the way home. I could have a little downtime on social media and catch up with family members.
I am a super fan of Samsung. Before my Galaxy Z Fold4 and Galaxy S21, I had an S9 for five years. I also have a Samsung Galaxy Watch4 and a Samsung tablet, which has a vivid screen that’s great for moodboarding (and watching on long train rides home). I made the switch to Samsung when a previous phone died and unfortunately it hadn’t been backed up properly. With my older phones, social media apps kept crashing if memory reached a certain point; it really started to affect business management, so I decided to switch to Samsung. Now I don’t have those kinds of headaches. I can back up files and integrate with Google so there are never any issues; all my devices are connected, so there is continuity in my work from one to the next, and the switch was really easy with Smart Switch, which restores all photos and contacts in just a few steps.
Although I work with books all day, in the evenings I like to reconnect with them in a personal capacity. My partner is also a reader, so we sit and read (I always have a fiction and nonfiction book on the go) and chat, or watch something on Netflix, or eat the lasagna I made at the beginning of the week. .
A couple of afternoons a month I go to London if there is a must-see event like a book launch or an author discussion. We just did a book club event at fashion label Kate Spade’s Covent Garden store which was great fun. Generally, though, I like to try to go to bed by 10 p.m. I often wear my Samsung Galaxy Watch4 in bed because I like to track my sleep and well-being patterns. I have learned a lot about my REM (rapid eye movement) cycles and how my sleep habits change during my cycle. I am very curious about my health and feel empowered by having this information.
It sounds like a cliché, but I never thought that I would be in charge of such a varied and interesting business. I feel incredibly privileged to speak with truly inspiring authors and the talented people behind the publishers. Some of the stresses of being self-employed cannot be avoided, but you wouldn’t have it any other way. I am very grateful to be doing this.
