The Lazy Genius Podcast - #72: The Lazy Genius Hosts a Book Swap

Episode Date: August 27, 2018

Hosting a book swap is a low-key way to meet new people and get some great books in the process. In this episode, we chart the path of a book at a book swap plus talk about food, music, and everything else to have a great party. Curious about how many friends to invite? How to set up the books? How to collect the books in the first place? We cover it all here. Enjoy listening, and if you host your own, don't forget to tag me on Instagram and use the hashtag #lazygeniusbookswap! Stuff Mentioned: Want to get detailed reviews of every book I read? Join the mailing list here! Annie B. Jones is a favorite IG account for books, and she's a real life bookstore owner! Want a behind-the-scenes look into her life? She was on one of my favorite episodes of Simple if you want another podcast to add to your queue.  How to Never Run Out of Food at Your Party Fun music ideas for a chill book swap: Kate Rusby, Gregory Alan Isakov, and the Your Favorite Coffeehouse playlist on Spotify Download the transcript This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi guys. I'm Kendra and you are listening to The Lazy Genius podcast. Here I'm going to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. You're listening to episode number 72. The Lazy Genius hosts a book swap. Now if you follow me on Instagram at the lazy genius, you might have seen photos of this on my account or at Emily P. Freeman, who was at that book swap and this was like months ago. But I still get so many requests to explain how we did it. How do you host a book swap? There are a lot of options. I am sure great ways to do it, but I will happily tell you what I did that worked, what didn't really work, and what I would do next time to make it go even better. I made the mistakes for you, so you are welcome. But before we get into the

book swapping, I want to give you a heads up on the perfect way to start your September. It's called Like Your Life, and it is a resource created by the lovely Tish Oxen Rider to help you like your life. She gives beautifully practical tools to help you figure out how you're wired, how that impacts your daily life from your to-do list to what you say no to, and it's all presented with Tish's smart, very gracious tone. If you are in a season of transition, whether it's starting a year of college where you don't actually know what you're doing, you're having a new baby and don't actually know what you're doing, maybe you're saying goodbye to your house full of kids. empty nester, you don't actually know what you're doing. Like your life could be a great place to

start. Tish is a real life friend and so trustworthy in this process. Plus the course is on stupid sale. Oh my gosh. From Wednesday, August 29th to Friday the 31st. It is a very short window. And if you're listening to this episode on the day or two after it drops, obviously you cannot dive into the course quite yet, almost time. But you can head to the lazy genius collective.com slash like your life to get on the waiting list and you can get first word when the course opens or just head to that link anyway no matter when you listen to get access to more about the course and see if it's right for you and you guys it's only $47. It's usually $67. So it's a steal in that regard. It's $20 off. But it's also kind of like going to a life coach for several

hours, which will cost you several hundred dollars. So it was already an incredibly worthy investment at $67 and is a no-brainer at 20 bucks less than that. So head to the lazy genius collective.com slash like your life to move into this September with more clarity about who you are, how you spend your time and how you can like your life day after day. Okay. Let's talk book swapping. First, let's talk books. Books are the best. Books are the best, right? I love how readers are drawn to other readers and are always so willing to help each other find the next perfect book. But also a lot of readers have the problem where they have so many books. They're obsessive book buyers. And we all have lots of books in the house that like we've read and maybe we want to share

or we didn't read for any of number of reasons, but we're wanting to share them anyway. Not every book is right for every person. And that's okay. So a book swap is such a fun way to kind of clear out your shelves, but to get books in the hands of the right people, and then hang out with friends in the process, and maybe even make new ones. If you are looking for an activity to have low-stakes connection in a new community, a book swap is such a great choice. People don't really have to talk if they don't want to because they can just peruse books. There's no agenda that someone who doesn't really know anybody has to be weirded out by,

not any like icebreaker games that make you nervous you know and then books are one of the best ways to have a conversation to a stranger um with a stranger um and not like commit to forever friendship you know you can just talk about a book you both love have a little human connection and then just move on and then when you see that lady at church the next week you can ask if she started reading yet it's such an easy way into new possible friendships um and then maybe a maybe a book club is like too high of a commitment for you, but a book swap could be just the thing because it's just one off and you're done. But it serves a similar purpose as a book club. It gathers people around books. Okay. So we're going to chart the path of the book during a book swap.

And then we'll talk about things related to planning the actual gathering itself. You ready? Let's book swap. How many times do you think I can be like, let's book swap before it gets annoying? that's probably enough. Okay, so the path of a book. So much of what I'm going to share is based on how many women or people, they don't have to be just women, are going to be at the book swap. I think for it to have the energy that you're probably looking for, you want at least 10 people, but more than 30 feels a little crazy, maybe. I organized a book swap for the women at my church, and I go to a really small church. So I think we had close to 30 women come.

It didn't feel crowded at all. It didn't feel like too much. But there were a number of women that I never even got a chance to speak to. So it just kind of depends on your purpose. If you're looking to unite an entire group like this is your in to creating some sort of connection, you might want to keep the group smaller, you know, like less than 20. Or if it's just a fun social thing and it's okay that not everyone says words to everyone else like it wasn't mine, having it a bit bigger is great. The only reason that I suggest more than 10 people is because

you're getting the books for your book swap from the people coming. If only six people are doing this and everybody only brings one book or two, it might feel kind of like a downer. Or might not. It really is up to you and how you structure it and what the purpose is. But if it's to make sure that everyone leaves with a book or two that they're excited about, a higher number of people and therefore books is better. You just have more inventory to choose from. Okay, so as the host, how do you get the books? There are two main options, I think.

You can ask for the books ahead of time, so you can organize them before the swap, or you can have people bring their books when they come to your book swap. There are pros and cons to each, I think. I asked women to bring their books to church the couple of weeks before the book swap. I put a big cardboard box in the front gathering area at our church and just told ladies to drop

their books in there and I'd take them home. I had some drop books at my house if they knew where I lived. And then a few still brought books when they came to the book swap. One of the points is, whatever you choose, it's likely that it's not going to be just that thing. Like if you ask for books in advance, hold that loosely because you'll still have some show up when the book swap is already rolling. and that's okay. It's whatever you feel most comfortable with. And again, how many people

slash books you're expecting. But here's the one thing I highly suggest, regardless of how you get these books in the first place, whether you get them before or people bring them. Wherever you host your book swap, set the books up by some kind of genre. You can stick with classics, like classics, romance, suspense, mystery, fantasy, all the things. Or you can be, you be a bit more creative with your categories, especially if you have the bulk of books ahead of time. Annie B. Jones, who owns an independent bookstore called The Bookshelf in Thomasville, Georgia, who is also a great Instagram follow, by the way, if you like books, I will put her handle in the show notes so you can follow her. She gave me the idea to classify the books in a unique way.

Categories like, for fans of This Is Us, or Gone Girls, Little Sisters, or books to read on a rainy winter's night, you know, that kind of thing. That requires a little more creativity, but that could be exactly what you want to do. Either way, though, categorizing the books is really, really important, I think, for a successful book swap. I set the books up in a dining room and living room that were next to each other. And then one room was nonfiction and the other was fiction. Nonfiction is easier. You've got memoirs, self-help, business, religion. You can usually tell from the title what it is. That group is really easy. Just put them on the table and you're good.

Fiction is harder, but not impossible. I had areas of tables marked by genre and then I had, and like labeled so people knew like, I'm looking at fantasy right now. I'm looking at science fiction right now or whatever it is. I'm looking at literary fiction. That's always a favorite category of people. And I had organized the books that I had gathered beforehand by those genres already. which made it really easy to set the books up when I got to the swap, by the way. And then when the

women brought books with them to the book swap, I could just stick those books in the right genre because the genres were already there. And if I didn't know about the book or where to put it, I just asked the person who brought the book and put it in the right place. Or some of the women just put the books in the right place themselves. They had their little box and they just saw the categories and they popped them in the right place. So whether you organize, ahead of time or you create organization just in your space for books to land in when they arrive, it will pay off immensely in the experience of the book swap. Okay, so how do you actually swap? I'm sure there are a lot of options, but I will tell you what we did. And for the most part,

I really liked it. One of the goals of my hour sounds very like my book swap, but our church's book swap was to create opportunities beyond the book swap for the women in our church to connect. Because of that, I had index cards. I like cut index cards in half long ways to create like a like a bookmark shape. And then I put those in bowls with pens on the book tables. As women, and I gave these instructions beforehand when we were like all gathered before we started book swapping. As women browsed through the titles. If they saw a book they wanted, they got one of those index cards. They wrote the number one and then their name next to the one.

And then put that bookmark index card back into the book. We asked for women to start doing this on only like three or maybe it was five books at once, like on their first pass. But essentially, if you're browsing and somebody already claimed that book, they already have their name in the number one spot, you can put your name on kind of a sort of waiting list if the person would like to pass the book along when she's done. So you just write your name underneath the person's name that was there first. Need a vehicle that isn't afraid to make a splash?

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read it and are happy to pass it along, you have a name of a person you will probably see sometime soon and can give them the book to enjoy. I have done that with a couple of books that I got at our book swap already and I have had a book given to me too just like randomly on a Sunday morning so it's like the book swap keeps swapping it's so fun now you can you can also just let people go for it if they see a book they want they take it and they hold it in their arms and no one else can have it um you could always if you go that way you can cap like how many people how many books that people can take on their first pass you know like okay go through and you're welcome to take the first five books that you take five books and that's great but then let you let you

everybody go through and then you can go through again. Does that make sense? Um, so if you like the idea of keeping the sharing going, that index card waiting list bookmark thing could be a nice way to do it or some version of that. But you certainly can just let people take the book and go home. So that's kind of the path of the book. It gets to you before the swap or the night of. It hangs out on a table with its similar friends, it gets chosen by someone who will either pick it up and keep it forever or will write their name in that bookmark and then put the book back on the table to give other people a chance to see it and write their name down on the waiting list, but then it goes home with the initial chooser, right? And if you have books left over, you have a couple

of options there too. You can let people know that they can just take the books they brought, they can take them back with them if they want to go try to sell them in a used bookstore or something. Or you can just donate all the leftovers to a church library or Goodwill or a women's shelter or like your little neighborhood library or your actual library. A lot of libraries love donations. Any number of places. Okay. So let me give you a few like logistical details and little fun little extras to make this kind of gathering. So fun. Okay. So number one, half food. always have food. I always have food. But fun appetizers are such a great way to go for something like this. I will put a link to a resource that's on my website about how much food to serve at a party and how to choose that food. So I will put that in the show notes. The lazy genius

collective.com slash lazy slash book swap to get that. But I served, gosh, I don't even remember. I think I had spice nuts, probably some kind of like, I think I had like a crusty, you know, like toasty bread with something yummy on it. I know I made a lemon pound cake because I can't find the recipe of what I tried and I'm so sad that I lost it because it was so tasty. And then I think had like a bowl of grapes or something. Oh, and I had salami. I remember I had like a plate of salami. Because that's something that you don't usually buy yourself, but it's so lovely to eat salami. It doesn't have to be crazy. It doesn't have to be fancy. It just, it's just fun to have something. And then we had hot tea and because that feels very bookish. And then little cans of like

pretty fizzy water. It was not La Croy. I have still never had a La Croy. Don't at me about that. But number one, definitely serve food. Number two, play music. This makes every party better, you guys, but especially during those quiet moments in the beginning when like the first person gets there, but no one's really talking yet. Or in the book swap room where it feels more like a library than a party, if there's nothing playing. You know, it's just like sign. and like women perusing books and I don't know it's just it's nice to have music it's nice um I'm not saying you have to like blast Drake you know just play something classical music easy coffee shop type music there are a million playlist that will serve your needs on Spotify or Pandora or whatever um

I actually really love for this kind of thing to choose an artist who is just good background music um I'll list a couple on the show notes but a couple favorites are Kate Rusby our USB Y she is like an Irish folk singer, but it's like super chill and lovely. Her voice is like butter. Oh, it's so good. And then I also love Gregory Allen Isaacoff. I think that's how you say his last name. He is just a dude with a guitar. It's like easy melodies, nice voice. Nothing makes you jump. You know, it's just great. It's just good, simple music. He is. The play music. It does make such a difference in any kind of party. Number three, put a personal touch on what the book is about. One of the great things about a book swap is that you can get firsthand knowledge of why a book

might be a great read for you versus like randomly choosing titles at a bookstore or a library. So you can do this a couple of ways. You can have personal recommendations a couple of ways. You can ask people to write like a little note on a card inside the book that they bring about like what it's about or why they liked it or what books similar to, that kind of thing. Or depending on the size of your group, you can give each person like a quick minute to sell the group on why a certain book or two that they brought is worth the time of the readers in the room. Now, if either of those sounds like too much work or they don't really fit the vibe of your group, you can have like a couple of laptops or tablets out and open to like good reads so that if somebody is intrigued by a

title and wants to dig deeper into reviews or something. You know, like some books, they sound great. and they look pretty and then you look at reviews and they have like two out of five stars you're like oh my gosh i don't want to waste my time reading that um so that's something that you could do easily to like give people a little more resource about what the book is about but words from a person um whether on a card in the book or from their actual mouths in the room is a really great element to a fun book swap that is something that i tried to do like i encouraged or i just suggested to women like hey if you want to put a card about what it's about in there. That's great. And one or two people did it. And I tell you what, I did pick up a lot of those books because they were, like they made sense in their recommendation.

One of those was my friend, Arian, who I have talked about before. She has the like natural skin care business. Some call me crunchy. She has that cleansing oil that I'm right or die for. But she used to be a school librarian. And so she was like all over putting the cards in the books and explaining why someone would enjoy them. So not everybody is going to be game for that, especially if they're donating like 30 books to the cause, you know? So you can just sort of read the room on that one, but having personal recommendations is such a great way to go.

Okay. Number four. This is purely logistical, but set up your books so that the titles are really easy to read. Imagine standing in front of a table, you know, like a long eight-foot table. Our inclination is to line the books up left to right. in long rows like a bookshelf. But you have to angle your head a little to actually read the titles, you know, to make it even

easier to browse. Here's what I suggest. I suggest you set the books up top to bottom, not left to right. So the titles are straight across, like right in front of your eyes. Like you just read it, like it's lines. So basically like where the books aren't stacked on top of each other, they are stacked where the, this is spine up, right? Where you, where you open the book is on the table and the spine is facing up, but those books are stacked top to bottom rather than left to right. So you can just

like read the titles across. That's a really, I'm finding that really hard to explain. I hope that's making sense. But so rather than having like two long rows left to right, you'd have like six or eight short rows, top or columns top to bottom, right? And then also just sort of think about the flow of people looking at books. Like make sure that someone always has a way out of the book swap room. It's not just crammed with tables and books. That it's easy for people to be back to back without bumping into each other when they're looking at tables that are close together. Just make it easy for people to read the titles without needing a chiropractor at the end of the thing.

And that they aren't like awkwardly having to shimmy past other people that they might not know very well to get to a book. And finally, number five, have all the books in one area so that conversation can happen in the other areas. You don't want to have the food table in with the books and then make it hard for people to maneuver through bigger crowds to try and get to the science fiction table. You know, so books in one space, food and fun, and another, music in both. Okay, so that's it. That's how I hosted my book swap. And hopefully you have some ideas on how to do yours. Oh, one less thing I forgot.

it is nice to have a set starting time for people to come. Just so browsing feels more or less fair and also so that you have all the books available for everyone at the same time. But it's also nice to communicate beforehand that once people get their books, they can totally leave or they can totally hang out and stay. As the host, just be clear in what's happening. You can announce the rules for choosing books so people feel safe and know what to do. And also like give them a clear out so that they know that they're not missing anything if they leave before it's technically over it's not like you're pitching timeshares and they have to stay for the whole program right so just be clear as the host and what people can expect so that they don't feel

like they're breaking a rule if they leap okay if you end up doing this if you um have a book swap and you post anything on instagram will you tag me so i can see it and like if this if this resonates with just a ton of you. Let's just go ahead and preemptively gather all the ideas in one place. So if you remember, use the hashtag lazy genius book swap so we can just get ideas from each other. Okay, that's it for today. I will be on Instagram at the lazy genius this Thursday to answer any of your book swap questions. So you can join me there Thursday around 1215 Eastern. A lot of details will be listed in the show notes for this episode. So you can head to the lazy genius collective.com slash lazy slash book swap so you don't miss anything including that post on having the right food

for a party and then don't forget to check out like your life doors open briefly for that crazy sale price of $47 this Wednesday August 29th so head to the lazy genius collective.com slash like your life to learn more and make your September take a deep breath. Thanks for listening you guys and until next time be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'll see you next week. Have you ever felt like you are living just a B or B plus life? It's so dangerous to live that. More dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A plus life is

not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.