A Book Can Find Someone Anywhere

In recent weeks, a Russian classic published in 1886 reached the top of Amazon Brazil’s bestselling books list. Google searches for the title rose by 180%, and hundreds of people organized themselves to read and discuss the book together. We could be talking about a BookTok phenomenon, a newly released streaming adaptation, or a particularly successful campaign by a publisher.

But we’re talking about soccer.

Gustavo Scarpa, a midfielder for Atlético Mineiro (Brazilian Soccer Club), posted a review of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich on his YouTube channel. The video went viral, sales of the book soared and, shortly afterwards, an Atlético supporter created Galeitura, a community born from the meeting of two passions we tend to place in very different worlds: football and books. Within days, the initiative had already attracted hundreds of participants and tens of thousands of followers on social media.

The numbers are impressive, of course, but perhaps the most interesting part of this story lies somewhere else. It wasn’t simply that thousands of readers discovered that Gustavo Scarpa also likes Tolstoy. Thousands of people who were talking about football started talking about Tolstoy.

That may seem like a small distinction, but I think it says a great deal about one of the challenges ahead if we want to expand reading in Brazil. Our industry has learned to look for readers where readers already are: in bookstores, at book fairs and festivals, in book clubs, on literary social media accounts, in newsletters about books, on BookTok and across the many other spaces that have formed around reading. It makes sense. We invest in communicating better with people who already read, offering new discoveries and helping the right book find the right person.

But perhaps there is an earlier question we don’t ask often enough: where are people when they’re not talking about books?

They’re at the stadium, at the gym, running a road race, watching a video about food, listening to a business podcast or talking about parenting, music, gaming, travel or technology. Because nobody is just a reader. Someone can love football and Russian literature, follow the NBA and read biographies, run a half-marathon and be interested in a book about health. They can spend hours watching cooking videos without ever having walked into a bookstore looking for a book about food.

Perhaps the publishing industry still segments people too much by their reading habits and too little by the worlds of interest that make up their lives.

What happened with Scarpa is particularly interesting because it doesn’t appear to have started as a strategy to sell books. He was already a reader, he was already talking about what he read, and he began doing so in front of a community that had found him through a completely different door. The book went to football, not the other way around.

At Estante Virtual, we have been experimenting with something along these lines since the second half of last year through a partnership with Voz Futura, an organization founded by Flamengo player Danilo. The relationship grew out of an affinity that goes beyond football: Danilo is also a reader who speaks publicly about books, education and learning. What interested us from the beginning wasn’t simply associating books with a well-known footballer, but the possibility of bringing reading into conversations and spaces that don’t necessarily begin with books.

That’s why I watched the Scarpa phenomenon with less a sense of surprise than of confirmation. Perhaps reading can also grow when it stops talking only about reading.

That doesn’t mean putting books everywhere at random, much less turning anyone with an audience into a book influencer. In fact, I think what makes these encounters powerful is precisely their authenticity. Scarpa doesn’t seem to be following a brief when he talks about Tolstoy, just as Danilo doesn’t need to stop talking about football in order to talk about the books he reads. They are people with multiple interests sharing a genuine part of themselves with communities that have already built trust around other subjects.

And perhaps trust is one of the most powerful discovery tools we have. When someone I follow because of football tells me why a particular book moved them, for a moment that book stops belonging to the world of literature and starts belonging to my world too. That is different from being shown an ad for a book. It is someone telling me: this might have something to do with you.

For publishers, bookstores and the entire book ecosystem, there is an enormous opportunity in this shift in perspective. Instead of asking only who the book influencers are, we can ask who the people are who can create encounters with books. Instead of thinking only about communities of readers, we can look at communities of runners, football fans, cooks, entrepreneurs, gamers, musicians or travelers. And instead of bringing everyone into the spaces we have built for books, perhaps we can bring more books into the spaces people have already chosen to inhabit.

For a long time, one of the most important questions in our industry has been: where are the readers? We still need to answer it. But perhaps it is time to add another: where are the people who might be interested in this story?

Because if we want to find people who are already looking for books, we more or less know where to look. The challenge may be creating encounters with those who aren’t.

After all, sometimes a book’s next reader doesn’t even know they’re looking for it yet.