How I Built Belonging: with Lynda Hammes
Maria Cury and Matthew Janney in conversation with Lynda Hammes, co-founder of Tertulia
Lynda Hammes is a co-founder of Tertulia, alongside Sebastian Cwilich and Robert Lenne, who both were pivotal in growing Artsy, the online art marketplace and discovery platform. Tertulia launched during the summer of 2022 as a new, personalised way to discover and connect around books. Starting out as an iOS app, the company has enjoyed early success both in terms of media coverage – including in the New York Times – and its strong user base of readers. Tertulia.com now sees hundreds of thousands of visitors per month – many of whom are co-owners of the company through the Tertulia Co-op – and is accessible on all platforms. As part of our How I Built Belonging interview series, Lynda speaks to ReD’s Maria Cury and Matthew Janney about the power of books in community-building, how to use AI to go beyond personalisation and towards belonging, and her future vision for Tertulia.
Maria Cury Reading is such a personal activity and, at the same time, we tend to gather around books. What role do books and reading play in how we feel a sense of belonging?
Lynda Hammes Books are the DNA of our culture. They capture and encode our living history in a way that I don’t think other media can. While I think all forms of art – music, visual art, film – can engender a sense of belonging, what’s special about reading books in particular, is our deep investment of time, our deep focus in a world ruled by an attention-based economy. Books are the original immersive experiences, right? They require such focus that we become hostage to them – and there is a phenomenon that occurs between hostages bonding. That bonding surfaces when you’re talking to somebody and you serendipitously find out you have both been taken hostage by a book. Even if you hated the book or you felt ambivalent about the book – and certainly if you loved the book – you have this sense of joy and togetherness with somebody that you spent that time alone together.
Maria We’re living in this age of niche-interest and hyper-personalisation, where we can curate what we read or watch or listen to precisely according to our preferences. How does that impact our sense of belonging with other people?
Lynda When I was younger, there was always a summer jam, the unequivocal hit of the summer. This past summer maybe it would have been Beyoncé or if you ask somebody else, it’s Lizzo or another might say Bad Bunny. The same thing goes for TV, if you’re really into food, last year’s big show was The Bear, and everybody in the sphere that you belong to is talking about The Bear. The monoculture has faded with the rise of digital platforms and streaming. While algorithms and personalised platforms can drive homogeneity – in some cases, in nefarious ways – the reason we delight in Spotify Wrapped at the end of the year is because each person has their unique playlist even when they may share overlapping interests and tastes, which aids in discovery but also gives us a feeling of belonging. I would say that book discovery is not where it should be in this regard, due to some outmoded aspects of book publishing, consolidation in the industry, and mostly because of Amazon’s power over the retail landscape affecting how most people now experience books. There will always be bestsellers, but I think Tertulia has an opportunity to address book world Blockbusterism by enhancing the reader’s experience of finding the right book for them and capturing the enriching conversations about books that bring meaning to what we choose to invest our time in. When we started Tertulia coming out of the pandemic, the books industry was booming and it still is very healthy. While millions of books are published each year only a very few sell millions of copies. On top of that, there are infinite backlist books to choose from as well. With so much choice, we still have difficulty discovering books that are right for us. I think personalisation can help if it avoids relying on sales-based collaborative filtering and captures the many data points around these books – the cultural signals – and unpacks those for you in your discovery.
Maria I’m hearing you describe the problem as one where we have all of these backlist books or books where there are small communities that are creating a lot of buzz around them, but I, as one individual reader trying to navigate what to read, end up going with whatever is at the top of the shelf in a bookstore; I don’t have access to those little pockets of conversations around books that might be relevant to me. It’s like walking around a cocktail party overhearing conversations and finding which conversation you want to slip into.
Lynda Totally. There’s a feeling that some of our users play back to us in our research, which is that there’s water, water everywhere and not to drop to drink – they actually feel paralysed by choice.
“That bonding surfaces when you’re talking to somebody and you serendipitously find out you have both been taken hostage by a book.”
Matthew Janney Who is driving these conversations? Where do you put your social antennae to capture this social chatter?
Lynda Understandably, there’s a media bias to the new and the hot and the bestseller. But there are so many great books that come out each year and many of them don’t get coverage. There are pockets of people talking about books through authors who have a loyal or growing following, pockets in academia, pockets in local book clubs and libraries, pockets on social media. And those conversations don’t necessarily overlap with the critics’ picks. Where do we put our social antennae? It’s a very epic project that we’ve undertaken. But one way we thought about it is looking at communities of interest and trying to go deep into those communities of interest. So take food books, for instance, everybody knows when the new Ina Garten cookbook is coming out, you can’t get away from it. But people who really care about food and cooking are interested to hear what chefs or restaurateurs are reading and talking about. So we mine chefs interviews, in podcasts or Instagram posts where they’re taking maybe a dusty backlist book off their shelf that’s a cookbook, or maybe it’s a new cookbook that’s about food ecology that is quasi-academic. Sometimes it’s a very mainstream book like a classic novel; it doesn’t need to be obscure. So the antennae have been placed by those communities of interest. We’re able to do that at scale because of AI. It’s not about using AI to personalise in the Amazon sense, it’s more about reading the conversation and then picking up whether this person shares something emotional, original, or substantive about the book.
Maria So Tertulia is using AI not just to hyper-personalise to your taste, but actually flipping it to understand how people are gathering and communicating and forming around books. How are you thinking about AI and belonging?
Lynda We’ll take it as a given that AI will continue to get better at personalisation and gathering relevant information and prioritising that information, which is immensely valuable. But I would say beyond recommendations or algorithms in the current construct that we are used to, there are profound changes to come, and we don’t know yet how that will affect belonging. I fear that artificial intelligence creates artificial belonging and we could end up talking to machines more than real people. I think the foundation of belonging is trust. Trust for Tertulia is the North Star. It would be meaningless for us to help you discover something that you’re going to spend the next 10 hours of your life on without trusting that it’s coming from a human or that it resonates for you on some human and emotional level. And so we have to be very careful how we capture this next stage of the technology.
“I hope the future of books looks a lot like the past of books – it’s really the best technology there is.”
Maria How does Tertulia specifically go about creating belonging on the platform? Are there certain moments or types of interactions that you’re really seeking to foster?
Lynda One way that I see people gathering is around the phenomena of certain books, so we try to capture why people loved it or hated it or talked about it a lot. Sometimes this is most interesting when a book is not trending in the culture at large; we can capture traces in a particular community of interest. So that presents a picture of how people are talking about it, who is saying what about it… We have a very robust roadmap of features we are building to spur author-to-reader engagement as well as reader-to-reader engagement. If you’re a person who doesn’t want to join a book club and you prefer reading alone, you still may have a text thread with that one friend from college who loves the same books as you. Enabling that conversation and connection is also really interesting to us. So we’re looking at tools to aid that. If you are going to create Goodreads in the post-Web-2.0 era, it’s not going to look exactly the same. I think people still care about self-expression as they did when the concept of web reviews first came about, but we’re thinking about how to roll things out in a way that’s a little bit more up to date with how we talk, how we exchange and communicate. Something I’m really excited about is author pages which we are releasing soon; people follow authors like rockstars. So how do you make author pages come alive and allow authors to feel like their work is represented in a way that is inviting to readers? Most authors I talk to deeply want to connect with their readers, and in a world where we all have screen fatigue with online events, we’re looking at how to help readers connect. Overall, the goal of Tertulia is to be your home for books.
Matthew I’m interested in your approach to curation. Do you see yourself as driving conversations or is the focus more on reflecting what’s going on?
Lynda Both. We are reflecting what’s going on out there in streams and in pockets of conversations about books. But of course we have a curatorial prerogative. We have staff picks, and we choose these very authentically. My team is looking at books all day, reading them, reading about them, and looking at the connections between books. I used to work at an indie bookstore and that’s exactly what I was hired to do. Our picks are in that same spirit of putting trust in avid readers. The team is there all day capturing that knowledge about what books people love and why they love it, so that service is definitely an input to the product and content coming from Tertulia. We are doing editorial coverage where we invite an author or guest contributor to curate books and our team is regularly curating reading lists where you’re going to see books that are bestsellers and prize-winners on there, but also university press books or indie press books that maybe you’re less likely to come across. To the extent we can be another voice in making recommendations, we should, and we work hard at trying to put thought into how we’re doing that to be additive to online book talk.
Maria And finally, what do you see as the future of books?
Lynda I hope the future of books looks a lot like the past of books – it’s really the best technology there is.
Maria Cury is a partner at ReD. Matthew Janney is editorial director.
All illustrations courtesy Tertulia, Inc.