Saving Lone Star Literary Life

A literary website that has connected bookish Texans since 2015 nearly closed this year. Then one of its readers saved it.

Out in West Texas, a pair of aspiring novelists and enterprising small-town newspaper owners, Barbara Brannon and Kay Ellington, were dismayed by the number of publications that were dropping book sections, cutting critics, and otherwise decimating literary coverage, especially in the Lone Star State. By the 2010s, “93 percent of the state’s newspapers offer no regular books coverage of any kind,” they told the Writers’ League of Texas.

Initially, it was only a side project for Brannon and Ellington, a dynamic duo who have now published several novels (a series all about The Paragraph Ranch) while still stubbornly championing small-town papers too. (Their company, Paragraph Ranch LLC, now owns three around Lubbock: the Texas Spur, in Spur; the Caprock Courier in Silverton; and the Floyd County Hesperian-Beacon.)

In 2018, school librarian Kristine Hall took over and Lone Star Lit coasted through the pandemic when many Texans were home reading—and writing. But the upstart venture nearly died in April 2024, a victim perhaps of its own business model of providing substantive but low-cost (or free) services to readers and authors across Texas. It had become popular but not profitable enough to sustain a team of employees large enough to support it without burning out.

From its beginnings, Lone Star Lit was ambitious. The Texas-centric newsletter offered announcements on book events, a statewide bookstore directory, and coverage of Texas authors’ latest work, whether from big publishers, boutique operations like Dallas’ literary powerhouse Deep Ellum, academic presses, and even self-published work.

Early on, Hall, who already ran a blog she called Hall Ways, joined the operation. Hall formed a network of bloggers who agreed to help cover the book launches of Texas authors in what was dubbed Book Blog Tours, for which authors paid small but affordable fees meant to support the company’s operations.

She and other contributors at Lone Star Lit also helped boost book tourism by expanding their statewide directory to 300 bookstores and publishing an annual list of the Top Texas Bookish Destinations. That list has included predictable big-city entries like Austin and Houston, as well as Abilene, home to the National Center for Children’s Illustrated Literature, and the Lower Rio Grande Valley, which hosts both the McAllen Book Festival and the Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival.

“When our team took over the Texas Spur in 2018, it was with full expectation we could manage both projects, but community newspapering turned out to be much more demanding than [we] anticipated—in a good way,” Brannon told the Observer. “We were fortunate—as is the community of Texas book lovers—that Kristine was eager to step up. We’ve continued to cheer her on since then!”

As efforts to ban books escalated in school districts near Hall’s home and beyond, the controversies seemed only to galvanize Lone Star Lit readers, who wanted to know what they could do. “With the banning of the books, I think people are looking for a way to support the Texas literary community. People want to be able to do something, but they don’t always know what to do,” Hall said.

Over the nine years of Lone Star Lit’s life, more independent booksellers and literary festivals popped up in unexpected places. The massive Texas Book Festival and the San Antonio Book Festival remained the biggest—drawing national and Texas talent—while the Hill Country town of Boerne built a beautiful new library, and librarians there turned their lovely town square into a festival venue. The town of Winnsboro in East Texas created a book festival too, and a brand new one just popped up in the Austin suburbs called “Bees and Books.”

By late March, she’d whittled down the list to four finalists, finally selecting Amy Kelly, a former middle school teacher and Lone Star Lit fan who had for years been writing about YA books on her own blog. “I feel like all of my experience so far has led to this because I am so passionate about the freedom to read and the fact that stories save lives,” Kelly told the Observer.