Trinity at Portable Magic tagged me to do the Small Booktuber tag, so that’ll be this week’s bookish video on my channel over at Jenna Gets Creative. Thanks for tagging me! I’m releasing the blog post format as my Sunday post because I don’t have any tours this weekend, but I do also make sure to put out blog posts for all of my book videos since I don’t have voiceover scripts that I can plug into captions for an easy override of the automatic craptions in time for the video to go live. Enjoy my ramblings, or hit that previous post arrow to see what I reviewed yesterday. The choice is yours!
1. Introduce yourself!
My name is Jenna and I’m Canadian. I’m 33 at the time of answering these questions and I currently live in Newfoundland with my husband and daughter, but I was born and raised in British Columbia. I studied for a BA in history with a minor in psychology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in BC before moving to Newfoundland to attend Memorial University of Newfoundland for what started as a Bachelor of Engineering and became a BSc in computer science. All of this to end up a stay-at-home mom trying to make a work-from-home living as a freelance illustrator & editor, a book review blogger, and aspiring author. I speak English fluently (native language,) French semi-fluently (Mon accent est terrible!) and basic Norwegian (Bokmål, just past my 1-year streak on DuoLingo last week, yay pandemic hobbies…)
2. How long have you been on Booktube?
Specifically booktube? I launched a second channel to try booktube (and authortube) in May 2020 and then moved that content to my main channel in October 2020. I started uploading art content to my main channel in May 2018. My main channel is my legacy viewer account from 2007 so the about section will say the channel was created back then, but that’s a lie! I created the branded channel and moved my viewership data over in 2018.
Yes, by the way, that’s why if you poke around hitting a couple links on my channel the URL doesn’t revert to a /c/numbers-and-letters URL, it reverts to user/name. I hate that! I wish I could change that! That legacy viewer account used my maiden name. I was a stupid teenager. I don’t want it there!
3. What types of videos do you make?
In terms of book content I mainly do tags and reviews but I would love to branch out into recommendations, genre discussions, etc. The idea of reading vlogs doesn’t really appeal to me because I’m not usually camera presentable when I just happen to be reading and get to that awesome point in the book I’d like to stop and talk about, so I don’t even know when I would film that!
I always intended to have writing content on the channel as well but that hasn’t really happened yet. Maybe some time this year!
But of course, if you hang out here on this channel and you’re not just showing up to check out my answers to this tag then you’ll know I also do lots of art content. Timelapses with related and unrelated rambles, supply reviews, tutorials, collaborations with other YouTube artists, all sorts of stuff!
4. What do you love about Booktube?
The community! YouTube in general, book Twitter, Discord, I love the community! In the book realm it’s really great to find people who want to buddy read things or who recently also read the same things so I can have book discussions, since my husband isn’t a reader and my daughter is 3.
5. What types of books do you read?
Science Fiction, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Cozy Mysteries, Gothic Horror, Literary/Contemporary with LGBTQIA themes, and just about anything in the YA category. I’m definitely not a romance reader and I will absolutely not touch erotica. It’s not that I a prude, it’s that I’m demisexual and I don’t care enough.
6. What is your favourite video that you’ve made?
I’ve been making videos on YouTube in general for coming up on 3 years now and book videos for almost a year, so I honestly don’t know which single video would be my favourite. Let me instead highlight the recent bookish video I had the most fun making: Reacting to 1 Star Reviews of Books I Loved.
7. Tag 4 small Booktubers to also participate in this tag!
I’m going to do this by looking for small channels with bookish videos in my subscriptions feed who haven’t answered this question set yet (as far as I can tell.)
- Elizabeth Duivenvoorde @Author_ElizaD
- Kat – K.D. Reids Books @kdreidauthor
- Kae’s Infinite Library @kaeslibrary
- Bearded Bookworm @BookwormBearded
That was easier said than done! Am I one of the last holdouts in the small book channel community who hasn’t answered this tag in the last 7 months? Sure feels like it!