Rising Stars: Meet Nahomy Ortiz-Garcia

Today we’d like to introduce you to Nahomy Ortiz-Garcia.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Ever since I lived in Puerto Rico, I watched YouTube. My favorite channels to watch were channels that people talked about books. I’ve always been an avid reader, but living in Puerto Rico at the time being able to read all the books I wanted wasn’t really possible as public libraries aren’t really a thing in Puerto Rico. Therefore I spent hours and hours watching people online read and talk about books that I dreamed of reading. This was about 10 years ago. Later when I was 13-years-old I moved to Cleveland, OH and discovered public libraries and bookstores 20 minutes from me and this is when I began collecting books. I’d always wanted to start a channel, but I felt like I wouldn’t really bring a new perspective or insight to the community so I stayed on the sidelines for many years and just watched.

In the summer of 2019 I started my bookstagram account titled at the time “Anastasia’s Library”, I started it to document my experience participating in a literary event called The Reading Rush. With the start of my bookstagram account, I fell in love with photography and capturing unique pictures of books. I was able to share my thoughts about books on instagram, but I still felt like I wanted to do more. After the encouragement of one of my all time favorite booktubers, Kayla from Books and Lala, I started my booktube channel a year later in the summer of 2020. The start of my Youtube channel was slow but later in 2021 it began to grow a lot more. I made lots of friends that make similar content as me, felt a lot more inspired with my content, read 100 books, hit 1k subscribers on Youtube and got monetized!

In the year 2021, I was also very lucky to be added to some influencer lists and get sent early copies for review and work with some of my favorite publishing companies for promotional content. Now one of my goals is to continue growing my audience, making videos I love and reading!

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
There have been some struggles along the way. When I first started my YouTube channel in the summer of 2020 I thought that “success” would come a lot faster. But success to me at this time were big numbers, lots of subscribers and views, etc. I was making content I thought would garner lots of views rather than things I enjoyed making. From July to December of 2020 I struggled a lot with what to make and felt very lonely in the community. The one thing that drastically changed my journey in the booktube community were my friends. I met a lot of my closest friends early February of 2021; this is when I started to feel less lonely in the community. I was able to express my frustrations and get feedback, bounce off ideas and talk to people that experienced the same things that I did. My creator friends were the ones that made me realize that success wasn’t in number, but in what content made me happy. Only a couple of months later that summer i hit 1k subscribers and later that year became monetized.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I began doing mostly photography, reading and reviewing books. But now I do all of those things as well as video content for my YouTube channel. I work with publishing companies to promote and review upcoming books on my bookstagram. I feel like on bookstagram I’m mostly known for combining fashion and books on posts.

I’ve recently started a book club called Brujas and Books with my best friend Camila (BurrowsandBooks) where we read books by a Latinx author each month!

Something that sets me apart from most creators I would say is my background. I am Latinx and I feel like my background when reviewing upcoming book releases by Latinx authors is necessary. Something that the publishing industry, but mostly BIPOC authors, suffered a lot recently was that a lot of upcoming releases by BIPOC authors weren’t getting as much hype/buzz the way that white authors were. And this was due to publishing companies sending advanced reader’s copies only to white reviewers. The wrong audiences were reviewing and critiquing these books which made the BIPOC author community suffer a lot.

Can you share something surprising about yourself?
I think when people learn that I have a channel is pretty shocking to almost everyone. I am a very shy and quiet person in real life so when people learn that I talk to a camera about books for fun is pretty shocking. A lot of people do get confused because they don’t know how it works. I think a lot of people when you mention YouTube think the big beauty vloggers, family/couple channels or the gaming community. But there’s a community on Youtube for almost anything!

Contact Info:

• Email: ortinaho@gmail.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nahomyslibrary/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJrTFd9ovteiOvCHK4oP-5A