We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful The Mandem Read. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with John one of the founding members of The Mandem Read below.

John, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

Our most meaningful project is an ongoing one and that’s the regular recordings of our podcast. The purpose of our podcast is to read and review books. Within the process we are reading a variety of books which we are genuinely learning from and we give our perspectives on. A noticeable number of our episodes have involved interviewing the authors of the books we’ve read which makes the experience even more entertaining and interesting. Each member of The Mandem Read make an active effort to complete reading the books which leads to engaging conversations and debates which are shared to our audience.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

The Mandem Read is made up of four guys who are collectively the ‘mandem’. East, one of the members, developed the concept of the podcast which is based on reading and reviewing literature. We didn’t wish to create a podcast just for the sake of it, our focus has been on making meaningful content. The purpose of our podcast is to promote reading, especially amongst young males from black and minority backgrounds. What we do essentially is read and review books from a variety of genres including self-help, fiction, non-fiction, biographies, autobiographies, poetry and novels.

We have managed to interview a number of the authors of the books we have read therefore increasing the engagement level of the episodes. Having the authors discuss their books on our show is one of the things we are most proud of amongst the very positive feedback we’ve received about our content, and having well known content creators and influencers reach out to collaborate with us.

None of the members of The Mandem Read would call ourselves ‘bookworms’ or ‘reading buffs’. However, we have to read a variety of different books to review on each episode of our podcast which keeps us busy individually and makes us learn about new topics or matters we wouldn’t have learned about had it not been for reading different types of literature. Additionally, we never hold back from giving our opinions on the texts we read. This experience has certainly broadened our learning so far and is something we want to continue pushing and promoting to the world!

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

The mission driving our journey is mainly to promote reading and the benefits of it whilst building our audience. Reading can help reduce stress and improve mental mental health, can help and improve cognitive skills, can help develop empathy and learn social skills, and help build and maintain your memory. Approaching our third year together as The Mandem Read, whilst having to read books, has helped us develop and take in these benefits.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

The members of The Mandem Read individually work in different sectors of employment which are unrelated to content creation. We have had to learn how to build our audience from scratch and through trial and error. Our journey to building and increasing our audience and following is currently ongoing, there is still a way to go but we appreciate what we’ve been able to build so far. What we’ve been able to do so far is constantly post clips and episodes of our podcast on all of our social media platforms, attend networking events, and reach out to and collaborate with other like-minded content creators. The main advice we would give to those starting to build a social media presence is to be consistent, believe in your product or what you’re putting out, and to enjoy the process.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @themandemread
• Facebook: The Mandem Read
• Twitter: @themandemread
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@themandemread
• Other:Spotify & Apple Podcast: The Mandem Read