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Anna Ford<\/p>\n
Camden, Maine-based Bookclubz Inc.<\/strong><\/a>, which runs an app to manage book clubs, has raised $1.07 million<\/strong> as its co-founders led by CEO Anna Ford<\/strong><\/a> bid to turn a hobby into a business.<\/p>\n According to the Business Journal, Ford plans to actively raise funds and won\u2019t close the funding round until September. The new tranche reportedly includes seven follow-on commitments from previous investors.<\/p>\n Ford started Bookclubz, now known as Bookclubs, in 2015 as the book club she started in Philadelphia struggled \u201cwith organization, attendance, and waning membership,\u201d according to Forbes.<\/p>\n Campbell is a computer programmer with start-up and consulting experience. An alumnus of Harvard University and the Wharton School, he built the first version of Bookclubs and serves as the company\u2019s chief technology officer. Four years after Bookclubs\u2019 founding, Ford and Campbell married.<\/p>\n Bookclubs\u2019 third co-founder, Nancy Brown<\/strong>, is based in Richmond, Va. The company participated in the Startup Virginia incubator and Richmond\u2019s Lighthouse Labs accelerator, according to the Journal. She is an alumna of the University of Alabama with a BA in English Literature.<\/p>\n \u201cI became our club\u2019s de facto leader, scheduling meetings and tracking books through email,\u201d Ford, an alumna of Harvard Kennedy School and Georgetown University, once told an interviewer. \u201cWhen our club ballooned to twenty members, our email threads got tangled. People were asking, when\u2019s the next meeting? What book do we read next? As the logistics grew complicated, we met less often, attendance went down, our numbers dwindled.\u201d<\/p>\n Ford joined her first book club in 2005, and started her first book club, called The Original, in Philadelphia in 2011.<\/p>\n \u201cWe designed Bookclubs for my wonderful club in Philadelphia. But within months,100 new book clubs had signed up! We realized we\u2019d stumbled across real-life book club people who, like me, were looking for help. Over the next year, Ian and I listened to their feedback, adding tools that made Bookclubs even better,\u201d Ford said in an interview published on Bookclubs\u2019 blog. \u201cNow 8,000 clubs with over 35,000 individual members rely on Bookclubs to organize meetings, vote on books, track discussions, even post recipes.<\/p>\n When Ford moved to Harvard for graduate study, she started another book club.<\/p>\n \u201cWe called ourselves Grad Students Finding Time for Fiction. We were four women and two men, studying government and public policy,\u201d she recalled. \u201cOur membership is international\u2014with two from Spain, one from Costa Rica, one from Lebanon, and three Americans\u2014so we decided to focus on women authors from around the world, often with feminist themes and perspectives.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, Ford runs five book clubs besides managing Bookclubs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anna Ford Camden, Maine-based Bookclubz Inc., which runs an app to manage book clubs, has raised $1.07 million…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":48507,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-48506","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114817283347255175","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48506\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}