Meet George Dunn

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to George Dunn. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi George , thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?

I have a real passion for and excitement toward horror literature, one that is only fuelled and influenced by the wonderful “bookstagram,” community that I’ve found myself to be apart of. I’m able to, alongside my studies and private life, churn out these reviews and posts (a couple a week) because I don’t see it so much as “work,” as I do fun and social, and hopefully sometimes helpful to others.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

In June of 2021, maybe a little later, I read a novel called “The Troop,” by Nick Cutter. It’s a rather bleak, gruesome coming of age novel, and it blew me away, to the extent where I stuck a photo of it up on Instagram and shouted into the void about how good it was. But then people started commenting, they’d read it too and felt the same, and I realised that this was a whole active community, and subsequently one I decided I wanted to be apart of. My rambling soon outgrew Instagram captions, so after a failed blog of my own, which I refused to buy the domain for, I stumbled across FanFiAddict. We review primarily fantasy, but I emailed and asked if it would be possible to join the “FearForAll,” horror team, and after two trial reviews, I was in! It allowed me to publish longer review pieces and blog posts, in which I’m free to crack as many terrible jokes, and go off on as many tangents as I please. I’ve since written over 100 full length reviews for that site, grown my personal following on other platforms, and have had the opportunity to interview multiple authors, including, in what turned out to be a full circle moment, Nick Cutter.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

A dash of confidence, and a little open-mindedness is probably required. I am not a literary critic, nor did I study literature at all past the age of 16. I started my page as a guy with a subjective opinion and a little willingness, and that’s really all you need.

I suppose to an extent, a little resilience. On social media it’s far too easy to get caught up on how many views, likes, shares, a post may have. Some posts do better than others, irrespective of the size of your account and the standard of the post, it’s kind of just up to the algorithm gods. You shouldn’t obsess over it, although that’s easier said than done, and you definitely shouldn’t throw in the towel.

The last is knowing how deeply entwined with community reviewing and reading is AND how friendly the community is. Approach and be approachable, comment, share, reply, direct message, and I promise you’ll have a much better time.

So in short: if you’re thinking about it, do it, and do it with confidence, once you’ve done it, don’t give up on it, the algorithm may fail you sometimes, but not always, and make friends, have fun, and it’ll all be worth it.

Alright so to wrap up, who deserves credit for helping you overcome challenges or build some of the essential skills you’ve needed?

So many people. The folks at FanFiAddict, who allow me to take up a little space on the site. Anna Dupre who continues to put amazing books on my radar and is a wonderful cheerleader. Creators like Sadie Hartmann and Neil McRobert who I’ve looked up to from the very beginning, and continue to inspire me. Emily C. Hughes who keeps a running list of horror releases throughout the year that I work almost completely off of. The hundreds of publicists I’ve worked with who have offered me countless opportunities to review upcoming releases and chat with authors I didn’t ever imagine I’d be able to. As I said, what I do is entirely community driven, so the entirety of bookstagram, everybody who has followed and read and discussed with me, really do keep me going.

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