A Chat with Bex at Ninja Book Box | Big Green Experts

Tell us about Ninja Book Box and what inspired you to start the project.

It started back in 2016 on a bit of a whim, really. Earlier on that year I'd accidentally started the London Bookshop Crawl after wondering on twitter if anyone wanted to come and explore London bookshops with me. The buzz I got from celebrating and discovering the indie bookshops of the city on that day made me start to think more about other indie bookish businesses, and I started a feature on my old book blog where I'd highlight independent publishers and write about some of their titles that looked appealing to me. During the process of researching this I started to notice how hard it was to find indie books in many highstreet bookshops, and think wouldn't it be cool if there was a book subscription box (which were really starting to be a big thing around that time) which helped people to discover independent publishers in a variety of different genres and helped them expand their reading horizons. It didn't exist, and so within a few weeks I had planned and launched our Kickstarter project. I had a lovely community surrounding me online from the bookshop crawl, and from an international book swap that I used to help run, and people really responded to the Kickstarter, and almost five years later here we are!

Our ethos is entirely centred around supporting indie publishers, UK based small businesses (all of our gifts come from them), and charities. We've been donating £1 from every box sold to our wonderful charitable partners Give a Book for the past few years.

What do you think Indie publishers offer that the big publishers can't?

In my experience of indie publishers, they provide a hugely valuable service to our reading lives. Because they are smaller they are often able to move much more quickly with the publishing process, and so respond to certain situations quicker than big publishers can. Indie publishers are much more likely to provide a platform for underrepresented groups and be able to focus on specific things, for example translated writing, experimental fiction such as Lucy Ellman's Ducks Newburyport, or initiatives such as Jacaranda Books' Twenty in 2020, where they published 20 books by Black British writers over the course of 2020, or publishers like And Other Stories and Bluemoose Books who have both had years of publishing only women writers in the past. I love the passion in indie publishing - many micro publishers are set up by people who really feel the need for the thing they publish to exist, and that is reflected in the way that they talk about and market their books, and it's responded to by their readers in a similar way.

How do you come up with each box theme? Do you shape the box around the book or the books around the box?

There is no box without the book. I think that we work backwards to the way that a lot of book boxes work, because every theme and box is very specifically tailored to the book that is included. We don't include anything we don't absolutely love ourselves, and once I've decided on a book I comb through it and pull out all sorts of the vaguest references, getting inspiration for the gifts and extras we include in each box. I like to try to make the boxes a little bit interactive so we include recipe cards inspired by the book, as well as often providing things to do such as craft kits, card games and even a penpal scheme at one point.

You also sell pre-loved books and pre-loved subscriptions, how important is reusing and recycling books to you?

So important! We all know the situation that we're in with climate change at the moment and sometimes it's hard to reconcile that with being a book hoarder and especially a person who doesn't read ebooks, so reusing preloved books is a huge thing for us. For me it's also an affordability thing and goes back to my childhood - as the eldest of 7 the way I could afford to get the most books was to frequent charity shops and the Oxfam Bookshop, so we're trying to provide a gateway into indie books at a lower price point, while also using our preloved listings to signpost people towards brilliant indie publishers they will want to read more from!

Which has been your favourite book to feature?

That is such an incredibly hard question to answer. I honestly love every book we've included in a box, but I'll always have a special place in my heart for our very first box book, Star-Shot by Mary-Ann Constantine (published by Seren Books), which is just a beautiful story about silence and noise, responding to ecology and finding friends in unlikely places.

This year, you took the London Bookshop Crawl online - how important have these kinds of online events been to you and the indie bookshop community?

For me they've been incredibly motivating to be honest. During Lockdown 1 last year we started the Virtual Bookshop Crawl which ran on Instagram mostly and spotlighted books from around the world, and we shared recommendations from bookshops of their Uplifting, Inspiring or Distracting books (the list is still available here - https://www.ninjabookbox.com/bookshop-recommendations) and encouraged each other to buy books and support bookshops while they were going through the stressful time of having to be closed and (for many of them) setting up websites to sell exclusively online. When it became clear that we weren't going to be able to run the London Bookshop Crawl the way we had for the past 5 years we looked at moving it online and it was such a lovely experience. I got to talk to so many wonderful people and actually didn't feel like too much of the social aspect was lost at all. I've had lots of great feedback from both bookshop crawlers and booksellers to say how lovely it was to feel connected with people and to get to chat on panels about things relating to bookselling. It was just a joyful experience, which I wasn't really expecting, and so important for all of our motivation going forward!

Which indie bookshop are you excited to visit now restrictions are easing?

I can't wait to visit my local, The Margate Bookshop. I've been waiting for the weather to be nice enough for me to be able to walk there and back along the coast, so fingers crossed I'll get there very soon! Aside from that, I'm looking forward to visiting Word on the Water the next time I'm in London, and hopefully to being able to travel a little in the summer and visit some of the lovely bookshops in Norwich.

What do you have planned for the future of Ninja Book Box?

So many things! We've just finished our very successful crowdfunder for the second installment of our mental health self care book boxes, The Little Box of Hope, and we're bringing back our very popular Summer Reading Boxes this year, which include three brand new indie books for the summer along with a reading challenge for those who like them. As well as that we're of course curating our usual quarterly boxes and running the online bookshop and subscriptions and we're organising a very exciting Summer Bookshop Crawl which will be happening in multiple locations during August. Oh, and our 2021 Indie Book Advent Calendar is already available, if you're a person who likes to plan ahead...

Where can we get our hands on a subscription to Ninja Book Box?

You can set up a quarterly subscription for the box here, and if you're not ready to commit just yet each box is also available for single purchase from 1st of the month before the box ships. We've got full and mini boxes available, so you can choose how many gifts you'd like, and if you want to try out a past box we've got a couple available here.