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The Three C’s of the Changing Book Blogging World

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The post I wrote about blogging and responsibility a couple of weeks ago seems to have struck a chord with  lot of readers, both those who blog and those who just enjoy reading them. The responses were great and gave me a lot to think about.

I noted in the post that there were a few other things on my mind in relation to blogging I thought might be worth writing about. More specifically, I thought it would be worth looking at how blogging has changed in the last few years and what, if anything, that might mean. It’s interesting to take stock of what’s out there now and what’s been out there in the past, and it’s also interesting to think about the kinds of things that aren’t gone but have instead shifted. As blogs have grown in popularity, the way people interact and engage with them has grown and changed as well.

Like last time, I’d love anyone to weigh in on what they think about these or any other blogging-related topics. What I see is from my own experience, as well as those experiences of people I know who blog or read blogs and have been for a while. The three topics I want to delve into — crediting, commenting, and critical reviews — are things that are on the forefront of my mind and they’re things that matter a lot to me in terms of how I can be a better blogger within the blogging community and as important, to our readers here.

Crediting

In the last few weeks, citing and giving credit where credit is due has been popping up in the blogging world. There are two thought-provoking posts from the library world (here and here) and there’s a post from Molly at Wrapped Up In Books.

During the same span of time, I stumbled across more than one post written on other blogs that mirrored things I’ve written, almost down to the voice. And these weren’t coincidence type posts; these were posts that were on a very similar topic that wasn’t necessarily timely to what was going on in the bigger world of books and reading. In none of those posts were my posts noted or credited. While I think it’s fair for anyone to write on anything they want to, it’s also obvious to me when people have written a post that’s been inspired by another; perhaps it’s because I read so many blogs. Perhaps it’s because I know my own voice and writing well enough to ferret out the sorts of passages and thinking patterns that I go through when I work something out in writing.

Seeing those posts and seeing no credit to me at all, not even in a passing manner, made me very angry. And it makes me equally angry when I see posts by people I read being used in the same way: as springboards without any passing credit.

I think it’s easy when you’re new to the blogging world to think everything on the internet is free. Unfortunately, what I saw didn’t come from new bloggers; they came from established ones who should know better than that. Rather than acknowledge their post was spurred by another interesting discussion, those posts were written without any contextualization and without any credit. When there’s no credit given, and when it’s obvious that credit should be acknowledged, it’s not borrowing; it’s stealing.

Having your work stolen is shitty.

When I sit down to work on a post that’s adding to a larger discussion or trying to spur a larger discussion, I also open up Google and do a little searching. I pull open my Feedly saved posts, as well as the things I’ve saved in Pocket, and I look to see what, if anything, other bloggers have said about this topic. In many cases, the reason I find myself interested in writing a big post is that it’s something I’ve been thinking about because someone else has written or discussed it. It only makes sense for me to sit down and dig through what people have said or not said and raise those posts into my own piece, in order to ground my argument and to give credit to those sources. It doesn’t mean I have to agree with them, but it means I acknowledge that they had an idea and pursued it; it would be lazy and, I think, unethical of me to ignore than, even if I disagree completely.

The work people put into blogging isn’t free work. It’s a passion but it’s also a passion pursued at the expense of something else. What’s being said and what’s worth expanding upon doesn’t come from the ether. Actual, real people sit behind those words and use their energy to pursue ideas. To not credit that work in some capacity is theft.

It is hard to keep track of what and where you’re reading things. But there are easy-to-use tools worth looking at in order to be a better, more ethical, more thorough blogger. Feedly and Pocket are my go-to choices, since I can bookmark and save interesting things in each, then I can search through them. But it’s also easy enough to hop on Google and refine your searches to a certain time frame, when you know or remember having read a post on a certain topic.

By no means do you have to look everything you’re interested in writing up and build your own work around those who’ve written on it before you. But good writing does build upon the work of others, so taking a little time to do research — then crediting that research — is just good practice. When we write our monthly genre guides, for example, we know other people aren’t necessarily talking about those topics at that particular time. We also know, though, that doing our research then linking to what we’re looking at only makes what we’re doing more enjoyable to use and more valuable to readers.

Write whatever you like and however you like to. Just give credit where credit is due.

Commenting

One of the biggest changes in blogging — one related to the issue of crediting — is the decrease in commenting across blogs. We’ve definitely noticed it here. Where we used to see a large number of comments, we now see relatively few, even though our readership has grown (some bloggers have noted a decrease in readership but we continue to see ours increase). Some days, it’s disappointing; you work on a blog post or a review for hours and hours and no one says anything about it. Other times, it’s almost a relief no one commented because it’s a post you didn’t feel entirely sure about or didn’t think was your A game.

In many ways, I find it more disappointing to see work I think is fantastic by other people have no comments on it. This is such a great piece! It should have loads of comments! Why is no one listening and responding to it?

The answer is, I think, that the way people engage with content is significantly different than it was a year, three years, and five years ago. One’s blogging content and response can’t be gauged anymore by a number at the bottom of a post. That’s not where readers are looking at and thinking about your work. Engagement is no longer within the blog; it’s beyond the blog.

Bloggers are on Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook, and any number of other social networks. So are blog readers. Because of the way information’s shared and dispersed, the commenting on a piece is no longer on the blog post itself. It’s through shares on social media, through responses that pop up when a post is reblogged on Tumblr. It’s through how many tweets and retweets a piece gets. It’s also through the discussion that post can spur on podcasts, on other blog posts, and so forth. Because blogging is such a large thing — and the word blog itself means such a bigger thing than it once did — people want to comment, talk about, and share what it is they’re reading. A post about magical realism in YA might not see a single comment, but it might be tweeted by 100 people, reblogged by 50, discussed on a bookish podcast, linked up 15 blogs on weekly link round ups, and so forth. Your work has been seen by thousands at that point, even if it hasn’t been commented on by a single person.

Rather than your blog existing within itself and within this community of bloggers, it’s grown legs and reached audiences both familiar and, maybe more interestingly/importantly, those who are unfamiliar.

Reaching new eyes is exciting and it’s what drives new people to become regular readers. Reaching new eyes also means that it’s harder to pinpoint engagement and it’s harder to figure out who your readership really is. We rarely see where our posts end up unless we spend a long time researching where they’ve been shared socially. Sometimes, those pop up if we go into Google Analytics, but for the most part, I’d rather spend time writing and reading than tracking down every instance where my work ends up.

And this is where crediting becomes really important, too.

When a blog post is credited as a source or inspiration for another post, that’s how the initial blogger can often “track back” where their content is landing. For me, this is exciting because I love seeing what people are taking away from my writing but more, I love that it opens up new voices and blogs for me to read and follow. It’s the new way to engage and grow the community. No longer are their big roundups of “necessary to read” bloggers like there was early on. Because this is such a huge world and because it’s expansive in terms of content creation and dispersion, finding where people are reading my work gives me an in to see what work I should be reading, too. When you credit where you find inspiration for your work, you help grow the community, not shrink it.

Is it still a bummer that commenting on blogs seems to be a dying art? Sure. But I like to remind myself it means that the comments we do get are really worthwhile, and even if we don’t reply to every single one, we do read them and appreciate them. I also like to remind myself that engagement now isn’t contained to one place.

There’s something fun about seeing one of your blog posts pop up on your Tumblr dash weeks after it’s been written and seeing that people have not only shared it, but they’ve added to it.

Critical Reviews


There’s not a lot to explore in terms of critical reviews in the YA blogosphere, is there?

I feel like a lot of the staple critical reviewers — ones who have been doing this for a long time — are still doing it. I think about The Book Smugglers, Liz Burns, Leila Roy, and a few others are still writing some of the most thoughtful, deep, analytical reviews out there. Those reviews take exceptional amounts of time to write, and it’s not just about the book that these critical reviews are worth reading for. It’s also the craft of writing the review itself; they can be creative, exciting, and sometimes funny pieces of writing in and of themselves.

Review writing is an art in and of itself.

I read a lot of blogs, but I have become particular about the ones I read for reviews. I don’t like seeing blog tour reviews for the book that a publisher is promoting at the time. I like having the book on my radar, but seeing one, two, or three week long blog tours doesn’t excite me, nor does it compel me to want to write a review of the book, unless I know my take aways from the book differ from the ones I’ve seen (positively or not).


A big reason I love critical reviews is that they’re often of books that aren’t getting the big marketing and publicity attention that other books are. Whether or not I agree with the review, I find that the critical, thoughtful, an analytical reviews are the ones that make me most want to pick up a book because I know that it’s something that’s going to make me think — both about the book and about the review writers.

As I’ve said again and again, critical reviews are not negative reviews. Critical reviews are thoughtful explorations of what does and does not work in the material at hand. Some of the best critical reviews are entirely positive, but what separates them from a lot of other reviews is they offer a huge slice of the person behind the review. They’re often more personal than a personal blog post because they let in opportunities for vulnerability that the reviewer doesn’t always know they’re opening up: their biases, their preferences, their world views, their passions. These reviews allow me as a reader to really get inside the book and inside the head of another reader. It’s hard work, and it’s the kind of work that isn’t always rewarded with the kind of engagement other posts are — either in comments or in sharing — but it’s work that is rewarded in terms of what core blog readers (who are readers in general) want.

That’s why I blog and that’s why I read blogs. It’s engaging with other readers.

Which is why I wonder: where are the newer critical reviewers? Where are those newer critical voices? Who can we read and think about and who is going to open us up to new books worth checking out? We’ve had our eyes on a few bloggers who came for a few months, wrote great reviews, then disappeared. We had our eyes, too, on bloggers who were critical reviewers for a long time then decided for any number of reasons that writing critical reviews was a thing they didn’t feel comfortable pursuing anymore.

I know I’m eager to see more. I can’t be the only one.

Contemporary YA Week Wrap Up — And A Bit About Kelly’s Book

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To wrap up Contemporary YA Week here at STACKED, I wanted to send a huge thank you both to our guest contributors, as well as to our readers who keep asking for more posts about contemporary YA. In fact, I’ve already received some suggestions for what to consider next year, and I’m compiling a list of those topics so that I can try to make it happen.

If there’s ever a topic that interests you as a reader, I’d love to know. Or if there are things you’ve thought about this week you’d like to read more about, leave those things in the comments. I can’t always follow up or through, but I do always think about them. And I hope the booklists, as well as the rerunning of some older content was valuable, too.

So please, feel free to give us feedback or suggestions or ideas for future contemporary week features — as well as ideas for posts about contemporary realistic fiction outside of this series — because it’s helpful to us to know what’s of interest.

Just because it’s fitting — and because I’m about to dig into revising — I thought it’d be worthwhile to talk a little bit more about my book about contemporary YA too.

The Real Deal: A VOYA Guide to Contemporary Fiction for Young Adult Readers should be out sometime next year, and you can add it to your Goodreads shelf if you want to. As it stands, I’ve not added a short description because the description of the book’s fairly evident from the title.

My book has three distinct parts that all build upon one another. The first part talks about how we define contemporary YA, how reader’s advisory for contemporary YA works, how to be effective and innovative in your reader’s advisory and book recommendations, and gives you the raw tools for working with YA readers and contemporary YA fiction.

The second part contains 10 thematic book lists, each with 15 annotations that can be used not only as book descriptions, but as book talks. They also include read alikes and appeal factors for making connections between and among different books beyond those within the thematic list itself (in other words, while the book list might be about health and well-being, the appeal factors might hit on the fact the book has a great family element to it, making it connect with some of the books in the relationships book list). At the end of each of those thematic book lists is a long list of other books, too. Here’s a sample of one of the annotations:

Finally, the third part of the book might be my favorite: conversation starters. I’ve pulled from the book lists and pooled together five or more books on a big and heavy topic and developed a series of questions and discussion fodder for them. Some of the topics include sex and sexual assault, military service, body image, and more. Essentially, this portion of the book puts the things in part one together with the things in part two and offers a way into talking about tough or touchy subjects with readers. This was the most fun and most challenging to write, but it’s also the part I think will offer the most value. I hope, at least!

Nearly every chapter in the book — and there are 22 — begins with insight from a variety of contemporary YA authors, as well as teachers and other librarians, about what contemporary YA has influenced them or how it is they implement contemporary YA into their own work. I thought it was really important to incorporate some other voices into the book, and I’m really pleased not only with what those contributors had to offer, but how well those contributions played into the things I was talking about in my book.

There’s really not much more to report at this stage in the process. The book’s been with my editor and the publisher now for a few months, and it’s in line for the design process, meaning there will be something that looks like a book-shaped thing very soon. In the mean time, I’m writing an index (yes, writing my own index) and going through the manuscript itself to clarify, tighten, and reword some of the things I haven’t looked at since I turned it in. I’m hoping to sneak in a few more titles into my book lists, as well, since I’ve read quite a bit in the interim.

I’m excited about this book and pleased with how it all came together. I think it’ll be really useful for those who love contemporary YA and those who work with YA readers in particular. And of course, when I know more — publication date, cover, so forth — I’ll share. But I believe this update pretty much covers what to expect content wise.

Perhaps the best part is at this point, I still love contemporary YA and I think that maybe I like it even more now that I’ve spent so much time thinking about it. In fact, I feel like after writing it, I could write even more books on some of the things I hit on within it. Maybe some day!

What I will tell you about my book

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Remember how I’ve been working on a book about contemporary YA fiction for VOYA Press?

I’ve been not talking about it a whole lot because I don’t think the process is all that interesting TO talk about. But after writing for the last many months, as well as revising for the last as many months, I have spent this weekend eating ice cream since I turned in a finished draft to my editor.

Rereading my initial post on the topic, I’m pleased that it’s almost exactly the same vision I had when I started. If maybe not even a little bit better.

Things will likely change through editing and more revision, but it’s not a thin little book. When I turned it in, it was roughly 95,000 words long. Which is a long book. I’m not sure how long, since it’s in a few different pieces.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to write an introduction to a book? I’ve always been one of those people who reads them (a preface is another story…) but sitting down to actually write one might have been more challenging than any other part of the book. I didn’t realize how hard writing a page and a half could be, but it was tough. And it’s likely the most personal part of the book.

I know nothing more about the process from here, other than I’ll know more when my editor gets the chance to read it all. I’ve sent her multiple “I hope you like it” emails over the course of the weekend, so if that’s any sign, I’m really hopeful she’s as pleased with it as I am. I am so grateful for the two lovely ladies who offered to read this for me, as I know their keen eyes and insight helped me sharpen some elements and tie my ideas into something more cohesive.

Writing a book is hard but it is also kind of fun. When things are more clear and I have a better idea of what this will look like as a finished product, I’ll talk more about the challenges. But for now, I had to share that there is a finished draft, and I am quite happy with it. It does have a title, which is likely subject to change, but you can add it on Goodreads now, if you so desire.

I’d prepared myself, too, to hate contemporary fiction after. But I’m still finding it the genre I love most of all — maybe even more now.