Are you on Instagram? I am! It’s fun! If you follow/have followed me there, I changed my handle to @ceceliareads in June. It’s all books all the time. My personal handle (for photos of not-book things – most likely scenery, sports & coffee) is still live, too.
After I changed my handle I mentioned to several real-life friends that I’d started to do the “bookstagram thing.” Most of them couldn’t see any difference between my feed then and my feed now, so I guess we’ll chalk that up to me being extra on-brand with bookstagram. I did get one complaint about too many photos of socks, but what can you do? #socksunday, y’all.
For those not in the know, bookstagram (with or without the #) is the bookish community on Instagram. Participants take photos of books or book-adjacent things, use the hashtag for easy discovery, and then (as far as I can tell), go around telling people how beautiful their photos are and how excited they are to read [insert book title here]. It’s pretty great.
I was inspired by a few bookstagrammers I met at the Fierce Reads party at Book Expo. I looked them up after the fact and thought, yeah, I could do that! And then I had to figure out how to take tons of photos of books without getting really boring and repetitive.
Well folks, aside from the #socksunday idea I was stumped about how to make my photos stand out. I don’t collect book swag (bookmarks, trading cards, branded knick knacks, etc.), I don’t subscribe to any book delivery services, and I can’t afford to spend a fortune at the craft store – nor do I want to. Then I had an awesome brainstorm: could I use the flowers at work?
Work for me is in a nice-ish building in downtown DC, and the office has a standing Monday morning bouquet order with a local florist. It makes the reception area look really classy. But from Friday at close of business through Monday AM, the last week’s flowers just sit there (rotting!) – and so I asked the receptionist if I could start taking them on Fridays after the end of the day. Thus, Cecelia’s Friday book & flower photoshoots were born. I now take a stack of books with me to work on Fridays and look forward to the end of the day, when I’ll get to deconstruct the current week’s vase of flowers and create a few looks to fill my feed for the following weeks. I’ve included an example of the before-and-after so you can see what I mean!
Of course, the flower and book thing is a little precarious – it depends on the goodwill of the office staff and me staying late every Friday night. So, what else should I feature on my bookstagram? Hit me up with ideas!