TB here.
Miranda officially joined IHS at the end of 2020. It should be noted that she’d always been helping me since I started the website in 2017. But in 2020, she became co-owner.
By the end of that year, I’d reached my breaking point and was about to shut the website down. Not because I didn’t believe in the mission of supporting sapphic fiction. 2020 was a tough year for all of us.
When the World Health Organization officially declared the pandemic, I was in the middle of a business trip to London. I flew home on March 16, one of the last days that international flights for the airline I had tickets for were shut down. Two weeks later, my life drastically changed.
At first, I didn’t think it was Covid. My symptoms were nothing like what we were told to expect. Until they were, as experts began to realize there were other variations of the disease. My illness lasted for months. At one point, I didn’t think I was going to survive. I actually wrote goodbye letters, which luckily never had to be read as my health slowly but steadily improved.
Running IHS during this time was hard. To be honest, everything was hard for a long time.
I’m fortunate for several reasons.
- I’ve mostly recovered from my illness. Many others are still struggling with long Covid and my heart goes out to them.
- This is also the time when Miranda and I started co-writing on a regular basis. A true blessing.
- It’s also when Miranda helped me grow IHS.
One of her items on the IHS wish list was a database. She was a fan of the database Smart Bitches, Trashy Books had.
At first, I was hesitant. Just doing what we were doing took a lot of time and investment. I didn’t know a lot about databases, but I did know one thing. They were expensive. (Turns out it was way more expensive than I imagined in the beginning and they’re never fully paid off as we keep adding features.)
Miranda persisted in trying to convince me. I’m pretty stubborn, but it turns out, Miranda is even stronger willed than me. She was also right. There needed to be a better way to find sapphic books, especially when queer rights are under attack.
Finally, at the beginning of 2022, we opened conversations with the website team that developed the database for Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.
In the summer of 2022, we started adding books to the IHS BookFinder. The first book was entered on June 15, 2022. This was a test book to see how it worked. We put the pedal to the metal in July once we got the greenlight from the website team.
We didn’t announce the database until October of 2022. We wanted to ensure we had enough books in the database to show the true power of the BookFinder.
We launched with 1,000 books.
Our goal has always been to add every single sapphic book we can find. This is still our goal, but we know how hard that’s going to be.
Every single book must be manually added.
The BookFinder project became my mission, while Miranda helms the advertising side of IHS.
Since July 2022, every morning, I start off my day by working on the database. Every time I hit publish on a book entry, it makes me happy knowing that’s another sapphic story that readers will find.
The BookFinder has been used over 150,000 times by readers. Each year, the number of searches grows. By the end of this month, we’ll surpass the number of searches for all last year.
Recently, the database hit 7,000 books and I think I even impressed Miranda with this milestone. She may not have known that once I agreed to building a database, it would become such a passion project for me.
I can’t wait to hit 10,000 books! And, I’ll keep growing it.
I would like to say we wouldn’t have been able to do this without the community’s support.
We’d like to thank everyone who has helped turn the IHS BookFinder into such a success.
This includes:
- Patreon supporters
- Advertisers
- Peeps who bought us Coffees
- Those who use our universal links for Amazon purchases
Every single penny helps our mission to make it easier to connect readers with sapphic books. That’s been the goal of IHS since the day I started the website in 2017, and it continues to be our guiding light as we grow the website.
Thank you for being a part of our journey.
If you’re interested in helping our cause, here’s a page listing all the ways you can support us.
