Angela Hursh

Steve Thomas: Angela, welcome to Circulating Ideas.

Angela Hursh: Thank you for having me.

Steve Thomas: You had worked in TV news previous to working at NoveList and with libraries. What led you to want to change fields and how did you land in library land?

Angela Hursh: Oh, that’s a great question. I think part of it is a lifelong love of libraries, which I know is cliche for someone who works in a library, but truly, no matter what city I lived in, where I moved to, what the circumstances of my life were, the library was one of the central places in my life, particularly after I had children. As many parents do, we turn to the library for help, entertainment. I live in Cincinnati. I love the Cincinnati library system as a whole, and it was always a dream of mine to work for them. So really moving to a library, it was circumstance and happenstance. I just happened to notice that they had an open position that seemed like it aligned with my skills and what I wanted to do in the next step of my career.

As much as I loved TV news, I knew I didn’t want to work in it forever. It’s not the best paying career to be in. It’s very stressful. Don’t get holidays off. So moving to libraries at the time that I did made sense and I was just… I tell the story, I did the interview and I thought I blew it. I called my husband from the genealogy stacks and I said, I think I blew it. I feel like I just babbled through the whole thing and the next day they called and offered me the job. So I just think it was the perfect opportunity at the perfect time, and the fates were ready for me to make a move.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, that’s great. So you jumped into the field here where we make the big money in libraries.

Angela Hursh: I know, right? Well, the retirement benefits for the Cincinnati Public Library were much better. So that was great. And having holidays off, like, that’s worth more than money to me, to be honest with you.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. So what did you do at Cincinnati? You said you found a job that was the perfect fit for you. What was your position there?

Angela Hursh: My title was Content team Leader, which sounds like a cheerleader, and it kind of is, it’s a cheerleader for the library system. I was lucky enough to have a staff of about five or six people under me doing different pieces of things that I had done during my work in television news, so we had a couple of folks who wrote press releases and blog posts. I had somebody who was running social media, I had a videographer and I had two graphic artists who did all of the posters and digital graphics for the entire system. So my job was a lot of project management and strategy and coming up with messaging for the library.

And that really was the genesis for my starting the blog, superlibrarymarketing.com, because very soon into it, you know, libraries, we talked to each other and I realized that there were many systems in in the world that didn’t have the resources that I had. And so I was learning things about libraries and library marketing on the job and I wanted to share what I was learning with the world.

A blog also was kind of a way for me sort out my thoughts as I was thinking through different challenges, cause there’s no marketing like library marketing. We have unique challenges in this field and so that was really what I was trying to do with the blog, just kind of talk it out to myself and then share what I was learning with the rest of the library world.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. I work things out really well through writing sometimes too, just the writing process is how I process. So when you first started, was it just a blog at the beginning and then your YouTube videos came later?

Angela Hursh: Yes. I started the YouTube videos, I wanna say in 2019, I think early 2019. And there was some things that I wanted to talk about that didn’t lend themselves to a long form blog post. They were just little, tiny little tips that I wanted to talk through. Also, quite frankly, I was starting to do some speaking around library marketing and I felt like I needed a way to practice, and especially that part of the presentation where you’re answering questions and you don’t have notes and specific things that you have outlined that you wanted to say. I wanted to get really good at just talking off the cuff.

So I started doing the videos and I don’t write a script for those videos. I literally have like one or two sentences on a screen in front of me maybe, and then I just talk as if we were having a conversation, but those have proven to be very, very popular. I think because of time limits in staff time, those smaller pieces of tips are easier to consume. I hate to use the word snackable cuz it’s such a marketing term, but it is kind of, those are kind of snackable things, so…

Steve Thomas: So how is it being a YouTuber?

Angela Hursh: I am not a super popular YouTuber. I do not feel like I am on the influencer level. I don’t even have 2000 subscribers yet, but it doesn’t matter to me cuz the subscribers I have are very loyal and interested in the content. The lesson that I’ve learned is just, you just have to be consistent and not worry about a very small follower account. As long as you’re consistent, and you’re giving content that’s of value to people, they’re going to keep coming back. And that’s where all the magic happens.

A lot of libraries are getting into podcasting and into YouTube and it feels a lot of times, like if you don’t have a huge audience, it’s not really useful, but it is because these are conversations that we are having, especially podcasts. It’s a very intimate way to talk to your audience. You’re in their ear for 20 or 30 minutes or an hour. You don’t get that in any other format really, as an avid podcast listener. I am so loyal to the podcasts that I subscribe to. There are certain podcasts I literally, I know what day they publish. I’m getting on the feed as soon as I wake up in the morning to see what the next episode is. So if you can build an audience like that and libraries can build an audience like that, that’s incredibly valuable.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. So, you have Super Library Marketing, you still have the blog. Do you think it’s more of a video thing now than a blog thing?

Angela Hursh: Yeah, I do both. So I do a long form post on Mondays and a video on Wednesdays and organically have kind of fallen into a system of that Monday post often is a profile of somebody out doing actual library marketing work. I do a survey every year in the fall and ask my readers what they want from me. And especially this year, I got a lot of requests for more of those interviews. They want to see more examples of libraries doing things. I think that helps libraries to imagine that they can do the kinds of things that these successful marketers are doing. So that’s the Monday and then the short videos are on on Wednesdays. Yeah. Yeah. And I really enjoy it.

Steve Thomas: And when do you record the videos? Do you do it the week of or do you do like I do sometimes and record a bunch and then release them later?

Angela Hursh: So I don’t know how it works for you, but I often get an idea and I wanna do it like right then. So sometimes I’m doing the video the week of because I have an idea and I wanna talk about something that’s current and relevant. And sometimes I’m recording ahead of time. Right now, I have episodes recorded almost all the way through the end of January, but it doesn’t always work like that. It’s just like whenever I get an idea, I turn on the ring light, I jump on the recorder and I just get it on video so I don’t forget about that particular idea.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Well, and then, and then you have them and you can kind of see what do I feel like releasing this week? I’ve got these 10 episodes sitting in there ready to go.

We’re gonna talk about your position at NoveList now so you have that as sort of your full-time position. The Super Library Marketing blog and YouTube channel, how do you kind of see that within your work persona, is this a part-time job? Is it just something that you enjoy doing?

Angela Hursh: It’s just something I enjoy doing. I do not make any money from either the blog post or the videos. I just do it because I want to be of service to libraries, even if they’re not customers of my company, I want to be of service to them. Because there’s a need, even though there are podcasts like yours and there’s a new library marketing podcast from Katie Rothley of Northville Library in Michigan; she has a podcast called Library Marketing for Library Marketers. There’s a library marketing book club on Facebook. But that’s really it. Like ,that’s it for places that people doing promotions in libraries can go to, to get advice. I just feel like it’s incredibly important to keep giving tips and encouragement to the library marketing community. We want the library industry to be strong. When one library is strong in marketing, the entire industry benefits from that. So that’s really my goal.

The folks at NoveList have been incredibly supportive. We had a conversation about the blog and the videos when I was hired, and they know that I’m really not gonna say anything on the blog or the videos that I wouldn’t say to an actual Learn With NoveList client, and I feel very strongly vice versa. Like, if I’m giving tips to libraries on the blog, I want to implement those tips with my marketing team at NoveList.

Steve Thomas: What are some of some of the common issues that you see in library marketing?

Angela Hursh: Well, the one thing that I get asked about most frequently is social media. Not just for libraries but for everybody, social media is just difficult for marketing. It just is and it gets harder every year. Right now I’m working on the final installment of the 2023 Guide to Social Media for Libraries, and it’s about Twitter and I had to put off writing it cuz I didn’t know what to say cuz it is a hot mess.

I try super hard to find very practical tips that libraries can use to do well on social media outside of the algorithm. Keeping in mind that a lot of people who are posting on social media for libraries are doing 13,000 other things at their library. Very few libraries have a marketing department with a dedicated social media person. Usually it’s more than one person and they’re just kind of doing it when they have time. So to be able to help those people out, I’ve been giving tips about things you can do to increase your organic reach outside of the algorithm, because I think that’s the most sustainable way to go at social media.

I always tell all of my friends and all my library marketing friends that really the thing you should be do doing is building your email subscriber list. You don’t have control over the social media algorithms, but you have complete control over your email list and what your emails say.

That’s been the big theme for the last year. Also, the freedom to read and book banning. I created a conference presentation and a short webinar that you can purchase through Learn with NoveList that’s all about marketing your library to put your library in a position of strength ahead of a challenge. Unfortunately, it is my belief that almost every library in the United States is going to face a challenge, if not more than one in the next two years. I just think it’s inevitable. There is a group of people with a strategy and they are out there making challenges. And so I’m trying to give libraries some advice on how to market before and during a challenge. And those two kinds of presentations and tips and courses have been really well received, cause those are the things that are top of mind for library marketing right now.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and that leads into something I was gonna ask about of that. You don’t wanna be just creating things on the fly. You wanna have a plan, you wanna have a strategy for stuff like that. What’s the importance of that for libraries?

Angela Hursh: That is a very good question. So again, I think the strategy portion for libraries, the importance is twofold.

Number one, most libraries now have a strategic plan, an overarching strategic plan with goals that they want to accomplish as an organization, and marketing should be in service of that plan. So you have to think about what you’re going to post on social media or email to your card holders, or what signs you’re gonna put up in relation to your library’s overall goals.

Number two, strategy helps you focus. And as we know, marketers at libraries are doing many other things as part of their job. Your library may not have time to post on every social media platform, and you don’t have to. If you have a strategy, you can pick the platforms that have the target audience that you want to get your message to in order to accomplish your overall strategic goals. Unfortunately, many library marketers and folks doing promotions at libraries just don’t have the time to think that through. That is a luxury. I was lucky enough to do a pre-conference session at the Library Marketing and Communications conference this year, and we spent three hours working on strategy and most of those folks in that session were like, “I never get the time to do this kind of very basic fundamental groundwork that is really necessary to make library marketing effective.”

So I think strategy really helps with focus, makes your marketing more efficient, makes it more effective, and frankly will help your library achieve its overall goals more quickly.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. I would say the majority of libraries do not have a large marketing team, probably the majority of libraries don’t have a single person as a marketing person. So I know a lot of your tips on your blog and videos are for doing things without having to have a huge budget. I s that something you specifically, you’re trying to focus on a lot the time?

Angela Hursh: Yes. The majority of libraries in the United States at least are small and rural libraries. I have some friends who work in libraries in Australia and the UK and my sense of it, although their funding structures are different, is that they’re in the same boat for the most part, especially the UK. Funding for libraries is incredibly low, much lower than it should be. And so I want them to be successful and I don’t want money to be the issue that makes them not successful. And frankly, there are some things that you should spend money on. I think you should spend money on a good email marketing system if you’re gonna spend money on something. I think you should spend money on a social media scheduler to make life easier for your staff. A great catalog and a good looking website are really important, but I don’t know that every library has the budget to do those things, so I want to make sure that my tips are things that everybody can put into place, if that makes sense.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, yeah. So you talked a little bit about social media before. How do you recommend libraries figure out what platforms to jump onto?

Angela Hursh: Yeah. My advice to libraries always is whenever a new platform comes out, first thing you’re just gonna grab your account, just make an account. So on Mastodon, that’s not even how you pronounce it, every library should be on there creating their own library account and just hold onto it so that you have the handle or the name that you want on that account. Much of the time I counsel libraries to just kind of hold back and watch as other industries do some experimentation, see how they’re using it, who seems to be having results that your library might want. Read up on it. There’s some great websites that you can go to: Social Media Today and the Social Media Examiner website, those are both great resources to read up on new platforms and see what the buzz is and what early adopters are saying about it.

 If you have somebody who has the time and the energy to create a few things and do some experimentation on those platforms then go ahead and do it, it’s no harm to try stuff out. My TikTok hesitation really came from the fact that for a long time they did not have location as part of their algorithm so they were showing people’s tos to everybody, which makes sense for the platform, but it doesn’t make sense for libraries. This is a very specific geographic industry, so you really want your videos to be shown to people in your area. Recently they added that into the algorithm, so they made the creative tools easier.

The platforms learn too as they are rolling out new features, things get easier. They make the user experience for creators easier. So I always just counsel, start slow, see how other industries, what kind of results they’re getting, and then you can make a decision. The other thing is you have to kind of wait to see what kind of audience that platform draws. The audience that you need to reach for your library’s strategic goals may not align with the audience of that new platform. And then, so don’t waste your time posting on it.

Steve Thomas: A lot of it is knowing your community, I guess.

Angela Hursh: Yes. I don’t think libraries do enough surveying around marketing, and so I would suggest that they start doing a little more of that, even just one question a month in your email newsletter, “Hey, what social media platform is your favorite?” Let them answer so that you can get a sense of who in your community, where they’re ending up in terms of what channel do they want to hear from your library on.

Steve Thomas: You know, email is one of the oldest online communication things, but it’s great because it’s so open, and it’s just solid.

Angela Hursh: Yeah. And it is my favorite platform. It was the most effective tactic I had when I was working at the Cincinnati Library. We had different personas for our audience, so we had divided our audience into segments. Some of those segments were a couple, 10, 25,000 people, I might have sent them an email three times a week. My unsubscribe rates were under 1% because people love to get email from libraries. They love to hear from us, and it turns out when you get an email in your inbox, especially if you have a call to action right there, like you are taking advantage as a library of an opportunity to get that person to act right now. They don’t go home and think about it, it’s like right in front of them. I just found that for circulation, for program attendance, for driving use of databases or other services like our Kanopy videos or our Libby app, that was the best way to do it. And so I just spent most of my time emailing my cardholders cause it was the most effective thing to do.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, I just recently started a Substack to have that as a separate thing of being able to go, basically more detailed show notes than I do normally of just going deeper on stuff and provide links and everything. So that’s been fun. I’m still kind of experimenting with what I wanna do with it, but I do like that different way of communicating with people.

Well let’s talk about NoveList. You are the Manager of Engagement and Marketing. What was tantalizing about that job when you saw that and you wanted to go for that one?

Angela Hursh: I met my current boss at the Library Marketing and Communications Conference in 2019, and we had breakfast together. I knew of her, we had talked through Twitter and LinkedIn before, so we sort of knew a little bit about each other, but we got along really well and she just talked so beautifully about the company, the culture, the things that they were doing, and so when she asked me to apply for the job, I went ahead and did it. Also, the fact that it’s a remote job. Everybody at NoveList works remotely. My library had actually started allowing remote work in 2019 before the pandemic, and I really loved it and I couldn’t work at home all all week, but I did like one or two days a week and I loved it.

I got more done and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to just work from home all the time?” She had talked about travel being involved and my kids are now adults and that was something I could do and wanted to do, but the big draw for me was the fact that I would get to take what I was doing with the blog and the videos and apply it to a bunch of different libraries all over the world. The audience would be much bigger. I would get to help more libraries and so that was like the core thing. That was the core part of my decision to, to leave the Cincinnati Library and go to NoveList. And it was a great decision. I love this job.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. You’re reaching so many more people now. What’s the difference in the work now that you’re doing?

Angela Hursh: When I started at NoveList, I was actually doing consultations with libraries. So I would get into a meeting and we would talk specifically about what they were doing with marketing and promotion and give them ideas for how to do that more effectively.

Then we got to launch the Learn with NoveList platform. One of the things I always wanted to do in my life is be a teacher just hasn’t happened for me. But now I get to, and I get to teach about my favorite subject, library marketing. So I’ve gotten to create courses around library marketing and teach those two libraries around the world. And then also to kind of talk and work with readers’ advisory experts on creating courses too. So we have basically two sections of Learn with NoveList: Marketing and Readers Advisory. And that is just a joy. I love working with Learn with NoveList, and then I got my promotion to my current role this year. Now I get back into putting some of the tips that I am giving out to libraries into practice at NoveList and watching them work.

I think I’m a nerd of some kind for my work. It’s ridiculous. But, I do, I do. It’s every day is a joy. I have a staff that I love to work with. They’re really talented people, and I just find that we get to spend a lot of time trying to make life easier and better for libraries, and that is incredibly fulfilling.

Steve Thomas: The initial thing most people probably think with NoveList is that helps me find books for people. It’s a readers’ advisory tool. How do you see Learn with NoveList fit in? How is NoveList expanding on top of that? Reader’s Advisory Plus?

Angela Hursh: Yeah, I was gonna say we’re not leaving Reader’s Advisory behind, but just trying to make sure that every part of a library’s work has reader’s advisory as an element and to make that work easier for libraries, so Library Aware is in my purview also. I spent a lot of time talking about that with libraries when I was doing consultations. It’s an amazing product. There’s no product like it on the market because it does all the things that you need for marketing. We have templates for print material, email, newsletters, social media, so like you can do all the stuff in there, and there’s a reader’s advisory element. Our NoveList librarians will make up book lists and then we’ll turn those into flyers in Library Aware that our customers can print out or send out. That’s a really easy way to do reader’s advisory.

There’s also the NextReads newsletters, which are part of the library subscription and are automated. You literally, all you gotta do is turn ’em on and get people to sign up for them. And then once a month, sometimes once a week, depending on the newsletter, we at Library Aware sent out to your patrons a list of books that we think they should be reading in a particular genre or area. And it just drives circulation and you don’t even have to do anything as the library.

One of the ways that we are expanding now to make readers’ advisory easier is with the product called BookChat, which is a new service that’s a chat function, and you add it to your website and our BookChat experts can answer questions from your patrons, especially when your library is closed, or maybe you have staff shortages during certain parts of the day or on weekends.

The NoveList staff will be there to help. And of course all that stuff keeps people engaged with your library. And this month when this podcast comes out, we are launching Core Collection en Español, which is a new core collection, helps with collection development, what books should you spend money on, what titles are essential. And these are all titles that are for your Spanish speaking patrons. So just super excited about all the things that are happening at NoveList and definitely reader’s advisory is core to that. And even more core is making sure the community thinks of your library as an absolutely essential part of the community. We want them to be completely dependent on you for everything. So that’s our whole focus as a company.

Your collection makes it possible for everything else at your library to happen. Books are the library brand. I think that a lot of libraries forget that a lot of libraries spend a lot of time focused on their events, but most people get a library card because they want to check out the items that you have in the library, and so making sure you’re always thinking about that as your core service and making it easy for your patrons to engage with your collection is incredibly important for success in libraries, I think.

Steve Thomas: Tell me a little bit more about Learn with NoveList. How does that work? If a library is already kind of in the NoveList sphere, how do they add that on? What kind of courses are in it?

Angela Hursh: You don’t have to be a NoveList customer to engage with Learn with NoveList. You just have to sign up. It’s free to sign up on learnwithnovelist.com. And we have a couple of different formats. What we’ve learned is that different libraries have different schedules, different amounts of staff. So we’re trying to offer our courses in formats that meet all of those needs. So we have group training that we can do remotely or in person. I’ve done a couple in person and it’s really fun and engaged. It’s, I’m sorry to say, way more engaging than doing it on Zoom. We do our best with the Zoom, but getting people in a room, just, there’s just something about the energy of that you just can’t replicate in Zoom. But you can do either one depending.

We have self-paced courses so people can purchase the self-paced course and they get the content for an entire year. So they have a whole year to finish the course. They get a certificate at the end. It’s a very detailed certificate cuz we know some states allow you to turn those certificates in for continuing education credits, and then we have live courses too that you can buy. They’re $99 a seat, and you just show up on the day of the live course and it’s basically the group training that we do for specific libraries, but you can just buy a seat yourself and that’s really helpful for small libraries that don’t have the budget to send their entire staff training to Readers’ Advisory Foundations or whatever.

So we actually have early this year a bundle of readers’ advisory live courses. They’re $99 each, but if you buy all three, you get a 20% discount. And we do lots of discounts cause again, we’re very cognizant of library budgets. All of these courses you can purchase by credit card, and you can purchase group seats at a discount too. We have tiered pricing if a library wants to send lots and lots of their staff members to a course. We’ve got plans to add lots more courses, and we always look for ideas too, for courses. So if a library has an a training need, they can email us at [email protected] and say, “Hey, can you create a course about this?” And we’ll certainly consider that as part of our course plan.

Steve Thomas: And, so here we are in January as people are listening to this for the first time. How many courses are there right now?

Angela Hursh: We currently have about 13 courses on the platform, and on January 31st we are planning to launch our next course. And then we have three more planned after that through the spring to get into summer reading. And I’ll just give a little preview of the last three courses there, all summer reading related. One is gonna be Reader’s Advisory for Kids, which has been a big request from a lot of our learners. And then I’ve got two live session marketing courses that are planning to be done in May. My goal with them is to help you make sure that you are promoting your summer reading or summer learning at the library program in the best and most effective way possible.

Steve Thomas: We don’t have to name all 13, but what are some of the topics that are in there?

Angela Hursh: Well, the two most popular courses are readers advisory related. So one is called the Art and Practice of Providing Outstanding Reading Recommendations taught by Halle Carlson, a former NoveList employee. It’s a self-paced course and you get a whole bunch of different tips on how to do readers’ advisory. The cool thing about it is she interviewed real librarians working in real situations about how they had handled certain situations, and so you get to hear those interviews as part of that course.

And then our other most popular course at the moment is Actively Anti-racist Service to Readers with Becky Spratford and Robin Bradford. I just think there is an incredible need for that kind of training at libraries. We’ve got a lot of interest from many libraries on that course. We have a lot of libraries that are planning to send lots of staff members to that course. It’s a little different of a format than we’ve done in the past. We have two self-paced lessons for that one, so you can work on them at your own pace, and then you get to go to a live session with Becky and Robin where they will answer whatever questions you have after taking their two self-paced lessons. So it’s just incredibly valuable and I think the timing is right on that one. There’s a need and a hunger from libraries for that kind of training.

Steve Thomas: You also mentioned that there are marketing courses as part of this. What’s the most popular one of those?

Angela Hursh: Oh, good question. So I have two popular marketing courses. One is a self-paced course, Conquering Social Media: a Strategy for Libraries. Go figure! It’s popular because it is all about the things that you can do to make social media effective outside of the algorithm. It’s kind of like a workbook sort of thing, so you can work on it alone if you’re doing social media by yourself or as a team if you have a social media team at your library.

And then really the most popular live marketing course so far has been Collection Promotion Deep Dive. I think a lot of libraries are, like we talked about earlier, really interested in putting their collection as the centerpiece of their marketing. And so we go through how to do that, how to set goals, how do you market your collection on all the different channels, how do you measure your promotions so that you can repeat the things that are successful for your community and you can stop doing the things that don’t work. That part always really resonates well with our learners. They want to take things off their plate and this course will help you figure out how to do that.

Steve Thomas: Another great tool that I believe is part of Learn with NoveList is the Crash Course series where library staff can learn about different genres. Do you have more of those coming up?

Angela Hursh: Yes, I think the Crash Courses have been really popular because those sub-genres are always super difficult to get your mind around, especially if you are not a person who reads science fiction or who particularly likes westerns and adventures. You’re still gonna have readers coming into your library asking you for recommendations in those genres. So I think that’s why those crash courses resonate so well with libraries.

 We actually have all of the past Crash Courses on the Learn with NoveList website. You can log in and watch them. We have another one, a new one coming up on Tuesday, February 7th at 2:00 PM. You can register the live session. It’s free. The, this is a crash course in science fiction. It’s an updated version. We last did science fiction in 2018, but as you know, the book world changes a lot in four or five years, so we decided to update it. We have Matthew Galloway, who’s a collection development librarian at Anythink Libraries and Anna Mickelsen of Springfield City Library as the panelists for that. And my coworker Yaika Sabat is the moderator. She’s really an incredible reader’s advisory librarian. So I hope everybody goes to NoveList the website and signs up for that free live session.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, that’s great. All right, before we wrap up, I wanted to ask about actually one other online project that I read about that I thought was interesting and that is something that you’re not doing anymore, but it’s Bite from the Past.

Angela Hursh: Oh my gosh. You are a good researcher.

Steve Thomas: Can you tell listeners what that is and why that was something that was interesting to you at the time? I don’t think you posted, I think 2015 was the last post there, but what was that?

Angela Hursh: Every year I make a New Year’s resolution that I’m gonna start posting again on that blog and every year I just don’t have the time to do it, but I’m hanging onto it cause I want to get back to it eventually. Bite from the Past was a passion project really. I love history, and I specifically love historic food. I have a collection of old cookbooks. My oldest cookbook dates back to the late 1700s. And so I did this thing, especially when my girls were little, we did this together where we would find recipes in these books and cook them, which sounds like not a big deal, except if you consider the fact these cookbooks and the recipes are written to be made in a wood stove or a fireplace, and they didn’t have measuring cups. They didn’t have baking soda. So you read the ingredients and it’s just crazy. And it’s like “throw in a dash of this” and “put this in a hot oven for three minutes” so it’s a translation really into a modern recipe format. And my girls and I did it together. It was just like a fun thing that we did when we had extra time and a fun activity together.

Some of my recipes flopped, but a lot of them really worked. And I will tell you that about a week ago I was out of town, and my youngest daughter who’s 18, texted me and she said, “Mom, can you send me the recipe for the Jane Austin English Bread? I want to make it.” so she remembered doing that with me as a kid and it’s on the blog. So I just like got on my own blog and sent it to her. She made it and it turned out great and I was so proud. So someday I’d like to get back to you Bite from the Past. I loved it. It was so much fun.

Steve Thomas: Well, and that’s a good little parenting fun thing too there that you know that you’ve made a good little memory for her that she, that it popped back that it’s probably the taste is in her mind and she just, oh, I would love to do that, that fun thing I did with my mom.

Angela Hursh: Yeah. Yep. I loved it. Yep.

Steve Thomas: Well, thank you Angela, so much for coming on the podcast to talk about NoveList and also a little bit about vintage cookbooks.

Angela Hursh: Thank you. I appreciate being invited. It was so much fun.

Steve Thomas: If people had other questions and they wanted to get in touch with you, how could they do that?

Angela Hursh: Yes. I have a coupon code for anyone who wants to take a Learn with NoveList course. The code you put it in at checkout, it’s CIRCULATINGIDEAS, all capital letters, and it’s good through the end of February, get 20% off any self-paced course on learnwithnovelist.com.

If you wanna get ahold of me, you can do it a couple of ways. My email is [email protected] or you can just get on Super Library Marketing. There’s a contact area. My favorite social media platform at the moment is LinkedIn. So connect with me there. Message me. You can follow me and you’ll get notifications every time I make a post. Maybe that’s not what you want, but we can at least contact each other on LinkedIn. I just love LinkedIn. I think it’s a great professional networking platform.

Steve Thomas: All right. Well, thank you so much, Angela.

Angela Hursh: Oh, thank you so much, Steve. I had such a good time.