I broke stories – including on prison censorship, and indie booksellers suing Amazon – which were picked up by The New York Times, The Guardian and others. I created relationships with major publishers, and negotiated exclusives from Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, Elmore Leonard and Junot Díaz.
And our Book Club was a new kind of online community around reading. We interacted with readers on social media and Google Hangouts, bringing new voices into the conversation. We traveled to meet readers and authors at events in independent bookstores across the country – sometimes dressing up for the occasion.
The books we chose with our community were about Islam, teenage cancer, fantastical circuses, mental health, geek culture, America's treatment of its veterans, all the time curating and encouraging discussion across a variety of online platforms.
We were honored to be joined in our live discussions by veterans and doctors, a teenage boy getting chemotherapy and a Pulitzer Prize winner. There's never been a Book Club like it.
"The idea of an online book club isn’t a new one, but the HuffPost Books’s execution of the idea is absolutely fresh and innovative." - Jen Marshall, Publicist, Random House
"The Huffington Post’s book club... is a major step forward in encouraging intellectual discussion" - Karl Marlantes, author of What It Is Like To Go To War
Some numbers from my two years in charge of the section:
• Twitter followers: from 19,000 to 98,000
• Facebook 'likes': from 800 to 31,000
• Instagram followers: from zero to 7,000
• Page Views: organic increase > 50%
• Number of bookmarked visits: increase > 100%
Co-created by Zoë Triska and Madeleine Crum
Book Club co-created by Annemarie Dooling