“I just had a wild idea. And I mean WILD...[lot’s of separate messages with the word wild for a bit]...I HOPE YOU LOVE THIS. I HOPE YOU SAY YES.”
Honestly, Nildene wondered if this was a proposal for a moment. (It wasn’t.)
Now, both Mikaela and Nildene write – they bounce ideas off each other constantly about how they should go about ruining their character’s lives – so Nildene simply assumed something bad was about to happen to one of the favourite characters. She was wrong.
Instead, Mikaela went on to explain (just to note how hyped Mikaela was about this, she was not explaining anything about the seedling idea of Bookstapress in any calm manner) that we should do an anthology of Bookstagrammers’ writing.
Nildene responds:
“OMG YES” (yes, with the abbreviations and everything)
And the rest, they say, was history.
Not really.
From the end of February to launch on June 1, hours were spent every week researching, planning, writing out guidelines and doing as much of everything that we could think of about our project. Before Bookstapress was Bookstapress, the project was simply known as the Secret Project of Awesomeness, and it was under tight wraps until it was ready to go. When Bookstapress became Bookstapress, during the first week of March, everything set into motion a lot more smoothly.
By March 15, Bookstapress had a running Twitter and page (alongside the primary Instagram page) and by March 23, Bookstapress had a logo! Over April and May, Bookstapress was figuring out the logistics of being a small publishing press and finalising the timeline for #ProjectPublish; a Bookstagram Anthology.
The theme, Influence, was chosen and all technicalities ironed out. Subtle countdowns began on Nildene’s own Bookstagram, with other users guessing what the announcement could possibly be – only one person’s guess even came close to what Mikaela and Nildene were going to announce – and Mikaela left clues on her own Bookstagram along the way too.
Leading up to launch, there was an overload of excitement and finally;
June 1 2018.
Bookstapress was known to the world.
And it was incredible.
Bookstapress has a vision to bring the writing of Bookstagrammers, book bloggers and booktubers to life in an anthology collection of short stories, essays and poetry. Working to bring this community one step further into sharing their efforts with the literary world, Bookstapress wish to introduce editors into the project as well so that they are able to build their own portfolio of editing work to use in the future.
There’s no end to the Bookstapress story; it will continue into tomorrow, always.
*Nildene scrolled back through four months of messages to make this story of Bookstapress as accurate as possible.
