How to build your own community online?

On Friday, 29th January, we joined together virtually for the first event of the year! Following the global theme for this month, Promise, we had Helena Magalhães as speaker. She shared her journey to becoming a writer and how she gathered a book community online over the past several years. This event had a format different from the previous ones. It was an interview style with Rafaela, our amazing host, posing the questions and Helena answering and sharing her perspectives.

Helena studied Social Sciences and got involved in gender equality issues after finishing her studies. After working in the area of child protection and criminology for some time, she arrived to a point when she felt that it was no longer making her happy.The work was no longer fulfilling her inner self. So, she quit. With a passion for words, she always loved to write but felt that being a writer was something unachievable. To her, Portuguese writers were on some other level– too classic, too literary.

But Helena tried it anyway. She started with a blog in 2015 and simultaneously wrote a book that she wanted to publish. That book actually ended up being her second one, as the first was related to stories she wrote on the blog. She always felt an existing generational gap in book dissemination in Portugal, particularly for modern writers. With a book to publicize and disseminate to the public, Helena got the idea of creating a readers community as a way of doing so directly. She called the community: Book Gang.

Things were going really well, though the first time Helena really felt the impact of Book Gang was at the 2019 Lisbon book fair.  There, all the publishers were saying that the books she recommended to the gang were having a huge increase in search and sales. This made her really happy, but at the same time it made her think: Everyone is making money from the Book Gang except for me!! So, she started thinking about how Book Gang could be financially sustainable. After trying an unsuccessful partnership with a major bookseller, Helena decided to distribute the books by herself, always having in mind the value she could give to the experience of buying a book. Book Gang is now a literary curation, a readers community and a way to access modern literature.

This was a journey of perseverance, resilience and belief. Even after several no’s and many doors closed, Helena always believed in this idea of using influence marketing and the power of shortening the distance between the writer to the reader.

“I’m a successful person in my small world”, said Helena. We couldn’t agree more! Thank you so much for your honesty and true sharing, Helena. We feel really inspired and motivated by your persistence and resilience in your beliefs. Thank you for this sincere and kind interview! What a great start of the year!

Text by Ana Sousa

Photos by  Irina Konova and Sónia Ramalho