Shelves and the City 2025: Book Creator Meet-Up & HarperCollins Event in L.A.
By Kyle Colley, Apr 1, 2025
(Excerpt from our Bookum Buzz Weekly Newsletter)
For the newcomers, you might have missed our mantra, so let's say it once with emphasis…
WE SHOUTOUT CREATORS.
Sunset Blvd was honorarily renamed "Bookshelf Blvd." because book content creator took over Los Angeles.
Back for the second year, Shelves and the City hosted a three-day book creator meet-up celebration. (Last year, we wrote about the one in New York—NEWSLETTER).
To recap, Shelves and the City is a book content creator event put on by Epic Reads (HarperCollins) and AvonBooks. Here's our conversation with Maya (@mnmbooks) about last year's event:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEbiuZJPHIE
If last year was a dress rehearsal, this year was a Broadway premiere. Attendance jumped from around 60 creators to about 115.
This year included:
- Author panels (featuring R.F. Kuang, BK Borison, and more) with ARCs.
- Supporting local bookstores like Reparations Club.
- Supplying MyFreeLittleLibraries.
- Volunteering at a food bank to support those displaced by the LA fires.
- And, of course, partying in style on the Fox Studio Lot (all expenses paid)!
Attendees praised HarperCollins for including creators from diverse backgrounds and with varying audience sizes. Book content creator and attendee @TrayReadThat shared (via threads):
"Thank you for including creators of various backgrounds and social media journeys. Implementing community service to aid communities affected by the fires was so important and wholesome. I've made lifelong friends because of this trip!"
Although invite-only, if you're looking to secure a spot at the next one, a friend of Bookum, Hannah Lisa Lohr, asked the team who hosted it, and their response was:
1 - Post the content.
2 - Be consistent (you don't need a big following, but post quality content regularly).
3 - You don't necessarily need to be on HarperCollins' existing influencer team, but it helps.
Our Take:
We always love a good creator collaboration, and this might be one of our favorites of the year!!
From a business perspective, it'll be interesting to see how they analyze the ROI (return on investment)—especially since they scaled up from last year. It’s definitely a strong brand play; however, people don’t necessarily go to a bookstore today and ask directly for a HarperCollins or Avon book by name.
Maybe the hope is that more creators will support their authors in their posts and buy their books in the hopes of getting invited to this or similar brand trips in the future. Nevertheless, HarperCollins has caught people's attention!
We'll share more creators' posts below: