It was a snowy day sometime in early 2022 when TB and Miranda, co-owners of I Heart SapphFic, started to discuss plans for marketing the forthcoming multi-author collaboration, the Pride Collection. As we sat in front of Miranda’s fireplace with a couple steaming mugs of hot tea, we had a terrible thought. If we started advertising the collection, lots of strangers might start turning up at the IHS website, like guests coming to a party who might peek into untidy rooms or open cabinets that were best kept shut.
We weren’t ready… We needed to redecorate!
Not unlike a home renovation project, our plans for the redesign quickly grew in scale from slapping a coat of paint on everything and calling it done to tearing the whole thing down and starting from scratch. Since both of us are big fans of Smart Bitches Trashy Books (a website dedicated to romance fiction), it occurred to us to reach out to that site’s owner for some help. She pointed us in the direction of the team at Waxcreative Design, a woman-owned website design company that specializes in author websites.
Hundreds of hours of hard work and a few shining moments of brilliance later (we won’t mention the tears or screaming into pillows after too many late nights that also took place), the all-new I Heart SapphFic website is move-in ready!
The new site is easy to read and optimized for mobile browsing, with a fun feel and some touches of whimsy (not unlike a Markinson and MacLeod cowrite collaboration). By far the feature we are most proud of is the I Heart SapphFic BookFinder, a fully searchable database of sapphic fiction that launched with over 1000 books and is growing daily. We fully expect to have more than doubled the number of entries by the end of this year, and will continue to add to it as long as authors keep writing sapphic books!
This new site is intended to uplift our reader and author community as well as shine a light on a genre that is so often overlooked in the mainstream. It was a labor of love, but that said, it did not come cheaply. To get us to this day, it has taken a team of highly skilled web designers close to five months of diligent work. In addition, TB and Miranda, along with four part-time assistants, have logged over 200 hours of data entry, and there’s so much more to do.
We believe this investment is worthwhile, and it’s one that we’ve willingly made with our own time and pocketbooks. Moving forward, it is vital to us that the primary services IHS provides for readers and authors continue to be offered free of charge (note, we have recently introduced a pilot program for author sponsorships, which we will explain in more detail later). IHS’s income comes primarily from the Amazon affiliate program, so every time you buy a book using a link from our site, it helps us out. If you click a link, buy a book, and then buy yourself a brand-new television while you’re at it, that helps even more!
In addition, if you feel moved to contribute directly toward defraying the significant costs of this new resource, we would be grateful to accept the help. We have a Buy Us a Coffee set up through which you can make donations. Here is the link. If you’re unable to give, we completely understand, and we hope you’ll still make use of what we’ve built and share it with your friends.
So, without further ado, welcome to the party, and happy reading!
TB and Miranda
