Affection Does Not Keep the Lights On

I have installed Libby on other people’s phones in restaurants.

Once, at a child’s birthday party.

I have added partner libraries, explained holds, and shown people how to stop spending money on audiobooks they can borrow for free. This is one of the few subjects where I become aggressively helpful without being invited.

I love libraries.

When I returned to reading as an adult, borrowing books also felt safer than buying them. I have never been particularly good at spending money on myself. A library book came without the small internal hearing that usually happens before I buy anything unnecessary.

For a while, I thought supporting book culture mostly meant using the library.

That was incomplete.

Libraries need circulation. They also need people at fundraisers, volunteers, Friends groups, and residents willing to care before funding becomes a crisis.

Independent bookstores need customers who come back.

Authors need readers willing to take a chance on their work.

Having a book account means authors occasionally offer me free copies. Indie authors reach out and ask whether I might read their book or make a video.

I am a picky reader. The moment reading starts to feel like homework, I become a resentful little baby.

So I started buying books from authors I knew online without telling them.

No promise of a review. No expectation that I would post. I wanted to discover the book myself and form an honest opinion without an invisible agreement sitting beside me.

Sometimes support is quiet.

Lit Commons grew from that same instinct.

It is the event newsletter I started because too much of book culture disappears unless somebody goes looking for it. Author visits, library sales, tiny festivals, bookstore gatherings, odd little workshops that may only reach the people already following the right account.

This week, that community looks like library book sales from Milton to Madison, dozens of authors gathering at Loganberry Books in Shaker Heights, and readers crossing Kansas City for a bookstore crawl.

I have spent years treating book culture as a refuge. Lately, it keeps asking me to help move the tables.

That means showing up. Buying the book sometimes. Leaving a review. Going to the event even when staying home would be easier. Volunteering. Sharing the listing with the one friend who might actually care.

None of this is especially heroic. Mostly, it is people deciding to return.

Lit Commons is another way I am trying to return.

It also costs money to build.

The email platform costs money. Websites cost money. Travel costs money. The event listings require software, time, and spreadsheets large enough to make most reasonable people step slowly away from me.

Eventually, the project needs to pay for itself.

I do not want to take a portion of bookstore ticket sales. Their margins are already thin.

I do not want the newsletter or event listings hidden behind a paywall. Readers are the center of this project. Making the information harder to reach would defeat the point.

I also do not want to fill this space with promotions from companies whose business model works against the bookstores, authors, and organizations Lit Commons exists to support.

Right now, I am testing a few affiliate partnerships. The longer-term goal is to work with regional sponsors that add something useful to the reader’s experience. A Midwest coffee roaster. A tea company. Clothing, journals, reading accessories. Businesses that belong near this community without feeding directly from its most fragile parts.

The rule is simple.

The money cannot pull Lit Commons away from the people it was built to serve.

A project can serve a community and still need to pay its bills.

The trouble starts when the bills begin writing the mission.

Many Midwest readers know the childhood punishment that accidentally teaches a lifelong skill. For Sylvia Hubbard, it began around age six or seven, when her mother made her write down each lie and read it aloud. The consequences were memorable. So was the lesson: “It’s not the lie that hurts; it’s the depth of deceit we put into the lie.”

That early study of storytelling and human nature still shapes Hubbard’s romance and suspense, where pain, betrayal, justice, redemption, and love share the page. Detroit gives those stories their voice. She draws from growing up in the country’s largest majority-Black city, living through its municipal bankruptcy, and witnessing its hard times, good times, and singular moments.

Her August release, Desires Tryst, asks readers to consider the beauty of true love, the families people create for themselves, and the desires they deserve to have met. Hubbard brings a similarly sharp balance to conversations with readers: she loves “to kill people on paper” and make her characters fall in love—sometimes in that order.

She also founded Motown Writers Network, a community connecting Michigan readers, writers, and literary professionals since 2000.

Book lights are part of the routine in our house. My daughter uses one every night before bed. I pack one when I travel and sometimes reach for it when sleep is not happening.

There is something about reading in the dark with only the page lit. The room falls away, and the book gets your full attention.

Affiliate link: Lit Commons may earn a commission if you purchase through the link below, at no additional cost to you.

Glocusent offers several styles of reading lights, including the book light shown here. I have not personally tested this model, but it is similar to the book lights my family uses.

Lit Commons has 989 upcoming Midwest literary events on the calendar. Here are this week’s selections.