Hey, it's Anne, we're making today's full episode free for everyone. There are no ads and you'll get the whole ask-and-anything part of the show. So if you want to join the ranks of paid subscribers, so you always get the full ad free episode, along with access to the discussion thread, head to culturestudypod.substac.com. We are so close to making the show completely sustainable, which means that basically we're so close to paying melody a very sustainable rate.
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keep going, please consider subscribing today. So one more thing. Melody and I talked a lot about what kind of episode could possibly come out the morning after election night. There's no right answer. There is no episode. Like, it's just impossible. So we're taking next week off, no matter what, it's going to be a very intense week. So if you're a listener in the US, please go vote.
I am sure that you are already in the process of doing so, but we'll see you again in two weeks. Okay, on with the show. There's definitely several formats that booktakers use to talk about books. So commonly we have yes-no-maybe videos. We have hype level videos where they talk about books that are
criminally underhyped, appropriately hyped, and overhyped. They share their six star reads, which are books that are so good, they go beyond the five star scale. They share my TBR for spooky season. For fall, they share all of the books I read this month, the book that got me back into reading. I saw one once that was books my husband didn't read, but he loved books rated by spice level whiteboards, defining terms that people commonly use on book talk or diagramming the plots of books.
So I was able to see a book that was a very complicated series that extend for 10 books. One I saw recently was three books I'd save in a fire and three I'd burn. This is the Culture Study Podcast and I'm Anne Helen Peterson. I'm Melissa Morris, the author of Romance the Phone, a substack newsletter about book talk trends. Everyone, it is so good. I'm supposed to say this at the end, but I want to say it at the beginning. I'm obsessed with it. It's fantastic.
I think part of why it's so good is your particular training and background. So can you say a little bit about that? Sure. So I've been reading romance, basically my entire life, the way I was introduced to romance novels was not book talk, but a series of Avon published romance novels that only existed in the early 2000s called Avon True Romance, that were YA romance historicals, 14agers written by the popular authors of the time. So like Beverly Jenkins historical romance for teens.
And they it worked on me. Did how did you get it? Did like someone in your family have Avon? Like did they get Avon? No, no one in my family read romance at all. I just got it on a bookshelf at like a Hastings in Nevada on a road trip or something. Clearly it was formative to me. I remember exactly where I bought it. Hey, STU. I used to go browse like, oh my gosh, are they going to have a live album by Tori Amos in 1998?
And if you were super, super lucky in North Idaho, they would maybe have one. But I thought it was like the peak of sophistication. They also had Jewels Poetry book. I mean, that's your romance background. What's your other training in?
Well, so I eventually I interned at Penguin right out of college working for a romance imprint. And then I actually ended up going over to work at Amazon on the book's marketing team, where I was the only person on that team who proudly read romance. And a lot of interesting opportunities came my way because I was actually reading romance novels and I could talk about them. And so from that world that's wild.
I was 23, 24 and they ended up letting me pick the best romance novels of the month while I worked there because previously they were just using a spreadsheet and averaging star ratings. No. Yeah. That's wild. You're like, you know, this is a wide open. I just can't believe that they didn't think like, oh, maybe we should have someone. Were there any other genres? Like, did they have someone who actually read like sci-fi or fantasy?
Oh, pretty much everything else someone was reading, but romance was the one that no one was interested in. Even though even at the time, romance was like a huge part of where they were making money in the book's category. Right. Right. So what interests you so much about book talk that like you would dedicate an entire newsletter to it? So I think part of it is just, it's like a shadow version of the publishing industry at this point, right?
I started looking at the New York Times bestseller list and I'm obviously very conversant with popular authors and books. And there were suddenly all of these authors I had never heard of hitting the New York Times bestseller list. And it was because they were independently published romance authors or other authors who were going viral on book talk. And it was like sort of reaching out of that bubble into the broader world.
And so I wanted to learn more about where these people were coming from, what they're writing about. I think romance trends are an interesting indicator of where we are, like the national sentiment and what people are trying to escape from or what their what their fantasies are. And I think that that's like very clear on book talk because the kind of reading that a lot of people are doing on book talk is escapist, it's fantasy.
And so it's all of these books that like maybe are a little bit outside of what people think of when they're thinking about what readers are reading. But they're actually the thing that most people are reading. Yeah, pure numbers scale. Absolutely. So I think that there's like some part where people are like, oh, book talk is that just like people talking about Sally Rooney's intermezzo when it comes out, right?
Like no, that is not. I mean, there are some people. There's lots of people talking about Sally Rooney, but people are talking about everything. And the other thing, oh, I wanted to shout out your excellent recent piece on hockey romances as an example of what you can, like if you look at a trend that's happening in book talk, but also just like in romance generally.
And why it is working the way that it is and how it connects to a larger societal and ideological trends, like it's just it's really good. So we will link to that in the show notes. Because you have this background in publishing, I think you're the perfect person to answer this before book talk. How did a book take off in popularity? That is an excellent question, partially because the publishing industry is notorious for not having a lot of data about book sales or how these things happen.
And so we can all it's like a lot of vibes based marketing and book talk is really just the most recent version of that. They know that book talk is working, so they're finally all of their energy into book talk. Do they know how book talk is working? Like how to make something go viral in book talk? Absolutely not. And before it was books to Graham, before it was booktube, that's just, you know, similar versions of the same thing.
Before that, it was blogs. There are still some popular blogs like smart bitches trashy books. Yes, yeah, yeah, incredible. And they're still around. And, you know, before some of its the Amazon algorithm has gotten better and better. There used to be far fewer self published titles, so it was also easier to surface those titles and algorithms. And now there's just so much that tools like book talk are a necessity for book discoverability because there's just so much.
What about what was the role of things like book of the month club and even like Oprah's book club, which I think like Oprah's book club is so fascinating to me and its capacity to bridge this gap between like there was some of her is which we would consider like literary box quote unquote right. And then there were other things that gained a mode of comma prestige like a middle bra prestige by being selected by Oprah.
How did those work differently because those seem to me much more of the work of like big influencers right. But I think it's sort of just like a broader version of what's happening now on book talk and a lot of the big book talk influencers are just micro celebrities running their own book clubs. And they even operate book clubs on a platform called fable where they pick a book every month that all of their fable is very interesting.
They so they pick a book every month that all of their followers on that platform read their probably hundreds of book talk book clubs on this platform where they host the discussion. And recently the most interesting thing I found is that several of the biggest romance book clubs on fable this month were reading a marketing scene published by hinge about six different couples that met in real life on hinge and their stories were written by people like Roxanne gay.
So like basically hinge paid like authors like Roxanne gay to write essentially like marketing content for them, but it's like good marketing content because it's. And then they clearly knew about fable and like seated it to every popular romance book club on fable as their monthly read. And that is really interesting. Do you have you like peeked into some of these book clubs like are they constant chat are they more like how a Facebook group would work like how do they function.
I'm not totally sure and I could definitely investigate that farther, but I think some of them they pick a time and they just have like a live chat with all of their subscribers about it and some of it it's a little more asynchronous. I think the reason they need a platform like fable is to have that place for that conversation can take place all at once as opposed to like in the comment section of their most recent tick tock.
Yeah, yeah, that's so interesting. I always go back and forth with a platform like sub stack. I have seen people try really hard to do book clubs. And when you have asynchronous commenting, there's just not the energy there. But then people also dislike like especially with time zones and global readership like it's hard to have a synchronous chat unless there is an event of some sort like the Oscars, whatever or a presidential debate.
But I'm wondering if you know these influencers are big enough they're following is big enough that you can like the book club itself like it is event. It is a spectacle. It is a chance to also be with others in the fan community. Yeah, that's really yeah smart. And there's so much passion with all of these readers. So that's a really good venue for them.
I would say the other interesting thing about celebrity book clubs that there's there's still a ton of them right we have Reese with her spoon. We have Jennifer Shaker read with Jenna. And those in recent years have really been able to move the needle but increasingly less and part of it's because they don't resonate with these younger readers because the readers already have trusted sources they're getting book recommendations from and it's not Reese with her spoon.
Right. Right. Someone with a hundred thousand followers on TikTok. They would want Reese with her spoons daughter Ava to be given recommendations not Reese with her spoon herself. Well, there's all kinds of random celebrities with the clubs now like Dakota Johnson has a literary fiction book club which I find quite strange. Okay, that's a good. We got a lot of great opinionated questions from listeners and we're going to try to go through all of them today.
So this first one is about the paradox of book talk this comes from Nia and Melody's going to read it. One thing I've always wondered about book talk is how much of it is actually about reading and how much of it is about the performance of reading. I feel very torn about the pull to move reading online as on one hand the book talk community genuinely seems to pull people young people especially into reading and book fandom.
Yay, but on the other hand, the very online fragmented performance oriented experience of being on TikTok seems to train your brain out of the very kind of focused attention you need for reading in the first place. How do these two tendencies stack up in the end? Love this question. It's like the question at the heart of so much of this so attention span that works for TikTok is not the attention span that works for immersive reading.
What do you make of that tension? I think that's really interesting especially the part about performance because to me part of what's fascinating about book talk is some of the shift away from the shame about reading popular fiction and romance in particular. So in that way, it's not how I've always thought about performative reading, which is like where you have a copy of Infinite Just on your bookshelf to show how smart you are. It's like totally different than that.
And I was someone who hid all of my mass market paperbacks under my bed in my dorm room as an English major at a liberal arts college. So I think that's a really interesting shift in the past 10 years where like these are very conventionally attractive and popular looking woman being very proud of the kinds of books they're reading and how much they're reading and there's no shame there.
So I think it's a very different kind of performance than what you might think of in the past as performative reading and more of the performance is like the book fluencing of it right where it's the aesthetic, the bookshelves behind them that are custom built and filled with special edition copies of their favorite books that they've gotten and are now unavailable to purchase.
And the edges are sprayed with designs that the covers are be jeweled in some cases. So the books have become these visual objects in a way that I think is new. But otherwise the a lot of the women who are making these videos look like someone who might be in a rush talk video. And if they're like a little more dressed down there, we're in a big sweatshirt or something.
And some of the performance is that a lot of them are all talking about the same narrow set of books. So the performance is like you have to have an opinion about Akatar, you have to have an opinion about haunting Adeline, which is this like very dark stalker romance with a very long list of trigger warnings at the beginning. So I think that that's where the performance is that you have to show your participating in this same conversation.
I'm fascinated by the ways that like there is this expectation that you have like almost like a cannon in many different areas of book talk where you have like of course you read these 20 books, these 30 books. And what it allows though, instead of just being like, oh everyone's reading the same 20 30 books, it allows.
It's like a lingua franka like it's a way to talk about like this is how this was different from this book. This is how I felt about this book because it's also how I felt about this book. You have common points like it's almost a form of monoculture within the genre that allows you to then break off and recommend other things as well. So I don't think it's like a horrible thing. It's like people who are like if you loved this blockbuster, then you should check out this indie film almost.
Yes, I saw a good TikTok recently and there were several like this that was if you loved Glen Powell in a tight wet white t-shirt wearing a cowboy hat in twisters, you'll love these books. Okay, okay, you're gonna have you send me that one because that I do like that. So I would like to. One thing that I've noticed observing book talk and just like them the larger romanticy genre has like an umbrella term is how much it has embraced abundance.
Like so much of it is about like I have read this many books and these books are so freaking big and to get to the heart of this question, I do think it's possible and actually probably a very good practice to be able to switch from those two modalities, right?
To have a TikTok brain for lack of a better term and then to also have an immersive brain and that second modality of immersiveness of like not checking your phone of just going very deep into a text is something that these books actually I think teach readers.
Right, so maybe you haven't had a ton of experiences going to see a three hour movie in the movie theater, right, especially if you're younger, like that has not been part of your learning experience or going to like a two hour church service, right, and having to stay still. But even being assigned a full book. Yes, a class in high school. Right, right. Yeah, there's this viral essay right now from the Atlantic. That's about like my students can't read books from a college professor.
And I think that what these books do in terms of like the way that their narrative. Propulsion works is they teach you to immerse yourself and the pleasures of it, right, like if you haven't had that experience, then you don't know like, OK, if I put my phone in the other room, this is going to be awesome.
Well, and a popular type of video on book talk is someone sharing the book that made them love reading again. Yeah. And so I think a lot of these books are the kind of books they're teaching people to have that sort of focused attention because they are so propulsive and it sucks you back into something that maybe you haven't done since you were a teenager. Totally. And I think that's part of why this was all accelerated by the pandemic.
The other interesting thing thinking about reading deeply is that the book talkers in particular and on books to Graham, they love to annotate these books and their books that I wouldn't have necessarily thought to annotate when I was reading them, but they'll put page flags on every page. They have a color key about which color page flags aligned to like banter or sex scenes or all kinds of different personal ways of annotating these books and then they show those annotations.
And so it's like a performance of close reading. Yes. And like just because like I don't know if it just has like footnotes and references that might be more like I wish what like that doesn't mean that it's a different sort of close reading like it's still close reading. It's incredible scale. I love that you brought up the way that people have performed or use these books as a way to get back into reading. This was certainly the case for me during various reading drops during the pandemic.
I also think it's true for a lot of women as they get into their late 30s and 40s. So like whatever part of their life is making their life feel like very exhausting, giving them burnout. For me, the first sign that I'm burnt out is that I don't want to read it night, but having something that retrains you in that attention is just so fantastic. Our next question is about which books take off on book talk. This comes from Carly.
I know the quality of a book is subjective, but I've been finding that the books I'm seeing over and over again on book talk just aren't that good. It's almost turning into a red flag for me. If it's showing up a lot on book talk, I probably won't like the book. So I'm curious, how is it that these books end up being circulated as much as they are? Is it marketing campaigns like paying book talkers to promote a new release? Or is this content actually genuine as Taser evolving?
So let's break this down. What kinds of books become popular on book talk? So I think that it's more complicated than people think when they think about book talk. Because at the service level, the obvious big hits from book talk are romance. It's romance to see. It's a lot of thrillers and suspense books like popular fiction. But there are fandoms and conversations about all kinds of books happening on book talk.
And so one sort of viral book talk person that you might not expect is Rachel Cusk, the experimental writer of auto fiction, has a huge thriving community of young female fans on book talk. There's a video about which order to read her books in and it has over 27,000 views. So just because we think about book talk as being about certain kinds of books doesn't mean that they're like incredibly passionate fandoms for very specific kinds of writing.
Another book that isn't what you would typically expect to blow up on book talk, but that is sort of a big book talk hit is bunny by Mona Awad, which is like an extremely weird literary fiction novel. So I would say we're all prisoners of the algorithm and when you start looking at book talk, maybe it will only be serving you a lot of dark romance, mafia romance, romance, but if you start searching for a book you've loved, I think you might find someone talking about it.
Yeah, I think there's also this tendency, it's like an infantilization almost, if like you like books that are on book talk, then like you could never have expansive taste. Whereas like, I think if we think back to when we were younger, there were a lot of like entry level books for me.
Like I read the shit out of John Grisham when he first came when his books first came out and they taught me to then also be like, oh, like I'm going to take this off my mom shelf or I'm going to take this off my mom shelf and a lot of them were like challenging, weird, interesting books, right?
And so how does like book like I love that like experimental fiction, you can be like, oh, this is totally different than the genre that I read all the time, but also I love books so I can love this just the same. And sometimes it's the same book talkers who are talking about Romantic and Rachel Cusk, right? Like they just have broad taste and believe it or not.
Where do, how many dudes are there in this world? Okay, I keep trying to find more. There's not very many. The place that you mostly find dudes is there are couples often married couples reading us together who have joint accounts and they'll trade books. So like she'll read his horror novel and he'll read her Romantic and they like react to them. Right. And it's sort of transgressive that he's reading Romantic or it's exciting to see a man reading this.
But I do think as it gets more and more popular, it's possible we'll see a few more men if for no other reason than because it's very lucrative and drives book sales. But it is very female dominated space. That's a good way to talk about the second part of this question, which is like where if a book appears everywhere on book talk suddenly, like is it because like there's a marketing campaign, like are these genuine recommendations how organic,
what is it, what's your thinking? It's interesting because there are definitely, you know, book publishers obviously understand the power of book talk and even if they don't understand how something goes viral, they're always going to try to make something go viral. And then with these self published authors, there's a rise in the number of independent PR firms that are all you can hire to help your book and connect you with these influencers.
And so what has gotten really popular in the past few years as more people are trying to reach out influencers and get them to cover their books is like gift boxes that are sent out with new releases with related items to all of these influencers. So like stickers and shirts in some cases a vibrator, which was very controversial.
People are doing everything they can to get their books in front of these influencers and definitely some of them are paid, but the book talk community is pretty savvy and they're often good at sniffing out when things are paid reviews and that has caused scandals occasionally in the past.
And I think the interesting thing about book talk that sort of counters the idea that a lot of these titles are seated or inorganic is that a lot of the books that go viral on TikTok are separated from their release date. So a good example of this is priest by Sierra Simone, which is this incredible spicy erotic romance about priest who falls in love with one of her his parishioners and has to decide is he going to be with her or keep his vows they have sex on the altar of the church recommend.
It came out in 2015 and it caused like sort of a minor stir in the romance community, but didn't break out of that space, but in 2022 someone who was a big book talker just found it organically on book talk and it went super mega viral seven years after it first came out and it kind of reinvigorated her entire career in some ways.
And that's pretty common on book talk like it's not when you're looking at videos, it's not all new releases. A lot of it is things that have come out this year last year several years ago or you'll read one book by an author and then binge everything they've ever written. Yeah, book talk readers are very big on seasonal reading. So right now the books that are viral are like really, really, really fall themed. The one that I'm seeing everywhere is the pumpkin spice cafe.
Like great, that didn't it's not new. It came out last year. I think she has another book called the cinnamon bun book shop that has just come out so she understands exactly what she's doing. Are these like is it like cozy romance? Yes, exactly. Her name is Lori Gilmore, I think, which has to be a pseudonym because it is so close to Laura, like Gilmore, that it can't be an accident.
Is there anything like super historical like has it like has Rebecca gone viral book talk like or even something from like before 2000? Can you think of anything? Oh, that's a really good question. We can if you think of something later, we can put it in the show notes, but I would love that there must be, but it is I would say things from the past 10 years.
In some ways, I tell people that it feels like we're living 2015 all over again, which is sort of the last boom of independently published romances breaking out of their bubble. And a lot of the popular authors on book talk now are authors that sort of came out in 2015 and their books are being rediscovered. I have one maybe one last interesting thing here just on the topic of case evolving in connect with book talk.
I'm seeing that I'm seeing I don't have anything other than actual sort of anecdotal data for a lot of the books that people are reading and talking about on book talk are in Kindle and limited, which has come up on the podcast before. It's the sort of Amazon streaming service for books. You pay a monthly fee. You can read anything enrolled in the program.
But authors whose books are in the program get paid based on the number of pages of their books read each month. And what I'm seeing is that genre fiction books are getting longer. So books that I wouldn't have typically expected to be longer than 300 pages like rom coms. I read a 480 page sports romance recently. That's too long. It's too long. And you feel how long it is.
And like obviously their romanticy books are long too. But I think we're sort of seeing this return to a Dickensian payment model where the writers are being paid by the word. And it's influencing what they're producing. And when I ask younger readers about it, they love it. They want the books to be as long as possible. So I do think that's one way where tastes are genuinely shifting because of what is popular on book talk and the way that people are reading now.
Yeah, it's almost like it's like I think about this a lot like that TV series that a part TV series should have been a movie. But if you are used to thinking about the narratives that you consume as these like super long drawn out, not even just one book but like many different books. Like who cares if it's one book, right?
It's like the length doesn't matter in terms of you just want to be in this story for longer. But like romcom should be 90 minutes to max two hours and a romcom book should be 300 pages. That is my exactly. It's also sort of the fan fiction of vacation. Yes. Of these books because popular fanfics can be now 600 700,000 words long. And these readers are reading fanfiction and these independently published romances.
And to them, there's not as much difference than maybe another reader would expect. So their expectations and the way they read are different. The other thing I want to address quickly is this idea like and we always come up to against us when we talk about I think romance fantasy anything that's considered genre fiction, right? It's like this. These books aren't as good.
And do you like as a romance reader like someone who has tastes within romance and is not trying to compare romance as a genre to like literary romance. Like do you think that the books that get featured on book talk are quote unquote worse? Like what is it? No, I think that sometimes it's harder to find things that you really love just because there's so much and tastes are increasingly individual because there's so much you can find.
Like niche content for anything you really love and drill down and search that way when I worked at Amazon actually one of the projects I worked on was expanding the bisat codes for romance so that you could categorize books by tropes instead of just sub genre. So you could like sort and look for secret baby books.
And I think this is sort of the maximalist outgrowth of that kind of reading and searching so it might take a little longer to find a book that you really love but they're definitely out there and I definitely don't think the quality of the book talk books is worse. Like one of the things that's really popular right now is Gothic romance and it's very gross and horary that's not for me.
But I think these books are really interesting and well written and they're doing something totally fresh that I haven't really read in the genre before so you know I'm happy that people have that available to them now. Are they Gothic as in like like a little bit of vampire or they more Gothic in terms of like.
I would say like real just really creepy very almost body horror lots of horror I read one called not to Katie about like flesh eating worms that live in your body and a mysterious college on an island swarats you know surrounded and fog where they're the only people who know about this were meeting disease and the only people studying it.
This seems very related to like climate change and like horror of the world to me yeah yeah I also think the presidential election is going to have a big impact on what is trending on book talk in the next six months. So we've mostly been talking about readers on book talk so our next question is about the role that book talk plays for authors this is from Andrea.
Social media was one time presented as the great democratizer of fame once upon a time the industry insert any creative industry here acting singing writing was very gay keepy and it was hard to get one's work in front of the quote unquote right people for it to even have a shot at the general public ever see.
You had to have an in or know someone etcetera. The advent of social media flip that idea on its head by allowing people to put themselves and their work in the public eye without the help of anyone from traditional industry pipelines which seemed really good on its face.
However at this point the whole process of getting a book deal has been flipped on its head and now it seems like no one will even consider publishing a book if the author doesn't come to the table with an already built in audience via social media or some stack.
You have to prove you have X number of followers who will buy the book before anyone will consider publishing it which puts a whole different kind of pressure on authors to not just be writers but cults of personality and create entirely other types of content sometimes just to gain this audience that is now necessary to get their foot in the publishing door.
It also means that book doesn't have to necessarily be well written or quote unquote good to get published its author just has to be popular on book talk. So my question is with all of that in mind is book talk good or bad for authors are they better off now than they were 20 or 30 years ago when the path to getting published was very different.
So the first thing I would say is that I think a lot of this is true in terms of like how difficult it is to get a book deal if you don't have a large social media presence but at the same time I interview a lot of authors who like I know from when I'm linking to their social media presence that they either have very little or they have started a newsletter started an Instagram in order to promote their book so they got the deal without it and the these are not massive deals by any stretch of the imagination but like.
It isn't as clean of a delineation as like if you don't have a huge social following you cannot get a book deal. But it's still very possible to write and sell a book to a traditional publisher without an existing platform agents are still looking in their slush piles that are plenty of debut authors that aren't building their career off of tick-tock.
I do think if you want to be an author you do have to think about social media more because once you get that book deal you're going to be responsible for promoting that book on some platform or channel. And that's just the reality of the business at this point in time but like you don't have to have one to start with.
Yeah and I would say also that a lot of the authors that I'm friends with the way that they have sold the most books is not through the actions of traditional publicity and you know they're like yes getting placement in people magazine still like can move books going on a morning show can move books doing podcasts especially can move books. But the huge way that they have like become New York Times best sellers is through their social media channels and their own work.
So I think that that is a reality. But the second part of the question and like getting a book deal because you're big and book talk all of that stuff like what are your thoughts there. It's definitely true that building a social media platform or having successes and indie published author can be a way into the traditional publishing pipeline now.
Like there's really a race among all the big five if something starts going viral to sign that author for their next books and more authors are getting book deals through those channels then before but it's been sort of more or less true for the past 10 years as self publishing has become more of a thing. The publishers have always been trying to buy the big sensational self publish books and move them into the traditional publishing pipeline.
And now many authors are opting out of traditional publishing entirely because there's another option for them or they're choosing to go hybrid which means they have both traditionally published and self published titles.
And so when I talk to young writers what's interesting to me is that often their first goal is not to get an agent or a book deal but to build a platform and self publish that to them is the most natural path their digital natives they are already comfortable on these social media platforms.
And they see that as the path that allows them the most creative control over their career which I think is interesting so it's very different than how I would have thought about getting a book deal even 10 years ago.
But in some ways I think that's great like this can be particularly true for creators of color and LGBTQ plus writers who've been historically kept on the fringes of traditional publishing and now they have an ability to launch their career and have all of these levers they can pull without those gatekeepers.
For as much as we talk about how algorithms I think are like racist in all of these different ways like you know who's more racist is the often times the book publishing industry right like who has this understanding of like who will buy which books and who will buy a book by this reader or with this name or all of that sort of thing like there's such antiquated understandings.
There's still tremendous barriers to getting your book seen in this increasingly crowded landscape in the TikTok algorithm does diversity no favors it's pretty racist it serves up a lot of content from different creators that promote the same handful of books it's hard to find anyone other than white women and you can see this reflected in the New York Times bestseller list like the same handful of books are sticking around for longer for many weeks on end and 2023 calling Hoover and fourth wing were the longest lasting number ones on the list.
And things can sort of hit the list again and again and again over several years so in the past few weeks there was a special edition bind up of three I think two or three of the Bridgerton books in like hardcover that's very beautiful that hit the New York Times bestseller list which you wouldn't expect a hardcover version of be tree has been hitting the New York Times bestseller list and that came out in 2020 but this these special editions are sort of just selling over and over again which reduces the number of voices and authorizations.
And if you look at the ripped bonus diversity report things are actually getting worse with the rise of book talks so the percentage of BIPOC creators that publishers peaked in 2021 or 2022 in most cases and dropped in 2023 and some of that is because the publishers are chasing the big book talks and that has changed how many diverse authors they're acquiring.
And it kind of reminds me like the ways that money is funneled towards like these boxed editions and like stuff that's already popular like it's it's not dissimilar from like Taylor Swift and like reissues and buying the special CDs and like all that stuff right like there's just a lot of energy that's directed towards a massing artifacts of the primary object of fandom right instead of and like this is not a critique of Taylor Swift like she's just being Taylor Swift.
Being Taylor Swift and like reissuing stuff right but it does have the secondary function of like funneling more attention and more resources from the fans themselves towards the same narrow so excited things yeah when we can talk about Taylor Swift in connection to this question because she announced her book and it is being self published because the traditional publishers don't have anything to offer Taylor Swift.
So I think that's also interesting they don't have anything to author Taylor Swift and increasingly maybe they don't have anything to offer other authors who have different paths to publication and so how is that going to change the books that were seeing popular and how people discover books and how people publish books in the next several years.
Yeah I mean I think I was talking with a cookbook author recently and she is exploring some ideas of like author equity because a cookbook especially you're developing the recipes like if you can fund the photography or if you do the photography yourself and then the vast majority of the profits go to you you know and like if you're doing most of the promotional work as well that seems in line with how it works.
I think a lot of the angst baked into this question is the fact that traditional publishing is not serving writers as a whole as it once did because there's such an expectation on authors to promote their books themselves and have such limited resources and marketing resources
and publishers that really it's up to these authors unless they're like the biggest biggest titles to move the needle themselves. There's an expectation that they do most of the labor of marketing their books on social media and on other channels without much support.
Yeah. On TikTok there are some authors who have their own channels and some of them do it better and worse than others because like we talked about readers are pretty savvy and so recommending your own books almost never works because it feels foamy right? Like it needs to be organic from someone else. Yeah. Yeah. These successful booktakers do is they do a kind of bait and switch but if they do it well enough then like they go viral enough that it still works.
So the one I'm thinking of is there's an author named Mads Rafferty and she writes Romantic and she'll post like very traditional kind of standard book talk videos like 10 Shadow Daddies in Romantic that I'm loving right now and like one of them will be her book.
And so she's incorporating it into videos that feel more organic but she still promoting herself right. It's so interesting that like self promotion doesn't necessarily work with book talk. I think because the reason you're coming to these accounts is for their taste.
Whereas like I think that's like a newsletter writer. I don't have any qualms about promoting my book because like this is more of this sort of content that you want from me like you're not coming necessarily for my book taste you're coming for the other things that I write.
The other thing that I'll note is I do think there's kind of a somewhat generational divide in terms of like this allergy to self promotion or for like building up your platform first and then becoming a writer or concentrating on building up your platform wall also writing things. And I've always felt that as I was coming up through writing most acutely from people who are older than me because I think it is a very large part of especially the gen X ethos that self promotion is something that.
And I don't fault anyone for like breathing this air like it's just it's something that you should not do like the work should speak for itself right and self promotion is garish in some way and I always thought this actually that I would feel it from people who are older than me both academia and then also like even just like tweeting my own work right when I first started at less feed.
And that feeling like you don't want to tweet it too much or like tweeting it with like I wrote a thing right like just like nonchalance about how you wrote it and I think it's important to understand that like the younger generations do not have that self consciousness.
They don't and they also have different strategies on how to promote themselves particularly related to books that I think are very interesting so a lot of what these authors do is they commission fan art of their characters by artists and that's the thing that drives book sales for them like fan art is so popular and that feels a little bit less like self promotion if you're also promoting another artist's work in connection with your book and it like is sharing the vibe of the book or they'll do cover reveals have been a big thing in publishing for the past 10 years probably and.
That's one of the steps along the road to promoting your book as you do your cover reveal but now book top authors are doing trope reveals where they do a graphic sharing what tropes are in this book like there's only one bed enemies to lovers and that's what readers are excited about and so that's another way of like building that authentic connection with people where it feels a little bit less self emotional.
You have a post where you break down like kind of the different kinds of book talks that I are moving to in the show notes because I think it's super useful if you're not as familiar with this world but the tropes post is especially fascinating to me and I know I've talked about this with other romance writers and like melody talks with me about it a lot like I think some people if you're not super deep in the romance world you're like wait isn't it bad to be trope like isn't it bad to know like oh there's only going to be one bed at some point right like don't you not want to be a little bit more.
Don't you not want those reveals but that's part of like a sub sub genre essentially like you are you're zeroing in on the different things that give you pleasure as a reader and coming back to those things and that's not to say that there aren't other tropes that you might be introduced to but it's like a way of knowing that you might like this book even more.
There's a comfort in like having expectations for what you're going to read and know what you're going to get so I do think it's interesting that there's that emphasis and now micro tropes which are so specific as to be meaningless I saw something recently where this had one of the tropes in the book was he teaches her how to play guitar no yeah that's our trope.
He teaches her a skill but maybe be a trope right I feel like the trope version of that is he teaches her how to play pool and he's like standing behind her with the pool queue that's a trope that has happened a lot but. Okay our last question is about a specific corner of book talk where it's all about the numbers this comes from Shara.
As a big romance reader and follower of book talk please help me understand the disbelief around people reading a lot every month someone goes online to say people can't read more than 100 books a year and work and have a life. There's no doubt that some of the heaviest readers on my feeds are women primarily reading romance is it misogyny because it's women is it snobbery because it's romance is it anti intellectualism because who could ever enjoy.
Reading I usually read more than 300 books a year and I still friends family a job and a healthy social life because I prioritize reading in my downtime. Why are people who enjoy movies or TV given the same kind of grief online. The first thing to talk about here is like what is it about books that makes people keep track of numbers and report them I feel like this is a relatively new thing but yeah.
It's a good reads thing right I think this all goes back to the good reads reading challenges that people do where they set a goal at the beginning of the year I'm going to read 100 books they track them on good reads and then you see like as the year goes by they show you their progress how many books have they read towards their good reads challenge and as you get closer to the end of the year people start getting frantic and they're like I have to read 20 books this month tell me some books that I could read really fast so I could keep on track with my good reads goal.
And I think you see that in book talk a lot in these like lit just like long lists of books people read in a month or like if you need to hit your goals even they'll share things like this here are some fast reads the other thing that people do a lot on social media less on book talk because I'm not sure it works great as a platform for this is a 24 hour readathon where they tape themselves reading for 24 hours straight and share how many books they finish and read and what those books were and what their experience of that was.
So that's a performance of reading if we want to go back to that and I think the most performative thing about a lot of this is sharing the numbers of books you're reading but I don't feel like it's that new outside of the good reads reading challenge with romance specifically because romance readers have always been high volume readers what I think has changed is that some of the barriers to entry with price have been reduced because we have self publishing we have the Libby app we have kind of unlimited you can read a lot of it.
You can read a lot more books for a lot less money these days. How much is candle unlimited a month? It's 1199 I think but you can sometimes get it on sale. Yeah I'm just thinking about like you know use bookstores have trafficked in like dollar used novels for a very long time or even like lending libraries or libraries right you can get as many books as you want from libraries they might not be all the like new releases but there are
thousands and thousands of books that you can read in a particular genre and I've talked about this before I actually think that like the reading challenges is all part of like optimization culture and like how can I make my reading feel productive in some way like I just think it's shitty and also the idea that like you should be fitting in like short novels that you can tear through just to reach a number like why why are you doing this who is this for like
why so a tweet where someone asked if they could track the picture books they were reading to the new their newborn baby on good reads and include them in their good reads reading challenge which I thought was fascinating No it doesn't matter like you should just read the book read the number of books and I also think that it turns like sometimes for better sometimes for worse it turns you into like your self conscious about your reading list right
and I think like what it did encourage me to do since I was always like talking about the books that I was reading the one year that I did this was I definitely need to get more authors of color in this list and so that like I broadened my taste in that capacity during that year and continue to obviously but like when you publish it like when you're telling on yourself if you're only posting novels written by like white women or white dudes I can't believe that people like
if we broadcast how many hours of like reality television that we watched yes the people would be like I can't believe you watch that much reality television well I think that is still some shame or I'm watching TV right and that maybe it was
totally much more of a shameful thing in the 90s and you know maybe it's less so now with the advent of streaming everyone's like well I can't be that ashamed because everyone watches so much TV or it's like such a passive activity as you're doing other things and maybe that's part of what's
controversial about reading so much is that you can't split your attention when you're reading you're not doing anything else when you're reading but I do think a lot of it is misogyny I do think a lot of it is about the kinds of things people are reading and what people consider worthy of attention
yeah I definitely think there's some of that happening there but I think some of this is true about women in fandom spaces in general like there's that sort of trope where younger fans online will say it's really sad when women in their 30s are still participating in fandom
I think there's something weird going on here about like you're not allowed to have fun hobbies after a certain age because you're supposed to be focused on quote unquote more important things right and also especially if you're reading a ton and you're reading in
in genre fiction that like somehow you should be allocating if you're going to be allocating your time to reading it should be like the classics or something I don't know or I don't know like business bro self improvement books what if you're reading a lot of those is that more high minded
I have to chime in this is my take on the question of like people who are judging the high volume of reading don't understand reading as pleasure yeah yeah yeah yeah like they've never had as work yeah they've never had like an immersive pleasure reading experience so they don't understand why you would spend 24 hours or like my my big reading times are always on vacation like they are my favorite times to read I love just bringing a huge stack of books
and I think some people would be like why in the world would you ever read on vacation it's the best thing in the world I have a very particular like vacation spot I am picturing where I like to sit in front of a fire pit by the ocean and read my book early in the morning when I go to the speech town every year and like that's when I look forward to the year so peaceful
but I also think that like cine files collect how many movies they watch in a year like there are all sorts of cultures like subcultures within art like I went to this many shows I went to this many concerts and I think that no one is like oh my gosh actually I do think that the people are like oh my gosh how could you go to so many concerts
there's a denigration of people pursuing their hobbies and I think it sucks just broadly I also think if you think about the difference between the way people talk about good reads versus the way people talk about letterbox which is like letterbox people are tracking how many movies they're watching it's a lot of men and they're watching a lot of movies but it's like valorized how many movies and rare movies they're watching on letterbox and tracking over there
so I'm good reads maybe it's not taken as seriously yeah for sure all right is there anything about book talk that really annoys you and that you wish you could change okay one thing that surprised me when I started watching more book first of all what really annoys me is that a lot of people have book talk opinions but they've never seen a book talk video
easy for book talk to be like sort of the scapegoat stand in for all of the changes that are happening and publishing so rapidly right now without people actually knowing anything about what is happening on book talk
and that's I originally was going to call my newsletter I watch book talk so you don't have to because I felt like that was the space I needed to occupy for people where I think people need to know what trends are happening how people are reading if they're involved in the publishing industry at all or even if they're just interested readers but people are so scared of venturing into this space but particularly on book talk when I'm watching the videos they're so long they're so much longer
then I thought they would be and so sometimes they're like three four or five minutes long monologuing to camera and I have to watch them on two times speed thank god tiktok has that nice function where you can just press the screen in the right spot and they speed up but they're very long
and I guess that it's interesting to go back to that attention question because I think book talk videos would be pretty boring if you weren't interested in reading the books they're talking about or if you hadn't already read that book that's such a good point and I also think that some of the denigration of book talk is from people who just have never spent any time on tiktok just broadly right
and so they don't understand how clever it can be how varied it is like all the different genres of different talks like the ways you can film how funny the comment sections can be like they just they think that it's just maybe like reels that and oftentimes reels are talks that have made it over an Instagram but it's only a certain type of real right yeah so I think that's a great point the other thing I want to know is how you find out about the books that you want to read
it's not just tiktok for the most part especially I'm reading probably like six months ahead of what looks are actually released so it's like net galley and people I know and people whose recommendations I trust and have trusted for a long time like any good romance reader the vast majority of my friends are librarians so that's very helpful for me to find out about the books that I want to read
and I just have favorite authors in a romance I think that's helpful right like your favorite romance author's favorite romance author is Kat's a Bastion I'm obsessed with Kat's a Bastion and she has a really great newsletter where she shares recommendations and I think that's broadly true of a lot of romance authors I love the romance community in general is very supportive the first time I ever heard the phrase arising tide floats all boats was at a romance writers of America convention
so there's a real culture of both recommending other people's books and talking about other people's books in a way where you're really enthusiastic about them and want other people to read them and I think to some extent book talk is an outgrowth of that right like it's just people are so enthusiastic about talking about other books
but I do find things on book talk that I've truly never heard of and would never find without the aid of book talk and then from there you kind of hope to train your Amazon algorithm a little bit to serve you more books like that and you know go down the rabbit hole of that author's social media and things like that so it is I mean it takes work to find new books
yeah is there a books to Graham account that you would encourage anyone to like actually follow like not just hope that they show up in your algorithm but press that follow button so that they always show up in your algorithm I haven't you like particular favorites yet partially because book talk doesn't serve you the same people over and over again you really have to like fight the algorithm to get the same people even if you follow them
but there is someone I really like on Instagram I just think she has a lot of it is just I like agree with her taste I love that her her username is a paperback life and she has both like nice aesthetic content and I just like generally like the books that she's talking about
there nothing out of the mainstream it's usually just like you know traditionally published rom coms and sort of more dramatic contemporary romances but I just think she's charming and interesting and then I also I have a friend who has an Instagram account called eating reading where she does flat lays of books with foods that she bakes that align with the vibes and aesthetic of the book so sometimes I do like that
with her she's one of my best friends I will be delighted but I so I do I like the sort of aesthetic content sometimes the other thing I'm trying to get the algorithm to serve me is like custom book binding content because people are so obsessed with special editions that there's a lot of like special book binder influencers who will make their own special editions of books they really love and so that inner section of like books and crafts I find very interesting
book arts was like a big thing that you could take at my college and also at this high school that I used to teach at and I just I'm obsessed with book art like it's fascinating and so I would really like that content the last question is what is a book that you have recently read that has surprised you like that you were like this isn't my genre these aren't my tropes
or not even that genre but yeah yeah I've been reading a lot of small town cowboy romances because that is sort of the next the thing that I'm seeing a lot from different book talk and I had to get to know how it sounds is like everyone is loving small town cowboy books and I had COVID a month ago so all I was doing was like just lying on the couch reading cowboy romances and they were very soothing to my brain
is that the small the like found fat family gentle small town thing just really scratches an itch and the thing that's interesting about them that none of them are enemies to lovers for the most part and it made me realize that these like sweet goofy male main characters felt really different because I'm used to reading so many romantic
books or other contemporary romances that are focused on enemies to lovers were like the characters hate each other for 50% of the book and the man is so mean to the woman for so much of the book that it's very refreshing to read these sort of gentler books where it's not the conflict is not focused around how much they hate each other it kind of reminds me of some of Nicholas Sparks's work in terms of like a gentle protagonist in a small town often on the coast of North Carolina
and the absence of politics that's what I was going to say I think that is a like I want to cowboy hero who like values people as people and we don't have to talk about mega well the most popular cowboy romance author right now her name is LC silver she's Canadian and I think that's interesting no so that that keys in I talk about this a lot on the podcast with like how Canadian country like country music and the country station that I listen to because it's the closest one out of Vancouver
the ideological component of it is dialed so way down which isn't to say that those politics don't exist in small town Canada but I think that the the tenor is different so that's really interesting where can people find you on the internet if they want to find more from you they can find and subscribe to my newsletter at romancing the phone dot sub stack dot com and they can find me at my website
illissa morris.com this has been fantastic this is the best conversation before we started melody was like oh this is going to be so good and she was right so thank you this was delightful for today's asking anything part of the show we're answering a bunch of questions that we've received about dollias specifically I'm growing 550 dollars with my best friend on the island her name's Beth
last year I grew 12 and this year we're growing 550 it's it's a whole enterprise but also it's like we're just learning as we go and it's been super fun so okay here's here's our first question it comes from Meredith okay so Meredith says as someone who played around with a few dollias from a commercial nursery this year but wants to grow some real beauties in 2025
where do I even begin what should I be reading and learning during the winter to prepare myself oh my gosh like I this one of those things where I feel like I have so much knowledge that like I'm incomprehensible when I talk about it I'm just like like I start getting into like the really like granular instead of just doing big picture stuff I will say I wrote a post that is all about
what I learned about growing dollias that is from last year I will link to it in the show notes and then I also wrote a post in the spring of this I don't know what like spring march or something like that about what's called the dollia wars which is all about
how the growth of dollia sales and small farms and hybridizers like how that's all working right now it's very like oh I didn't realize that I was interested in this thing but actually it's a way to talk about like how capitalism is working right now and how people are thinking about small businesses and monetization and copyright and all sorts of things so I will say go to both of those posts for some of the nitty-gritty
but where to begin I think the two things to think about are learning about amending your soil and getting a really great situation ready for your dollias ahead of time and to do that you can either join the
medallia growers Facebook group which is nuts it is over 200,000 people and but people are talking about all sorts of things all the time and instead of just making your own post and being like can you tell me how to grow dollias you can use the search function in the Facebook group and search for various keywords and that will tell you a lot of things there are a lot of experts from all over the world in that group who are very generous with their knowledge
the other thing is you can buy Christine all bricks book which is I think called dollias from C to bloom it is absolutely incredible and we'll tell you everything that you need to know it's written in a very accessible way it's not too much information it's like if you want to get semi-serious about growing dollias it's the perfect book and she self-publishes that so you can only buy it on Amazon unfortunately because it's like sold through Amazon
the other part of this question is where to source tubers in the future and people keep the most they can virus which I know from you but then there's also like there's all of the dollias are cranky plants like they get all of these various diseases one that people are grappling with right now as they dig is one called crown or also leafy gall and leafy gall they're both bacteria that get into the soil and then affect the plant and then when you dig it the dollia looks either if it has crown
gall it looks like it's sprouted like all of these brains it's like brown brains and then if it has leafy gall it looks like the dollia like there's just like cauliflower growing out of it but it's like I will put a picture in because it is so weirdly nauseating to look at these pictures I don't know if that's just because when you dig a plant that has this not only do you need to like burn it in a fire
but also not grow any dollias there for two years so it can be really a pain in the ass but it actually I'm going to send you a picture because it will it's one of those things kind of like you know some people get grossed out by pictures with holes in it you know it's like that can't wait to see but as far as sourcing dollias there are a lot of great places where you can reliably buy almost entirely disease free tubers
one of the huge ones is Swan Island which is an organ but then there's also there's a site called dollia dict dot com that you can read reviews of local growers who are not selling tubers that have come in in large clumps that have been really kind of aggressively machine harvested in Holland and then usually you end up with either plant-sitter disease or not what they say they are
the best rule of thumb is to try to buy from smaller farms in whatever country you're there's a lot of Canadian growers for example so like Canadians can buy from Canadian growers does that answer that question yeah let's do Anna's question speaking of the clumps and I want to know can you explain dollia clumps to all of us dollia nubes what are clumps what is digging and dividing what's the benefit and what happens if you don't do it
okay so dollia is a fancy potato it is it's a fancy potato that has a beautiful bloom and if you plant one it has it has to have an eye on it like think about potato wise like you think about if you leave a potato in your cupboard and then come back two months later and you have like shoots coming out of the eyes
right so if a dollia tuber has an eye and you put it in the ground you will have a shoot that comes up from that eye and turns into the dollia plant similar also to potatoes you planted in the ground and it will grow a bunch of other tubers around it
right so when you dig up the clump in the fall one tuber has magically become anywhere from four to 20 and you dig it up and some people divide in the fall some people divide in the spring but what you have to dig it up if your temperatures reliably get into like hard freeze territory
because of it the ground freezes then the tubers will freeze and it'll turn to mush so you dig it up and then you can divide it and then you can take all your excess tubers and either turn your entire yard into a dollia extravaganza or you can give them away or you can trade them all sorts of things right you have to store them over the winter
and that's a whole other question people there are all these different storage methods but basically you don't want them to freeze or to get too dry and some people don't the worst parts of annuals and perennials is what I'm hearing they're the worst plants in the world they're the most difficult most arduous if you don't dig it like let's say there are dollia's are actually really hard to grow in hot climates they don't like hot climates
but if you live in like a mild climate like someone and I don't know like Santa Cruz right you could just leave it in the ground but eventually that one clump turns into like a hundred tubers and it's so heavy that it like you can't get it out of the ground at all and that it also like the plant kind of degrade so when people talk about other plants like say a hosta or an iris and how you have to divide them every three or four years
it's similar to that yeah so the plant eventually needs to be divided no matter what so it won't just like turn into a field of dollia's it just becomes a nasty clump yeah it becomes a nasty clump that becomes less vigorous as it gets colder
it that or sometimes though I think about it I'm like oh you could like well I can think of how big it could be because delias are naturally occurring plants in the wild in various places and no one's digging them and dividing them you can eat a dollia you can like fry it up like a potato
it's like a tarot root or something like that have you done it no there's every year people are like here's how you eat your extra dollia clumps no no that's apocalypse types yeah okay so we have a last question from Gillian who wants dollia winter storage ideas she's in Chicago and she says storage ideas that won't break my bank account that is already a little ruined by the seeds and tuber purchases in the spring okay so dollias need to be stored at anywhere between around 40 to 55 degrees
and they need to be between their humidity level needs to be between 75 and 85 percent again cranky and depending on your weather and your situation sometimes that can just be in your crawl space so that's what we're doing best house has a crawl space that's under the entirety of the house
and last year we bought like this little gov GOV EE you can like they're little portable their momators slash things that measure humidity and you can put them into like the little shoe boxes where we put them with vermiculate to make sure that they stay at the right temperature and like in alarm goes off on your phone if the temperature and humidity aren't right so we know that it stays a very consistent temperature and consistent humidity level down there and that's where we put them
a lot of people who don't live in homes don't have crawl spaces and the solution I've seen is getting a wine fridge off of like Facebook marketplace because the thing about a wine fridge is that you can really granularly control the humidity and temperature level
because wine has to be stored at certain humidity and temperature levels so people use what's called the saran wrap method which you can google saran wrap method dollias and it'll come up to wrap them in a smaller space and then put them all in a wine fridge
so people report getting wine fridges for like 50 bucks right then you have a wine fridge but like you know you're dollia fridge you're fancy potato fridge that's over in the corner so hopefully that that will help but if if Gillian has a crawl space that might also be an option
and I would try using either plastic shoe boxes and vermiculate or plastic shoe boxes some people use peat moss it's not a sustainable like peat moss itself like digging peat moss is not sustainable and not good for the world
plastic wrap also not fantastic for the world vermiculate is a renewable resource it's more expensive though so there's drawbacks to all of these these options but then you get your fancy tubers in the spring did that answer every question that you've ever had about dollias? well I now have a thousand more but I guess the one question that comes to mind after hearing all of this is is it worth it?
yes yes oh my gosh so the the thing about dollias is that you can create new ones so easily so if you take a tuber from a plant that will always create a clone of that plant but if you take seeds from the dollia it cross it's a cross of whatever the mother plant was with whatever was fertilized by the bees right from other nearby dollias so there are so many different variations and breeders are coming up hybridizers
are coming up with new beautiful variations all the time so like if you're a person who loves collecting if you like organization if you love like that anticipation of like oh it's gonna bloom it's gonna like what is it gonna look like when it blooms like all of that like that is a super fun part my Beth and I were talking about the other day how both of us like really loved collecting baseball cards and like star trek cards like we like puzzles and like putting things where they go
and all of those things are very much part of dollia growing collecting and that's everything plus like one of the exquisite things about dollias is they start blooming later in the season so usually in most places mid July to late July they really start going in August
and then they bloom until your first frost so when most other parts of the garden are really same goodbye dollias are at their peak and they love to be cut and love to give you even more blooms and they're just beautiful so I think that that for me that's that makes it worth it
we also live in arguably the best place to grow dollias in the world oh wow yeah like there there's a reason why I would say like a dozen of the top hybridizers in the world that live within a hundred miles of where we live
wow so that makes it easier on us so yeah we only get up to like 75 degrees in the summer but that's what dollias love most of all maybe I'm a dollia I would thrive under those conditions you and Bobby just come live on an island come dollia farmers you should make a special culture study hybrid
well we right now we call ourselves Lamy Island Dollias just because that was the easy thing to come up with there are a lot of other people who grow dollias on the island but we might like when if we do hybridize we haven't started this year but if we do we have to think of like what our prefix will be because people sometimes it's their last name sometimes they have like there's like a farm that all of their dollia prefixes are for like their dog
like so we have to think about what ours would be amazing yeah well we'll address that next year well that's the other thing is once you get one year of like you're like oh here's a brand new dollia that no one has ever seen before ever in the world right but then you have to let it grow for anywhere from three to four years to make sure that it's steady that it's genetics of steady so it takes a long time to birth the dollia into the world the arduous labor process
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