Beyond Reviews: How Reader Views Shows Up for the Indie Community

If you’ve been with us for a while, you know that Reader Views has always been about more than just reviews. We’ve spent over 20 years working alongside independent authors, and somewhere along the way, “working alongside” grew into something bigger.

We started sponsoring events. We started showing up at conferences. We started donating books to people who don’t have easy access to them. And we realized we’d never really talked about any of it in one place.

So we fixed that.

A New Page, a Bigger Picture

We just launched a Community & Events page on our website. It’s a simple idea: one place where you can see the events we’ve sponsored, the conferences we’ve partnered with, and the community initiatives we care about.

Right now, here’s what you’ll find there:

The Women in Publishing Summit — We sponsored the 2026 WIP Summit this past March and offered 15 complimentary entries to our Literary Awards program for summit attendees. The WIP Summit is the largest online conference for women in publishing, and being part of it was a natural fit for us. The energy in that community is incredible, and we were glad to support it.

The Vancouver International Publishing Conference — Coming up on June 6, 2026, this is a premier in-person conference at the Shipyards in North Vancouver. Industry experts and published authors come together to talk about everything from what makes a book a bestseller to how the publishing landscape is shifting. We’re proud to be a sponsor.

Inside Books Project — This one is close to home, literally. Inside Books Project is a volunteer-led nonprofit right here in Austin that sends free books and reading materials to people incarcerated in Texas. They’re the only books-to-prisoners program in the state, serving over 130,000 incarcerated individuals and shipping more than 35,000 books a year. Reader Views donates books to their program because we believe access to reading matters everywhere, not just in bookstores and libraries.

Why It Matters

We’ve always believed that indie publishing is a community, not just an industry. Authors helping authors. Readers discovering new voices. Organizations working together to make sure great books reach the people who need them.

Sponsoring a conference or donating books to a prison library might not be the first thing you think of when you hear “Reader Views.” But it’s part of who we are. And now there’s a page for it.

Take a Look

Check out the new Community & Events page and see where we’ve been and where we’re headed next. If you’re organizing a publishing event and think we’d be a good fit as a sponsor or partner, we’d love to hear from you. Just get in touch.

We’re not going anywhere. We’re just showing up in more places.