We were lucky to catch up with Amy Smalley and Carrie Vittitoe recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Amy and Carrie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
Our entire podcast, The Perks of Being a Book Lover, is a meaningful project. We love books and want to highlight literary endeavors, whether they by be authors, creative directors, textile artists, or readers. Just like our title, we’re trying to highlight all the many ways that being a book lover enriches your life.
Amy and Carrie, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
We have been in the same book club for close to two decades so we had a well-established relationship by the time Amy began floating the podcast idea to me. It was something she had wanted to do for a while. My schedule had been too complicated to try to squeeze in a podcast, but by late 2018 things were calming down. We were able to begin the slow learning curve of podcast production in January 2019; by May 2019, we had recorded several episodes and were being broadcast on a community radio station in Louisville, Kentucky.
Throughout the past five years, we’ve learned a lot about each other, about how books are written and published, and about how many unique readers there are. We’re proud to have brought under-the-radar books to people who might otherwise not have discovered them. We’re proud of the connections we’ve made with authors, artists, bookish podcasters, and people who just love books the way we do.
We’ve learned the importance of changing things up. We don’t do the podcast the exact same way we did five years ago for a variety of reasons. When we’ve felt a lull or overwhelmed, we’ve looked at what we needed to change to revive our passion for what we’re doing.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
In a perfect world, artists and creatives would be paid more for the services they contribute, but we don’t live in a perfect world. It would be great to be able to make a living off The Perks of Being a Book Lover, and maybe we could if we monetized everything. But should everything be monetized?
We began this creative endeavor for ourselves and to turn it into a commodity would mean we are doing it for other people, on other people’s timeframes, and with other people captaining the boat. That isn’t something we’ve wanted to do. Sometimes people do creative things because they just love them; they give you a jolt and make you think or feel in a way you didn’t before. That has been the most rewarding aspect of producing the podcast: finding a purposeful and creative outlet that gives us, and other people, pleasure.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
Like so many people, organizations, and businesses, The Perks of Being a Book Lover had to pivot in 2020. Prior to March of that year, we had been primarily interviewing authors in or near to Louisville. For example, when fantasy author Alix E. Harrow lived in Berea, Kentucky, we drove there to interview her. But, of course, COVID changed our ability to do that.
We had to learn very quickly how to use remote recording tools, which isn’t always the easiest thing for middle-aged folks to do. The benefit of this pivot is that it broadened who we were able to “meet” and talk with via the podcast. Perhaps this would have happened anyway, but the necessity of the virus made it happen faster, and we’ve loved the results.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.perksofbeingabooklover.com
- Instagram: perksofbeingabookloverpod
- Facebook: The Perks of Being a Book Lover
Image Credits
Photos of Amy & Carrie with Leesa Cross-Smith, Brooke Lauren Davis, and panel members from 2023 Louisville Book Festival courtesy of Bethany M. Planton.