From nine-to-five on the weekdays, Laura Button, 27, works as a receptionist at a Sacramento-based sign manufacturing company, but outside of the office she’s recently taken on a new title: co-host of the Literary B*tchcraft book review podcast.
Button’s project is among a growing number of book-related podcasts that have launched recently, riding an explosion in popularity of episodic audio commentaries across every subject and niche. This year in particular, book review podcasts, like Literary B*tchcraft, have seen increase in traffic as people quarantining at home search for new reads.
Getting started
Button runs the podcast with friends Alexis Marcom and Nicole Salle, whom she met while working at a local Barnes & Noble store several years ago. The trio discussed the books they read during their shifts and always wanted to start a book club together. But it took the coronavirus pandemic to give them the time to read and discuss a book together in real-time.
“We had so much fun with that,” Button tells Weekday Writer. “Alexis was just like: ‘why don’t we just do a podcast about this?’ And me and Nicole, being lovers of attention and reading, were very on board with it.”
They named their podcast “Literary B*tchcraft,” a title Button came up with as she considered their interests in Halloween and witchcraft, and set up an account on Anchor, a podcast-making platform and distributor. They released their first episode in August this year.
Working with Anchor has allowed Button, Marcom and Salle to easily expand their podcast to platforms like Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Literary B*tchcraft sees variance of traffic on all platforms but has experienced spikes in viewership on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. Typically, they reach around 50-100 new listeners each week.
What they read
Through Literary B*tchcraft, Button, Marcom and Salle share and discuss the kinds of books they like to read. For Button and Marcom, this means genre fiction works, like romance and fantasy novels, whereas Salle prefers contemporary fiction. So far some of Button’s favorite books that she’s reviewed on the podcast include Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
Salle, Marcom and Button pose for a photo (Credit: Literary B*tchcraft)
But regardless of their own interests, the three also consider their viewers when deciding which books to review for their podcast.
“We sometimes will delve into young adult fiction; we mostly try to stick to fiction that would fit younger audiences,” Button says.
This reflects in Literary B*tchcraft’s viewership, with a majority of their listeners falling into the 23-27 age range category, as per Anchor’s analytics, and 18-22-year-olds making up the next greatest age range demographic.
Literary B*tchcraft aims to offer advice for aspiring authors by interviewing authors (those they can reach amid the pandemic) and talking about the publishing process, finding the motivation to write and other topics.
Aiming for success
Running a podcast takes a lot of work, Button shares, but says that she and her coworkers all take their efforts equally as seriously.
“We’re all equally willing to work extra to put in time to do the social media. plan things, make sure we’re on the same page with guides that we make before the show,” says Button. “And then making sure that we read the review books and extra books so we have more to talk about on the wrap-up episodes.”
Right now, they record their podcasts together and each contribute to editing it on the platform, Audacity. Online, they divide their efforts between their website, podcasting platforms and social media platforms. Literary B*tchcraft is on Twitter and Instagram and Button shares they have plans to expand to YouTube and Tumblr in the near future.
In terms of finding success, Button also shares that it’s important for new podcasts to develop a working momentum in their first few months to reach a consistent audience.
“In our research, we’ve seen that podcasts normally dip after a few months, but then when you stick with it after six months,” says Button. “It gains a decently-sized audience if you have something original and you put a lot of work into it.”
Applying Literary B*tchcraft to her own writing
Outside of Literary B*tchcraft, Button, along with her cohosts, spends a lot of her free time writing, joking that one day they’ll be able to reach out to themselves for author interviews.
Button surrounds herself with her favorite novels (credit: Laura Button)
Button says that the discussions and interviews they air on the podcast, have been as informative for her as she hopes they are for viewers. She shares that she’s been taking notes about different authors’ publishing stories and their experiences navigating traditional and self-publishing processes.
At the moment, Button is also co-writing a fantasy-adventure young adult novel with cohost Marcom.
Reading and cohosting, Button shares, has actually improved their writing process. On the podcast, she says “we share how we interpret things and I think that also translates into the writing. It’s not hard to match up tones of voices when our analytical thinking is similar, and I think the podcast has helped with that and the way we analyze writing in itself.”