guys im scared

I want to preface that this could absolutely be a personal thing, but I still wanted to share my thoughts. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and honestly, I think PageBound has serious potential to do something great for the book community. The way it’s set up with the forums, the quests, and the front page (that's incredibly engaging & also catchy, like it makes me want to look at it and scroll haha), it actually feels like it could change things when it comes to getting people to pick up new books and pick up diverse books. I’ve been using PageBound since, I think, March? and in that time, I’ve seen so many little instances where I’ll leave a discussion post or review and then i'll notice someone add that book to their TBR. I’ve even personally bumped books up my own TBR just because I saw people chatting about them or sharing reviews that caught my attention (e.g. An Ember in the Ashes, I saw people chit chatting about it and felt like I wanted to be involved haha so then it was the next book I read) or I’ll see someone add a book to their TBR so I’ll check it out. The Quests have also helped me pick up books that I may have never picked up on my own. I’ve been on Goodreads since 2012, jumped on StoryGraph when it launched, and I’ve tried apps like Tome and Fable too but I’ve never really felt this kind of interaction before. With PageBound though, the community vibe is so real, and it’s already proving it can influence what people read. I do sometimes use TikTok for recommendations, but I’m less likely to trust those since a lot of influencers get paid to make videos and I don’t really take recommendations at all from Instagram. There’s reddit, but again, sometimes the authors are sneakily in there recommending lmao, but It’s good if you’re looking for books with similar vibes to ones you like. So yeah, I can totally see this becoming a major space for building hype, especially for ARCs and helping books gain early traction. There’s something really exciting here.

“It’s hard to see who I am when I am lost in what’s expected of me” This book will sometimes drop the deepest and most emotionally devastating sentences that I just need to take a moment to reflect on them

"The pride of an empire, the pride of the faithful, and the pride of nature itself, all converging in a mess of blood and brine as the world falls apart. Such were the musings of Historian Hafka as his manhood was cut from him and his body bound to the splintered mast of his ship." This is gonna be a wild book 🤣

I have a galley for this and after reading the description it's a Gothic historical fiction in italy, so I'm actually really excited to read this now since I enjoyed The Amalfi Curse much more than I expected. Apparently this genre is calling my name 😂 Excited to get this one started in June, has anyone else read anything by the author?