Episode 69: Reader Communities & Discovery Trends with Booktrovert

Joshua Tallent

Welcome to the BookSmarts podcast, where we talk about publishing data and technologies and send you away with insights that will help you sell more books. I'm your host, Joshua Tallent. So this month on the BookSmarts podcast, I'm chatting with my friend Tarah Theoret, who is the Vice President of Community Growth and Engagement at NetGalley. Tarah, thanks for joining me.

Tarah Theoret

Thanks, Joshua. I'm excited to be here finally on BookSmarts.

Joshua Tallent

Yeah, it's great to have you. I wanted to bring you on because I want to talk about Booktrovert this month. I want to give people some insight into what Booktrovert is, how it works, and what's going on with it. You guys launched Booktrovert a year ago, or maybe a little more than a year ago now.

Tarah Theoret

Yeah, June 23, 2025. Burned into my brain in a very good way.

Joshua Tallent

That's great. So I want to cover a little bit about what Booktrovert is and go through how things have gone as a baseline for our audience. The audience of BookSmarts is pretty varied—there are technical people in publishing, non-technical people, authors, and other people as well. So what is Booktrovert? What's the whole idea behind the Booktrovert system, and how does it work?

Tarah Theoret

Yeah, so at its core, Booktrovert is a reading lifestyle site, and it's built for readers, mostly by readers—so by the NetGalley company. It's designed to help people track, discover, and celebrate their reading lives, so it's really for anybody. We have a couple of pillars that come with Booktrovert. Our biggest draw is e-book giveaways and sweepstakes. It's super easy to enter, really easy to win, and then you can immediately start reading because they're e-books—you don't have to wait for shipping. It's fantastic, quick, instant gratification, and you can read via Kobo, Kindle, and we also have an in-browser reader that we call the web reader.

Once you have your books, you can organize your reading—those you've won and accessed, but also any other books that you have read—and you can do that in the Booktrovert Library. Readers can create, name, and manage different stacks, which is what we basically refer to as lists. We have a search tool so you can pull up any book ever and add it to your stacks, not just those you've won. You can look at it as a visual grid with big, beautiful book covers, or you can look at it as a spreadsheet if you want even more metadata, book details, and to add your own notes, too—when you started reading it, when you finished reading it, and star ratings. We also dig down into quarter-star ratings because we know readers like nuance, and sometimes you just can't decide between a four and a five or a four and a half. So we give that option as well.

Then we have really fun games. If you want to play with books, you can play bingo. We have monthly bingo boards, but you can also go back in time, select old ones, and add book covers to the prompts, and then share those online with your friends and followers. We also have a way for you to build a digital bookcase called Shelfie Showcase. They're really pretty bookcases you can select from, and you can pull up book covers and add fun stickers like succulents, cats, and coffee mugs, and then share those as well. It's super fun to play with.

We actually have daily games every single day that change. One's called Plot Lines, which is a Connections-style game. We give you four different books, and then you have to connect four words that are related to the plot of each book. It's kind of hard, and I'm not super good at it, but those who are very into those types of games find it to be a lot of fun. Then we have what is more my speed, called Cover Snap. It's a jigsaw puzzle that changes daily based on cover art, and that's super fun. You can do easy, medium, or hard, and see how long it took you. I particularly love that one.

Joshua Tallent

So there's a lot there. Some of that stuff is just so cool. You can put your TBR list on there. You said "any book ever," and I might have to test you on that.

Tarah Theoret

Oh, please don't!

Joshua Tallent

...books beyond the Booktrovert ecosphere, basically.

Tarah Theoret So we have a database of books that we pull from, and you can even find upcoming books—books that have not been published yet—and pull those as well.

Joshua Tallent

That's great. Yeah, that goes on the TBR list, or it goes on the "hey, maybe I should look into this" list. A lot of us on the team are Dungeon Crawler Carl fans, and looking forward to Book 9 and then Book 10. Having those on the list is fun to manage, and the features in Booktrovert are really cool. That idea—maybe with some limitations—of being able to go back to titles that you read when you were a kid and put them on the list to remember, or to think about when you have kids, or for nostalgia...

Tarah Theoret

Nostalgia! A "want to buy" list. I know a couple of people on our team use it for books that we see. It's a TBR, but it's also "I want to purchase this," "I want to listen to it," or "I want to read it." Yeah, there are all kinds of fun ways that people use the stacks.

Joshua Tallent

And the games are a cool idea, too. Kind of like doing Wordle every day in The New York Times, but having that ability to really do a bookish one. We're bookish people—we like engaging with literature, so it's fun to have games that are specifically book-related.

Tarah Theoret

Yeah, and book people love trivia, and we love kind of one-upping other book lovers, right? Learning about a new book, seeing a beautiful new book cover, and interacting with it brings everybody closer to books in general. It's a fun way to interact, and then you can share online, too, and get a little competitive with people.

Joshua Tallent

Tell me more about the shelf pictures. Is that really just like, "I want to make a bookshelf of my favorite XYZ type of books," and then use that in my social media posts when I'm talking about a series I'm reading through?

Tarah Theoret

Yeah, you can use it in a lot of different ways. I tend to use it as a visual version of one of my TBR stacks. I'll spend some time with it—it's like scrapbooking in a way. Maybe it's just this month's shelf, maybe it's the season's shelf of my TBR or the ones I've actually read and want to show off, or even around the holidays. There are a lot of different ways it can be used, but yeah, it's a visual instead of just a list of books where you can show things off a little bit.

Joshua Tallent

That's great. Okay, so let's talk about the business a little bit. Thinking through the last year-plus, launching a new service like this—a new website and app—comes with a lot of challenges. What are some things that went well in the last year, and what are some challenges that you encountered?

Tarah Theoret

Yeah, it is a massive feat. I have so much more respect, having gone through it, for those who launch brand-new products and brand-new companies. You don't know what you don't know until you know, and we've done a lot of learning in the last year. It's all been incredibly helpful, and luckily our team is grateful for that experience and those challenges. It just makes us stronger and makes the product stronger, and hopefully, people really like what we've done.

What went really well is that the organic community adoption was fairly strong. In the beginning, we did have some technical infrastructure challenges when we launched based on assumptions we made about the giveaways and how they worked. We initially launched giveaways as first-come, first-served, and they would be gone immediately. Then people were like, "Well, I didn't get there right at noon when it opened, so now I missed out." We realized we needed to adjust quickly. We heard that feedback immediately. Even though we tested it, and even though we're readers, it's different when you're launching to a massive amount of people.

Joshua Tallent

Yeah.

Tarah Theoret

So we heard them and immediately pivoted to start changing the infrastructure. A few months later, we introduced sweepstakes. That's a model where the sweepstakes are open for seven full days with a limited number of e-books available. People can enter all week long, and then the books are awarded. Giveaways are unlimited copies for a particular amount of time—48 hours up to seven days. So now it's much more gratifying for everybody involved. We have really high engagement rates for everything on the site, but particularly giveaways and sweepstakes. We get really high numbers from readers, which is fantastic.

Joshua Tallent

That's great. And publishers that are signing up for these promotions have the opportunity to pick the length of time that they have the promotion going for, and how many copies they are giving away in the sweepstakes, and those kinds of details?

Tarah Theoret

Yeah, they have full control over it. We also do pre-order and buy-now campaigns alongside those. So whatever goal they have for the book, whatever the timing is, or they could do multiple. We've had publishers do the same book multiple times for different types of campaigns—maybe a sweepstakes or a giveaway, and then when the book was on sale, they did a buy-now campaign to pair them and reach whatever goals they have.

Joshua Tallent

So what are you seeing with publishers who are engaging with the system and doing these campaigns? Are you seeing a lot of it pre-publication or immediately post-publication? Are you seeing books further down the line coming back into Booktrovert a year later as part of another campaign? What's the pattern you're seeing?

Tarah Theoret

Yeah, we're seeing everything, but I will say the majority of it is right before pre-pub—it's real close, and it's being used in a very smart way. Because Booktrovert is consumer-facing, they're using it to drum up a lot of buzz. It's paired with other marketing when you're getting a few weeks away from the pub date and have a lot of investment, time, and author involvement. You're trying to get pre-orders, so this helps people get really excited. If they don't win, hopefully, they're going to pre-order the book. The concentration is very tight to pre-pub, at pub, and post-pub backlist firsts in a series if a third book is coming out soon.

Publishers can also do multi-book campaigns. A publisher could do a giveaway for the first book in the series, and then a sweepstakes for 50 or 100 people for the next one that's coming out. That's a way to get people into the series and excited about the second one. There's a lot of strategy involved, but it's also really easy for publishers to book campaigns through a self-serve process. They have to be a NetGalley client with access to their own admin account, and they just fill it all out—it's very simple and easy. We're always around to help talk strategy, but they can make those decisions and book very close to their live dates—even within 48 hours of going live. On NetGalley, because it's pre-pub, they're booking much further out, but for Booktrovert, booking close to live dates has been a fun new discovery.

Joshua Tallent

Uh-huh, and that's great. They can go in and figure out their marketing campaign. Maybe a campaign isn't running as well as they thought, and they need to build more buzz—they can immediately set up a Booktrovert campaign and put in the sweepstakes to get it going without an arduous setup process. It can be reactive to what's going on, or proactive in setting it up in advance. That's great.

Tarah Theoret

Yeah.

Joshua Tallent

Looking at the community of Booktrovert, the number of people signed up, the size of the community, and the breakdown—what kinds of genres do you see people really engaging in? How big is the community, and how quickly is it growing?

Tarah Theoret

Yeah, we have over 80,000 engaged readers. When you join Booktrovert for free, you fill out a profile so we can send relevant emails and you can claim and win books. We have an over 93% profile completion rate, which is crazy for getting people to answer extra questions.

The rate of growth has picked up so much since BookCon in April. When the new iteration of BookCon happened, we had a booth, gave away free e-books, and it was an incredible experience. It was so nice to see readers face-to-face with the Booktrovert brand. While there were some issues Reed needs to work out for future BookCons, we had a fantastic, successful experience and saw a lot of website growth. Brand awareness was a catalyst for that.

My team did an amazing job creating a robust campaign around it, and the sales team did an amazing job—it was an all-hands-on-deck situation. We kept that momentum going with updates to the website. We celebrated our one-year anniversary, called Booktrovert Day, which we'll celebrate annually, and that brought in a massive amount of readers, attention, and incredible campaigns. We're going to have another moment in the fall that we haven't announced yet, but it'll be fun, too. We're keeping up that momentum and brand awareness, highlighting all the great things on the site that people can interact with. I'm feeling really good about it, especially having those in-person moments to talk to people and see their excitement.

Joshua Tallent

Yeah, that's great. Let's talk a little bit about some of those successes over the last year. What are some stories you've seen of publishers finding success using Booktrovert?

Tarah Theoret

One that immediately comes to mind is Abby Jimenez. She's incredible, her books are amazing, and she is a powerhouse when it comes to an author promoting her own books alongside the publisher. She's also an incredibly fun, joyful human being. For years, she and her publisher have been promoting her books on NetGalley with really creative campaigns, and they started doing them on Booktrovert. In December and again in July, they did private giveaways. A publisher can do a private campaign where you need the direct link to enter, allowing you to control it a bit more. Abby has a very active private Facebook group that is overwhelming in a good way. She announced a giveaway of her upcoming books pre-pub, and the members went wild. In the past, they've broken NetGalley because of the traffic, which they're proud of like a badge of honor. On Booktrovert, there were thousands of claims on this book. It was incredible, everybody was excited, and they loved supporting her. We know anything Abby does on Booktrovert or NetGalley is going to be successful because she has such a loyal community of fans and readers.

Joshua Tallent

Yeah, that's great. I'm sure that helps a lot with any kind of campaign. The more of a following or platform you build, the more people you can reach. It's really cool that you can put these up here and have a dedicated campaign that's just for your followers if you want, allowing you to focus on the community you're building.

Tarah Theoret

Yeah, exactly. If you have a book club—or we've worked with A novel Beehive, an online book club network—you can run private campaigns for those members. We provide the book directly to the book club members. Abby is the rock star example, but we also have tons of debut and indie authors who have done campaigns and found a lot of success with awareness, pre-orders, or running special deals like 50% off or extra content. People feel valued as consumers when those are provided. It's been wonderful to see all the outcomes and help readers discover new books while helping our clients and authors find success, especially close to the pub date after the NetGalley pre-pub tail.

Joshua Tallent

That's great. Tell me a little bit about plans for the future. What are the things that Booktrovert is working on right now that may come out later this year? What are some things you're excited about?

Tarah Theoret

Right now, we're planning for the rest of the year and heading into 2027 very soon. We launched a lot of tools and features in the spring around BookCon. Now, we develop by looking at the activity happening, finding any barriers people encounter, surveying our members, conducting social listening, and reviewing suggestions from our knowledge base. We take what people want and love to heart.

We'll be refining a lot of the new features we put out there, like the import tool that allows you to import reading lists from Goodreads, StoryGraph, or a custom CSV into your library to customize, sort, and filter. We'll start refining that further. We might be adding another game—I can't say too much, but we might be doing that.

My team works very closely with the community, and we have a lot of community activations coming up. Following the success of Booktrovert Day, we're planning another activation for October, an end-of-year event, and a robust community activation calendar for next year. People can look forward to chatting with us online and entering merch giveaways, which everybody loves. We're also planning themed events with publishers where certain types of books will be given away.

To answer an earlier question about top genres: Romantasy is definitely mirroring the market trend, mystery and thrillers are huge, and regular romance is right at the top. We've also had non-fiction do really well on Booktrovert. We have huge books from the Big Five and midlist titles all the way down to indies. Everyone can be discovered, and everyone can have their book interacted with and loved.

Joshua Tallent

That's great. Where can people find out more about Booktrovert—both on the consumer side and for publishers or authors looking to run a campaign?

Tarah Theoret

Booktrovert.com is a great place to visit and interact. On Instagram, we are @booktrovert_comm, where you'll see all of our fun activities, announcements, and daily questions about being a booktrovert. Publishers can visit our website, check out our FAQs, or reach out to us directly if they are already a client. We're always happy to chat.

Joshua Tallent

Cool. All right, well thanks, Tarah. I really appreciate your time, and I'm looking forward to seeing all the cool stuff coming this fall.

Tarah Theoret

Great! Thanks so much, Joshua.

Joshua Tallent

That's it for this episode of the BookSmarts podcast. If you like what you've heard, you can leave a review or a rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the show. We also really appreciate it when you share the show with your colleagues. If you have feedback, comments, or ideas for the show, you can reach out to me at joshua@firebrandtech.com. Thanks for joining us and getting smarter about your books.