I didn't buy a single book for a whole year - book ban update

in 2023 I did not buy a single book for my own enjoyment well kind of I'm going to get into the details but I was on a book buying band for a full year from the end of 2022 to the end of 2023 and in my mind I succeeded but there's some details that mean you might not agree with me so today I'm going to tell you why I did the ban how it worked how I did and what that means for next year for those of you who don't know me my name's Sam I'm a romance author based in the UK I saw a post online recently that said there are bookworms and then there are book dragons where book dragons just like to hoard books and I find that that sometimes describes me too and by sometimes I mean literally all the time I think most people who love books love like having books and as someone who's a major mood reader I really like having options on my shelf that I haven't read for when I'm in the mood for something in particular I I'm not a big reread and so I like having lots of books I haven't read on my shelf I never want that to not be the case however over the last few years I found that I spend way too much money on books and my book buying habits were really reflective of an overall consumerism that I wanted to curb in my life and I did a lot of growth last year in other areas of my life in terms of my spending as well but books were one area where that consumerism was really flagrant if I saw it and I liked the sound of it or sometimes even just like the cover I would just buy it and because it was a book and not clothing or furniture or decorations or something it felt like it was okay it's like yeah but it's a book you should have lots of books and while I do still like having lots of books and I have no intention of ever not having lots of books I don't think that that's the right way to be consuming anything books included so not just the money factor but also just the way that I was buying books I really wanted to try to to curb that and so I set up for myself some rules for 2023 to try to create some habits around spending and around reading that would be sustainable let's be clear my goal was not to go cold turkey I cannot read any new books anything that's not on my shelf anything like that because I know myself and I know that if I had broken a rule I would have thrown the whole thing out the window so I needed the rules to allow for enough flexibility for me that it wasn't going to be a problem so let me tell you how I set up my ban I listen to a lot of books on audio and I knew that that wasn't going to change my local library doesn't have a great selection of audio books and so I allowed myself to keep my audible subscription and my bookbeat subscription at the time I was on two credits a month on Audible and 50 hours a month on bookbeat and I was using those most months I also had pre-ordered a lot of 2023 releases and I of course let myself keep those pre-orders most of of them were for the first half of the year and I found that halfway through the year I didn't actually have that many more to look forward to and I had enjoyed receiving those pre-orders so halfway through the year I let myself pre-order six more so one per month for the rest of the year other than that I could not buy any books for myself to read so I did two main things to help with that first of all my friend Katie and I did a book swap where we each gave each other 13 books one for each month and then a backup that we wrapped up and packaged as blind date with a book packages and that was super fun I opened one every single month I didn't get around to reading all of them I'll come to all my reading stats in a minute but it was so fun to like have a new book to open each month and that combined with the pre-orders I think gave me the dopamine hit of new books that I needed to sort of make it so I could sustain the challenge I've got a whole other video on how we set that up and the books that I gave to Katie and I'll leave a link to that in the description and then of course the other thing that I did was get a library card I had never used used the local library here it's a very small one and I didn't know that I could order books from the entire network to have brought to the local library so as soon as I started doing that it was game over so those were the rules of the book buying ban and I started this just before Christmas in 2022 and wanted to run it all the way through 2023 up until a trip that I was taking for New Year's that was going to be a trip with my friend to hey on why which is the world's first book town in Wales and I've recently posted a vlog of my trip there so I'll leave a link to that in the description as well so let's talk about how I did because like I said at the beginning it is probably up to you to decide whether you think that I succeeded in my book buying band I think that I did so let me tell you about that I did end up purchasing nine books in 2023 other than my pre-orders but I don't view them as breaking my band and let me tell you why like I said I'm a romance author and sometimes I need to read books for research there are a lot of books that I bought and read this year that I would not have picked up on my own if I wasn't reading them to research a location or a point of view or a Trope that I was trying to incorporate into the story I was working on in particular I was working on a project early in 2023 that necessitated I read a few travel Memoirs then when I started on my next book you've got chain mail which by the way is out on the 15th of August don't forget to pre-order the link is in the description as always my publisher actually suggested that I read three different books and then I had one other project that I was doing research on that I bought two nonfiction books about dreams little teaser for a future project there so to me I don't count that as breaking the band because it was basically I was buying them for work I was buying them for not my full-time job but my job as an author now another area where you might uh think it's Up For Debate as to whether I succeeded or not is around the goal of curbing my consumerism behaviors and this really came out when it came to how I use the library I went on a rampage at the beginning of the year going through every single place where I had any kind of wish list bookmarks on Instagram and Tik Tok my Amazon Wish List my Goodreads want to read list and just like requesting tons of library books and throughout the year I got T T of them coming through at different stages depending on how many people were in the line ahead of me and it meant that there were times where I had like 12 to 15 library books out at once and that was not fun because like I said I'm a mood reader and I have really severe demand avoidance and so if I'm like have a deadline of like 15 different books that I need to read in like 3 weeks cuz that's when they're all due or I need to remember to renew them or whatever I'm not going to want to do that I'm going to want to read and anything else and it actually took a lot of the joy out of it for me I think I still have a long way to go in terms of curbing that consumerism even if that's through the library even if I'm not spending my own money on it and actually let's be clear I did spend some of my own money on it because I definitely racked up some fines the final way that you might debate whether or not I succeeded is how many of the books on my actual physical TBR I ended up reading because the answer was not many in the end in 2023 I read 100 38 Books five of those were from my book swap with my friend Katie I only read five out of 13 of those books 11 of those were from the pre-orders that I had placed out of 25 not a great hit rate there either given that I supposedly was excited enough about them to pre-order them I checked out a total of 48 books from the library throughout the year and I read 35 of them I had to return 13 of them without reading them because they were due back and I couldn't knew them because someone else had reserved them and in the end I only read six physical books that were already on my shelf at the beginning of the year now having heard all of that you might not think that I succeeded in my book buying band but to me I feel that I did hooray and so what I allowed myself to do was when I was in hey on why with my friend I spent some national book token vouchers that I'd gotten for my birthday on new books it was more than a year after I'd started the ban so I don't see it as breaking the band I see it as like a nice little reward a little punctuation between the 2023 band and what will be the 2024 band because yes I'm going to be continuing this into next year as I'm sure you could tell from the title of this video so am I happy with how 2023 went mostly yes do I have some changes I want to make for next year also yes I think I have gotten a lot better over the last couple of months at how I use the library and not reserving so many books not having so many many books out at once I think there's also a mindset shift that needed to happen for me which is I can return it without having read it if I need to because it's not going anywhere the library is still going to have it and yes someone might have requested it after me but I can just go back on the wait list and read it again later so getting rid of that scarcity mindset around library books sounds really silly but I think it's uh finally kicked in it took like 10 or 11 months for it to kick in but I think it finally has I am still letting myself have pre-orders but I've been a lot stricter about what pre-orders I will allow myself to make this time I'm only pre-ordering from authors that I know I will love I've actually done a whole video about the books that I've pre-ordered and my pre-order strategy for next year so I'll leave a link in the description I'm making quite the playlist for you for after this video sorry so keeping the pre-orders I am also keeping my audio subscriptions however I am actually going to be dropping those down and I have already as of filming this video so audible is down to one credit a month and bookbeat is down to 20 hours a month I do also have Spotify Premium so I do get 15 hours a month through that but even then I'll maybe be able to read four books a month on audio doing this which is a Max of 48 books in the year which is definitely fewer audio books than I read last year so keeping my pre-orders kind of keeping my audio subscriptions and then of course I need to change the way that I use the library and for me that's going to be a challenge to not have more than four books checked out at any one time now I have more than that out from the library right now which means that I need to find a way to fix that I'm going to be doing a little reading challenge almost like a sudden death reading challenge coming up to try to decide which of the library books I have out and which of the books that Katie has loaned me that I haven't read yet I actually want to read and I'm going to be super super quick with the dnfs on it make sure you're subscribed so the you see that when it comes out I think it's going to be a really fun video and then finally I am going to be challenging myself to read one physical book that's already on my shelves as of now each month so that will be 12 in the year which doesn't sound like a lot but it is double how many I read last year and I feel like that's a pretty reasonable goal now if you've been doing the math and I've got a Max of 48 Audi books that I can read in the year a Max of like three library books that I can read per month which is like 36 and 12 from my own shelves that's a total of 96 that is significantly less than the 138 that I read last year and honestly I'm okay with that I'm perfectly happy to go into 2024 expecting an almost planning to read less because I want to really be able to be present with all of the stories that I'm immersed in I've seen a lot of dialogue on social media about people wanting to do stuff like this really roll back their reading not set such rigid goals maybe let buy fewer books and I'd love to know if you're doing something like that it's always really validating when other people are also on a similar journey to you so let me know in the comments if you've got similar reading goals or I guess if you're doing the opposite and you're like you know what no this is going to be the year that I become one of those people that reads like 40 books a month thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time bye n

Channel: Searching for Samantha

Views: 1,378

Keywords: book ban, book buying ban, no buy year, no-buy year, no-buy month, no buy month, buy fewer books, how to spend less, how to read more, library card, using the library, how to use the library, book swap, blind date with a book, book challenge, reading challenge

Id: o-1B3E-jwvY

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 19 2024