What a rip-off!
Really disappointing. Paid £19.70 for a box (£15 for the box plus £4.70 UK postage) and received:
- Young Adult paperback book that came out almost a year ago
- plastic-coated card bookmark
- plastic-coated A5 size 'magazine'
There was nothing personalised about this box, it felt like a generic, corporate book subscription and I would expect more from a queer company. Mostly, I was disappointed with the book choice as I thought this was a subscription service for adult readers. Also, I would have expected to receive something more recent to reduce the chances of people already having read it.
So basically, this box felt like a total rip-off. An 8 quid book and a couple of plastic-y, unrecyclable, unwanted bits of paper.
I would not recommend this to any fellow queer bookworms.
Reply from Queer Book Box
Hi SP,
Really sorry to hear you weren’t happy with your box. We ask subscribers to get in touch if they have the book already, which was a risk with this book, and we swap them for something else. We chose this for the December box because it’s such a wintery book, and we think it made a perfect Christmas read (and we’ve had feedback from subscribers who agree).
We often include books which are newly out in paperback, but this doesn’t always work with the themes we have planned and ensuring that there is good diversity of authors, story types, sexualities represented, fiction and non-fiction etc. This also means we sometimes include young adult books. Of the 2021 books only 2 were young adult and of the 2022 books no young adult books have been chosen yet.
We don’t use plastic coating on our paper products, but since receiving your review we checked on whether our usual paper could be recycled and have switched to an alternative (so thank you).
In terms of personalisation, we don’t do individually personalised boxes, but we do make sure the theme matches the book and include loads of related extras. For example, in your box there was an explanation of why we chose this book for this month, further reading recommendations based on the book, an article by the author discussing themes from the book, an article on the history of ‘male impersonators’ (a key part of the book) and links to where you can find this month’s zine creators (as well as the author bio, reviews and details of what’s in the other levels of boxes). As an example, subscribers on the All Out tier also received a guide to lesbian pulp fiction (related to the book), a membership card to the club in the book, a vintage style queer Christmas card to send to a loved one, and a hand-wrapped gift to go under their tree.
I’m sorry you felt you didn’t get much value from the box. If you want to find books at the cheapest possible rate, you shouldn’t subscribe with us. We get all of our books through Gay’s The Word because queer community and supporting an iconic piece of queer history is more important to us than profit margins. The extras we include in the boxes are made by queer creatives, who we are proud to support. We could include cheaper, generic or mass-produced things, but that’s not who we are.
