Meet For Book's Sake, the 4th team in our student-led collaborative project series

Laura, EIiza, Bryony, Ruth and Asia, the brains behind For Book’s sake — Laura, EIiza, Bryony, Ruth and Asia, the brains behind *For Book’s sake*

Our 3rd years are leading original collaborative projects

This term, our third-year students are hard at work with a range of collaborative projects, including The Pompeii Project, The Wandering Heath and Re. Collective . These student-led projects are part of a new module where they consider the writer’s role as part of a creative eco-system, and literature’s role in the creative economy through working on a collaborative project.

In our fourth interview, we talked to the For Book’s Sake about their experience so far.

Tell us why you chose this project.

One of the main reasons we chose to do this project is to make literary topics more accessible to a wider audience through the discussion of books via comedic debate. Our aim is to bridge the gap between academic literary podcasts and light-hearted entertainment podcasts. Another reason we thought it was important to do this project is because we felt that there was a lack of all-female comedic podcasts where the discussion was focussed on literature. We want to create a successful podcast that is both intellectually stimulating and humorous.

Why did you choose to record a podcast, specifically?

The idea of using the podcast—instead of a blog or another written medium—came almost naturally among us. We are podcast listeners ourselves and the idea of creating one was too exciting to let go. We also believed from the beginning that For Book’s Sake had to be a light-hearted comedic debate, and a podcast can capture perfectly the simplicity of a friendly conversation. We loved the idea of creating a literary discussion which can be heard by anyone, and anywhere.

Why did you decide to do this now for you collaborative project?

As avid podcast listeners ourselves we thought it would be both rewarding and so much fun to give it a go. A podcast is the perfect solution to having lots of niche opinions but having nowhere to put them. Individually we knew we were all rather chatty when it came to discussion in seminars, sometimes so much we had to be steered back on track. As a friendship group it seemed only natural to make a light-hearted and comical podcast all about our book pet-peeves as these were debates we were having anyway, so we thought why not press the record button. We hope to give a voice to unpopular book opinions, settle some of the biggest debates and give our listeners something to laugh along with.

What are you most excited about?

I think I am speaking on behalf of everyone in For Book’s Sake when I say we are unbelievably excited to see the final result of our podcast. When we first started our project, we didn’t want to get ahead of ourselves by thinking we’d manage to get all of our planned episodes completed. However, being at the stage we are at now, there is definitely hope we’ll get all our episodes edited and available to the public. Our own podcast series! The major excitement definitely arose when Asia, our tech whizz of the group, managed to get our first episode on Spotify and iTunes. The dream would be to carry on For Book’s Sake independently of the course – to be able to maintain the love we currently have for the whole project and see how far we can take it.

What’s next?

We already have a lot of engagement with our audience through social media and it would be great to continue developing our podcasts series and keep people interested. Our first series is focused on book pet peeves. In the future, we hope to create a new series around literary tourism. We hope to keep our wider audience engaged by not becoming too academic. When we graduate we would have to consider the logistics of continuing this podcast as all but two team members live in different counties. However, it would give us a wonderful excuse to stay in contact and have regular meet ups.