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An empty community, membership, or subscription is the hardest room in the world to fill.

There’s no momentum to borrow from, no members to set the tone, and no activity to prove the place is worth showing up for. It’s like getting to a party first, and we all know that everyone who arrives early has to decide whether to talk to a room that’s mostly silent.

Most launches never get communities past that silence, but this one did.

This is the story of building the Epic Reads Book Club, the official digital community for HarperCollins’ Epic Reads, from a genuinely empty community to 250+ members and a feed that members were driving themselves, in under two weeks.

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The brief: a publisher’s launch, and a real risk

Epic Reads is HarperCollins’ hub for romantasy readers (the audience behind BookTok’s biggest launches). So, when they decided to build a book club community around a marquee release, the pairing of The Rose Bargain and its sequel The Thorn Queen by Sasha Peyton Smith, they had everything most brands would kill for: a devoted readership, a beloved book, and real reach across every platform that matters.

They also had a potential risk that reach often disguises. Readers show up for the moment, the release trends, and then the moment passes and the readers scatter back to their own corners of the internet.

The goal was to turn a launch audience into a community, one people would still return to after the book club they originally showed up for was complete.

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Starting from an actual zero

It’s worth being precise about the starting line for this project, because it’s the part that makes the rest remarkable.

Before launch, the Epic Reads Book Club had no members. Not a small base to grow, not a quiet community to revive, nothing. The community you’re about to see the numbers for didn’t exist a fortnight before those numbers were recorded. Every member, every post, every conversation had to be designed into being from nothing.

Here’s what the data says about whether we got it right.

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The launch: 0 to 250+ in two weeks

The community opened its doors in early May. Within roughly two weeks, total membership climbed from zero to 260 members, with 257 new members joining across the 30-day launch window. The steepest climb came in a single opening surge, then held a steady upward line, day after day, rather than spiking once and sagging.

That shape matters more than the headline number.

A launch that spikes and collapses draws a jagged mountain. This one drew a staircase: 73 members, then 109, 142, 201, 234, 257, climbing through the whole first fortnight and still rising at the end of the window. New members kept arriving well after the initial launch-day rush, which is a signal that you’ve created something people want to take part in.

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Members ran the room from day one

The number I’m proudest of isn’t the membership count, though.

Across the launch, the community members generated 5,559 total contributions in 30 days, including posts, comments, replies, and course activity. The busiest space in the entire community was The Common Room (the member feed), with 1,646 member contributions and nearly 1,300 visits within the launch period. That’s a room where members showed up to talk to each other.

This is the hardest thing to manufacture in a brand-new community, and it usually takes months. A space built by a corporation, around a corporate book launch, could very easily have become a place where HarperCollins talks and readers listen. Instead, within days, the members were generating the majority of the energy themselves. On the strongest days, contributing members ran as high as 65-77% of everyone active in the community, meaning most of the people present weren’t lurking, they were participating.

The onboarding did quiet, heavy lifting underneath all of this. The “Start Here” space alone drove over 120 completions, as new members moved through a designed first-week sequence instead of landing in an empty feed and guessing what to do.

That’s the Threshold from The Architecture of Digital Belonging Blueprint© doing its job: a stranger arrives, is told exactly where they are and what to do first, gets an early win, and crosses into the community as a participant rather than a spectator.

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The proof they stayed

Growth and noise are easy to generate for a week. The real question for any brand after a launch is whether the people who arrived actually stuck around for more. This is where the Epic Reads Book Club build proved itself.

New members hit a 7-day retention rate of roughly 65%, which the platform’s own benchmarks classify as exceptional (35% is considered healthy). For a community these members had just joined, off the back of a single book, that number says the room was worth coming back to. Existing members (members around for 30+ days) retained at roughly 72%, sitting comfortably above the healthy threshold of 60% and climbing toward the exceptional mark.

The activity ratios tell the same story from another angle. In the launch window, the community’s weekly-to-monthly active ratio held near the top of the chart, well past its 50% target, and the daily-to-monthly ratio cleared its 20% target repeatedly. In plain terms, a large share of the total membership wasn’t just technically subscribed, they were showing up weekly, and often daily.

After the launch-day peak, daily activity settled from its initial high into a steadier rhythm, dipping nearer its baseline before climbing again, a great signal towards a sustainable space. The spike of a launch is not supposed to be the permanent altitude. What you want is for the surge to resolve into a sustainable pattern of people returning, and that’s what the data shows happening here. A settling, then a climb back up (not a collapse).

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Built to outlast the book

Most book-launch-based communities have a fatal expiration date baked in because they’re built around one title, so when the discussion of that title winds down, so does the reason to be there.

The room empties as quickly as it fills.

The Epic Reads Book Club was designed specifically to avoid that fate, with spaces, rituals, and a structure that belonged to the club, not to any single book. And it worked! The club has since carried its members forward into a new read entirely, proving the thing every publisher hopes for and few achieve: the members didn’t come for just a book. They came to visit the room once, but the room was built to help them settle– so they stayed.

That’s the operational difference between a launch that ends and a membership that renews.

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Why it worked

None of this was luck. What the community needed was a deliberate blueprint for how a stranger becomes a member, a space where members gather, a reason why they return, and the understanding of what holds the whole thing together when the buzz fades.

That’s the work done in my Community & Membership Creation package.

Before the doors opened, we designed the Threshold that turned launch-day arrivals into oriented members instead of confused lurkers.

We built the Rooms, led by The Common Room, where members could actually talk to each other rather than only to the brand.

We set the Rituals and programming that gave a crowd whose attention we won through marketing a launch a reason to return.

We ran the Engine, focused on the onboarding flows and the reporting that let a corporate team see, in real numbers, whether belonging was actually taking hold.

And we built for the Renewal, the structural reason the community survived its own founding book and carried its members into the next one.

That’s the Architecture of Digital Belonging Blueprint©, applied not to fix a community, but to conjure one out of an empty room, on purpose, from the moment the first member steps in.

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What this means if you’re launching

The mistake most brands make is treating the launch as the goal. They pour everything into the spike, capture a crowd, and then watch it dissolve because there was never real architecture built to transition the noise into community.

A publisher with HarperCollins’ reach could have done exactly that and called it a success. Instead, the reach became the fuel and the architecture became the asset, and what’s left is a community that’s still running.

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Frequently asked questions

What is the Epic Reads Book Club?

The Epic Reads Book Club is the official digital reading community for HarperCollins’ Epic Reads, the publisher’s hub for YA and romantasy readers. It launched around the release of The Rose Bargain and The Thorn Queen by Sasha Peyton Smith and was built on Mighty Networks.

What service was provided in this case study?

Community & Membership Creation: a from-scratch build including the membership strategy, space architecture, onboarding and Threshold design, launch programming, and the reporting engine, plus post-launch support. The community was built from zero members, not inherited or improved.

What results did the launch see?

From a starting point of zero members, the community grew to 257 members in roughly two weeks (259 new members across the 30-day window), generated 5,559 contributions, achieved a member-led feed as its most active space, and hit an exceptional new-member 7-day retention rate of around 65%.

How do you build a community from scratch without any existing members?

By designing the entire member journey before launch rather than after: how a stranger enters (the Threshold), where members gather (the Rooms), why they return (the Rituals), what runs underneath (the Engine), and what keeps them past the founding moment (the Renewal). When the architecture is built first, an opening surge of members lands in a room designed to hold them, instead of an empty feed.

How is this different from managing an existing community?

Management diagnoses and corrects a community that already exists. Creation builds one that doesn’t yet, designing every stage of the experience before the first real member arrives. They’re different disciplines: one is renovation, the other is architecture from the foundation up.

Can a book-launch community survive after the book?

It can, if it’s built to. A community architected around a single title tends to empty when that title’s moment passes. One built around the club itself, with its own spaces, rituals, and reasons to return, carries members forward. The Epic Reads Book Club did exactly that, moving its members on to a new read after the founding book.