Booktube Babble: An Interview with Yasmin from yasminthereader

Today, I’m bringing you a very exciting interview with Yasmin from yasminthereader. I’ve been a fan of Yasmin for a long time now; she’s a booktuber who is based in the same city as me (Melbourne) and I have been LOVING all her recent content.

NOTE: Yasmin is also currently hosting a read-along of the A Darker Shade of Magic Trilogy by V.E Schwab which begins this month. The first book, A Darker Shade of Magic, is the book for the month of August (I am going to try my hardest to squeeze it in my reading this month).

She is co-hosting it with Sabine’s Book Nook, with a liveshow coming at the end of August on Sabine’s channel to discuss the book. If you’re a fan of V.E. Schwab or like me, haven’t read a single book by hers yet (!!), I’d highly recommend joining (and watching some of Yasmin’s videos too).

Without further ado, here is the interview!

Hi Yasmin! Thank you so much for joining me in my little blogging corner of cyberspace. How have you been? (I’m also in Stage 4 lockdown, so I can imagine). And what are you currently reading?

Hello, thankyou so much for interviewing me haha. I’ve never been interviewed before, this is exciting and scary, but thankyou for letting me be a little part of your blog! I’m doing okay. Just trying to get through some sort of normality during a pandemic, as I’m sure everyone is. It’s just such a weird time. But I’ve been losing myself in a lot of fantasy books lately. I’m actually currently reading The Queen’s Resistance by Rebecca Ross. It’s the second book in the Queen’s Rising duology. I absolutely adore it. The characters are so interesting and the world building is fantastic. 

For readers who may not know you, please introduce yourself and your channel!

Oh okay so hello everyone. My name is Yasmin. I’m an Australian booktuber and bookstagrammer. You can find me online via yasminthereader. I love to read fantasy books, Ve Schwab is my favourite author of all time and I work in a bookstore (it’s honestly the best job in the world and I’m so grateful for it). I’m a crazy cat lady and currently have a black tuxedo cat called Amuro. I drink too much tea and I love to go on adventures. Oh! Also, Japan is my favourite country in the world and I’m obsessed with Disney. 

How did you first get into creating bookish videos? What inspired you?

I’ve always been a very creative person. When I was in high school (which was a long time ago, shh), I loved to make video projects. I’ve always loved just creating, in some way or another. So I kind of always thought about starting a youtube channel, but I never really knew what I wanted to make videos of. 

I’ve also always been a reader. Pretty much from when I could read, I have been reading. I remember staying up late as a child to read “Danny The Champion Of The World” by Road Dahl, and then as soon as I had finished it I would go back to the beginning and start again. Books have always fascinated me. I love losing myself in other people’s stories, meeting characters I would never meet in real life. I love being taken on adventures through books. Books just make me feel so content. I think it was back in 2017 that I first found booktube and I thought wow, here is a community made for me. I don’t really have people in my personal life who read, or who read as many books as I do, so I decided to become a part of the community. I’ve definitely had a few styles since starting booktube – it can be really hard to figure out the content that you want to create and what you feel comfortable doing. But I really feel content and excited about my channel and it’s content and where I would like to take it in the future. 

Something I’ve recently been getting into is minimalism and I love that your channel changed in that direction; particularly promoting paperless reading. How did that change come about?

I’m a very big neat freak. I love to be organised. I love to declutter. I love feeling relaxed in the space I am in. I guess as I’ve gotten older, I just realised that I didn’t need a lot of the things I owned. I think that in society, we are constantly being pushed to buy this or buy that to make us happy. Society thrives off of making us feel like objects will bring us joy or feel more accomplished in life. But I guess I just woke up one day and thought – no. It’s about the things we do, the adventures we have, the people that we meet that make us feel accomplished and joyful. And so I decided that I didn’t need a lot of the things I owned – so I’ve been on my own little journey of minimalism and it’s great. Not only am I barely buying anything and therefore saving more money, but I’m feeling a lot more relaxed and destressed. For example, my clothes – I currently only own three pairs of each thing, so three pairs of pants, three pairs of jumpers. And I kind of have this rule. If I haven’t used an item / worn an item in the last three months, it’s gone. If I didn’t even know I had that item and I’ve found it, it’s gone. And whenever I do a little cleanout or declutter, and I decide to keep an item, I come back to it in three months time. Have I used that item / worn that item since my last declutter? Or was I just holding onto it for sentimental value? It’s honestly been so refreshing to just declutter my things and my life. 

Recently I’ve been trying to promote paperless reading. I think as a booktuber, or if you’re someone who watches booktube, you can get so sucked into the thought of “I must own every single book, I must have ten bookcases”, and again, I think I just got to the point where I was like, no, I don’t need to have ten bookshelves to make me happy. I’d rather just have my favourite books and then buy the other books on my kindle. 

Book unhauls have been getting more popular too, do you find it hard to unhaul books in your videos?

Definitely not. I absolutely love book unhauls. I find it quite easy to get rid of books. Usually if I rated it 3 stars or lower, or I know I’ll never reread it again, it’s gone and I never think about it again. I also love to watch book unhaul’s – I love to see people’s reasons on why that book wasn’t for them. 

What are 5 things you have learnt since starting your channel? And any tips for aspiring content creators on BookTube.

• Okay, so the first thing that I have learnt is practice. If you’re considering starting a booktube channel, practice a few videos beforehand. Get a feel for what it’s like to film yourself. Find some filming angles. Play around with editing, lighting, colour grading etc etc. Because it can be really weird to talk to a camera and if you’re nervous, then just film a few for yourself to watch back and get more confident with. 
• If you’re wanting to get into booktube but don’t have a DSLR or a vlogging camera – that’s totally ok! You don’t need fancy equipment to film. You can always use your phone, as a lot of phones these days have really good, high definition cameras. Or I even know some people who use an iPad. If you do film on your phone and you don’t like your quality, then you can always edit it in a movie editor to make the quality look better. But please don’t stress too much on having “professional equipment.” When I first started, I filmed on my old Macbook Pro’s webcam haha!
• If you’re not happy with your video, or you’re doubting it’s quality – don’t post it. I’ve made this rookie error multiple times, but it could also be that I’m just a really big perfectionist. But let’s say I’ve filmed something and I felt kind of meh about it afterwards, and now I’m editing the footage and I’m not really happy with it. Maybe I felt like I came off a little flat or the lighting was just all over the place or there were really loud background noises. If this has happened to me, I don’t post the video on my channel. I’d rather just delete what I did, learn from it, and try again tomorrow. If my subscribers have to wait a few extra days for a better quality video, then I’d rather do that, than post a video that isn’t the best that it could be, and that I’m not happy with (and will probably delete after a few days of it being posted). 
• Find your own style and what you feel comfortable with. Oh man, this tip took me forever to learn. When you’re first starting out on booktube, it’s definitely a great idea to do a few tag videos as these are highly searched and everyone does them. They are generic, easy to do and give you a structured video to get started. But I would definitely recommend finding your own style. Experiment with videos that you want to try out. Don’t just follow what other booktubers are doing if you are not happy or comfortable doing those types of videos. For example, I don’t like sitting down in front of the camera and showing my face a lot. So I try to break it up. I film quite a few videos with a voiceover, and I’ll make the actual video itself quite creative and different. Or another example could be my friend Nicole from Nicole and Her Books, who does monthly videos on books based on certain retellings. So just find your own style, don’t be afraid to try new things. You don’t even have to always do a video about books if you don’t want. Just do what makes you happy 🙂
• My last tip is definitely one of the hardest, but it’s to not worry about the numbers. In booktube, some people are going to grow faster than you. And that’s ok. Try to not worry about the number of subscribers you have. This can be such a hard one, because obviously we all want to see those numbers go up. Booktube can be really hard sometimes and we put a lot of effort into our videos – of course we want to see that reward in subscriber growth. But you’ve got to not let that become your main focus on why you want to start a channel. For me, it was all about making friends. I just wanted to meet as many people online as I could who read books like me. I comment on every single video I watch, I add the booktubers on Goodreads and Instagram. Try and become a regular viewer of their channel, get to know them more, join in on buddy reads. There’s so many wonderful bookish friendships waiting for you. 

What are your top 3 books of 2020 so far? 

Oh my, that’s a hard question! Well.. I’ve read 52 books so far this year, and the three best ones that come to mind are – The Bone Houses by Emily Lloyd Jones, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by Ve Schwab and The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. 

The book community has grown so much, especially on BookTube. What’s one thing you want to see more in the community?

I’d love to see more creative and original content from booktubers. 

Do you have a routine for creating content? What does ‘a day in the life of yasminthereader’ look like?

Ooo interesting question! Ok, so definitely charge my camera the night before. I usually try and mentally tell myself that I’m going to be filming on a specific day this week, so that when I wake up I’m motivated and ready. But yes, make sure the camera is charged haha. Then I’ll usually wake up, get the books ready or my items ready for the specific video. Then I’ll get changed into a clean top (but I usually film in my pj pants) and I’ll put some makeup on. Then I set up the camera and tripod and make sure that the weather outside is ok. Because I film with natural lighting, I never film on a day that’s really windy, because your lighting will be all over the place as the clouds go everywhere. So if the sky is looking a bit sad in the mornings, I might keep everything set up and ready to go, so that when the weather changes for the better I am ready to film. Once I’ve filmed my video, I take my thumbnails and then I edit my footage. I always edit my footage and take my thumbnails on the same day – I like to make sure that it all went ok and that I don’t have to refilm. So I edit (which can take me about an hour or two), colour grade, rewatch to make sure there’s no mistakes, upload to youtube, schedule and edit the description and done.

Other than being able to leave the house, what are you looking forward to for the rest of 2020? It can be anything 🙂

I’m just looking forward to driving down to my favourite river spot in the bush to read a book, or go out for a nice meal, or sit by the ocean. And I also can’t wait to travel again when it’s safe to do so, I have too many adventures planned.

Thank you so much for joining me! I hope more people will find your channel and enjoy your content as much as I do <3 

Thank you so much for having me and for being such a wonderful, supportive, and long time subscriber of mine. It’s people like you that make me love what I do 🙂 

Booktuber Bio: yasminthereader

Hi, welcome to my channel. My name is Yasmin and I love to read books and journal. I’m also on my own journey of minimalism and I love to be productive. 🌿🍂🍃

BookTube Channel | Bookstagram | Goodreads

Another huge thank you to Yasmin for letting me interview her. Watching BookTube has been a major source of content for me in the recent weeks as we’ve been in a serious lockdown in Melbourne and it’s inspired to read so much more!

I could 100% relate to her answers, as someone who is also a bit of a neat-freak and loves a good declutter. I think I’ll be writing a post specifically to talk about minimalism in the book community because it’s an important topic to bring and share.

What booktuber would you like to see next in this series? Have you read A Darker Shade of Magic before? I’m keen to read it for the readalong!

Until next time,