Join us! We’re on Patreon!

And, what is Patreon?

It’s a place where people can chip in to help support interesting and creative projects.

What is our project?

Well, you’ve probably already heard it: Reading With Libraries! This is our book group podcast.

• Each week we share a new genre
• We have a Guest Host
• We provide information about the genre
• We give you resources to find more books or info on the genre.
• And we have beverages! Themed beverages! (I mean, sure – the books are great, but you need a beverage go really make it feel like a book group.)
• When we are taking a break to produce our Linking Our Libraries skills training podcast, we keep putting up short Book Bites episodes here. Each week a Guest Host shares a quick book they have enjoyed. (We never want you to be alone, without books to enjoy!)

We provide these podcasts to you at no cost to you. But of course, there are expenses on our end! Each episode we create takes several hours of work. It’s a lot more than just chatting with cool book people.

We have to find guests, negotiate dates to record, find information on each genre and lots of resources to share, track down beverages and recipes for each of them, write up the content, do the recording, adjust the sound levels, take out any mistakes made, take out the silences while we try to remember what we were going to say, save audio file to assorted locations so they are all safe, upload to the Libsyn site, create a graphic that fits the genre, create an article on Libsyn and schedule it, create a page on our website filled with links to recipes and books we discussed, and then: voila! It gets published! And it lands in your podcast app! (Yeah, setting all of that up so it magically arrives in every podcast app?? That was a big to-do that I’d really like to never repeat.)

All of that is for Each And Every Episode.

And we don’t just contribute our time and energy – there are monetary costs to making this podcast. We pay monthly fees for our podcasts to get hosted in the happy world of Libsyn, we pay our contractor, and we pay ourselves – because we like food and homes. Every hour we spend working on this, because we think it’s important for our members and for other libraries, is an hour we aren’t spending doing other work for our members.

Recording the episodes is the fun part. It’s the easiest part, because we get to chat with everyone! And it’s the part everyone thinks of when you think of podcasting.

It’s taken us a couple of years now to get all of this working pretty well. We’re pretty pleased with the podcast now. It’s fun to talk with people about books and genres they like, it’s fun to go to conferences and talk with other people about podcasting in their library, and it’s fun to have people mention they have heard it!

And we like sharing all this information with you! It’s fun to be part of a book group!

So we’d like you to share in the book group effort.

If we were meeting in person, we would each take turns bringing snacks and beverages to a meeting. Since we are online, and flexible around your schedule when you want to participate, we have different needs.

We have an assortment of different levels you can choose to support us with a monthly fee. And yes, they are book-related words, because you may have noticed: we’re pretty into books here!

Here are a few:

• folio: $1 or more per month Our mushy, sincere thanks! Access to Discord chat with fellow book group members! And a postcard from Mary, Angie, and Official Office Dog Lady Grey!
• octavo: $5 or more per month Everything from the folio level, plus we  mention you in an upcoming episode! 
• monograph: $10 or more per month Everything from the octavo level, plus we send you a sticker!

We have more choices, including choices for organizations that want to get training sessions from us.

You really want to go to the website to check them all out, because Official Office Dog Lady Grey has a picture at each level – and I promise she’s the cutest thing you’ve seen on a library book group page all week!

We would love to keep doing this for free, and just happily give everything away to you all. But, we really do need money to keep going. And we want to give you the opportunity to be full book group members, to feel like part of the team!

Join us! Become a supporting member of the book group!