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Kid Lit Con 2013: The Past, Present, and Future of Blogging

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Written by: Kelly on November 11, 2013.

This past weekend was the 7th annual KidLitCon, hosted by the Kidlitosphere, and it was held down in not-so-sunny-in-recent-weeks Austin, Texas. As you may or may not know, Kimberly and myself were part of the planning committee for the event this year, and we took on the tasks of finding locations for the events we had in mind. I think we were successful, since I believe the entirety of the conference was a success. I am glad I went, and I thought I’d recap what I did, as well as what I learned, in hopes of passing along some insight to others who may benefit.

Thursday

Because Austin is one of my favorite places and a former home of mine, I wanted to go down early and get some me-time in before the event. Leila, of Bookshelves of Doom, was one of my roommates, and she, too, came down early. We figured out our flights landed within minutes of one another, so we met up at the airport, took the bus downtown, and then we spent the afternoon with one another.

The first thing we did was grab a late lunch/early dinner at El Sol y La Luna. We stuffed ourselves on Mexican food and then headed on a nice walk down to Book People, where I proceeded to spend more money in a bookstore than I have in a very long time. I convinced Leila to spend some too, and then we hit up Amy’s for my favorite ice cream in the world. But by that point, both of us were ridiculously tired and a little cranky (early morning flights!) and we headed back to the hotel.

We spent the evening talking, which was so, so great. We hit on everything from work to blogging and books.

Friday


Since the first events weren’t until mid-day, Leila and I took the opportunity to go grab breakfast in the morning together. We’d found a place that looked good, but it actually didn’t exist anymore. So I suggested we see if The Driskill had a place to eat — and it did. It’s quite possible I had the best pecan waffle I’ve ever had. Bonus points to it being shaped like Texas.

The pre-con for KidLitCon was taking place at 1 at my old stomping grounds, the iSchool at the University of Texas. The event was open to all, and it was meant to let us get to know other bloggers, authors, and fans of kidlit.

Leila and I got there early, and shortly after, we met author Nikki Loftin. As more people began to show up, I helped get some things set up in the lounge where our meeting was. We’d devised part of the precon to be a chance to swap books and ARCs we’d had, and thanks to the generosity of Bloomsbury and First Second, we also had a couple of boxes of books and ARCs to bring ourselves. Local attendees kept bringing more and more books, and we kept going and seeing what was put out.

In short, book fans in the same room as books equals a lot of talk about books.

The precon was laid back, and it was a nice, low-pressure chance for those of us who knew one another to catch up, as well as a chance to meet new people without feeling overwhelmed.

After the event, we had a reservation at a local Mexican restaurant, where we all dined on plenty of chips, salsa, margaritas, and then delicious dinners. I got the chance to sit with Kimberly and her boyfriend/sometimes guest contributor to STACKED, Matthew, and we caught up with one another.

While a number of KidLitCon folks ended up going to the bar at our hotel after dinner, Leila and I both ended up back in our hotel room, spending hours and hours laying in bed talking. A mixture of exhaustion and needing introvert downtime made this a decision that I can’t say I necessarily regret. When Pam came back from the bar, we talked a little more, as well. Though not too much since we had to save some energy for the event.

Saturday


KidLitCon 2013!

It felt like we’d been planning this event forever, but in truth, it all sort of came together pretty quickly. We rented space and catering from St. David’s Episcopal Church and I cannot possibly say enough nice things about the venue, the ease of which it was to work with them, the food, and the support we had for our entire event from start to finish. If you’re ever in Austin and in need of a space, I would recommend them without a second of hesitation.

If I had to give three words that summed up the biggest themes talked about during the event, they would be diversity, authenticity, and burnout. Every session I went to — as well as the one I presented — covered these topics, and I’m going to try to hit upon them in each short writeup, though it’d be impossible not to see the threads coming together.

Our program opened with a wonderful keynote from well-known kid lit enthusiast, supporter, and author Cynthia Leitich Smith.

Her talk focused on blogging and how she’s come to help build and support the kid lit community through her own blogging, as well as through the sharing and uplifting of other bloggers, both those who are authors and those who aren’t. She talked about the value of having a mission and philosophy behind your blogging, stating that hers was to put something positive in the world, as well as to reject the notion that people like her — a Native woman, a person who adds to the diversity of the world — could and would do much more than be a single thing.

Some of her advice for bloggers who are feeling burned out or are looking for a means of expanding what it is they do include:

  • Considering your audience: what are their  interests and their expectations? What is it they’re taking away from visiting your blog specifically? How does this tie into what your mission and philosophy are?
  • Maintaining your content flow: you can pre-format things sometimes, and you can try to schedule your content strategically. 
  • Take breaks and plan for them to avoid burnout. As she said, it’s better to be regular than frequent sometimes. 
  • Use your platform: Highlight and talk about the things that matter to you as a blogger. You have the opportunity to talk about diversity and whatever it means to you. So do it. Your readers come to your blog for a reason — let this be something they take away. 
  • Diversity matters and it’s not one thing. Diversity means so many things. Think about what it means to you as a blogger and as a reader and talk about it when it’s done well as well as when it’s not done well. 
And in all things, be authentic to yourself, to your mission and philosophy, and to your readers. She noted, too, the value of windows and doors in writing and in reading. 
Cynthia’s speech was easily one of the most engaging and energizing I’ve seen in a long time. I was impressed, and it really got me thinking about those three things — burnout, authenticity, and diversity — in a way I hadn’t been before. You avoid the first by contributing to the third by acting with the second (it makes sense, I promise). During her talk, she had screen shots from many of our own blogs to hit on the various points she was making, and it was really effective in hitting those points home. 
Also, I had incredible respect for someone who can read 300 blogs a day. Not just impressive, but it’s a true sign of being involved with the community at large.
The next session I attended was all about blogger burnout, which was a discussion-style panel moderated by Sarah Stevenson and Jen Robinson. I thought the conversation was so worthwhile and invigorating, despite being about the very opposite. The talk honed in on the factors that cause bloggers to feel burned out and frustrated (it’s what anyone who blogs would expect — low commenting, wondering if anyone is actually reading what you write, feeling overwhelmed by life events, being overwhelmed by what to read and write about next, and all of that combined to feel perhaps your effort isn’t necessarily worth it) and then it offered ideas for getting back into the game. 
Some of the takeaways from the session include:
  • Changing your blogging from posting about books when you finish reading them to perhaps talking about them in the middle of your reading. You think about and engage with materials differently then while still talking about them. 
  • Develop new features, which can be on anything from what you’re passionate about outside of yourself to personal posts. 
  • Perhaps you can stop writing reviews at all. If you don’t love them — and we all know and all agree that book reviews receive the least traffic, least engagement, least sharing, and can be at times the least satisfying thing to write — then don’t do them. It takes the pressure off you as a blogger.
  • Give yourself the permission to say no. One of the points that came up that made me feel a little like a jerk was that we at STACKED have a no response policy. It’s in our review policy itself. If we’re pitched or approached about something and we’re not interested, we don’t respond. It takes the pressure off our inboxes and our time that we could be blogging or reading that would be spent sending responses. 
  • Make it easy to share things. If you want people to share your work, make it easy to do so. I know I am not good at commenting on blogs, but I read a lot, and my sense of appreciation for what people are writing comes through tweeting it out or including it in a link roundup. 
  • Do more lists and roundups by topic for new readers, as well as old ones. Share your old content in new ways. Sometimes you don’t have to have a brand new post every day, but instead, you can present your older material in a way that’s fresh and innovative. 
The best thing said the entire session was this: if you’re blogging your passion, it is special and worth doing. That alone is what makes it stand out. You add diversity to the blogging landscape simply by being a part of it. 
Lee Wind’s panel was the next one I attended, and it was entirely about diversity in kidlit. And let me say that Lee was one of the best speakers I’ve ever seen — he gave an excellent visual component, but more than that, he was so engaged and interactive with us as audience members. 
Like Cynthia hit on, Lee also hit on the idea of books as windows and as mirrors. That there is no such thing as “the other,” since we are ALL “the other” ourselves. We just need to recognize that journey in each of us. 
He presented some startling statistics about diversity within the kidlit world, which I’m positive most readers have seen at this point, but they’re still worth pointing out. For the years of 2011 and 2012, here are some numbers to note (and I believe the population here refers to the US population, but I’d like to be corrected if I’m wrong in my notes):
  • 1.1% of books featured Latino/as. They make up 24% of the population. 
  • 2.5% of books feature black people (African American or otherwise). They are 14% of the population. 
  • 1.8% of books feature Asians. They make up 4.6% of the population. 
  • .6% of books feature Native Americans. They make up .9% of the population.
  • .6% of books feature LGBTQ people. They make up 10% of the population.
And this is the kicker number for me, in light of today’s posts on mental illness: 8% of today’s youth, age 12-18, suffer with depressive issues. 
So Lee asks us how we can get diversity into our mission as bloggers? He offers these ideas:
  • Develop booklists and highlight the issues of diversity that matter to you.
  • Think about your site organization and highlight those things which you want to highlight.
  • Consider the keywords to and within your blog.
  • Conduct interviews and ask the hard questions — the more we press, the more we learn. 
  • Pay attention to where you shine your spotlight. You can talk about the tiniest things within a book and that becomes a means of talking diversity. No matter how small it seems, it does matter when you speak up for it. So do it. Pulling out small things is rewarding and it’s what makes blogging itself fun and worthwhile. 
Bloggers do three things: they aggregate content, they create content, and they communicate. Those three things can shine the spotlight on diversity. It’s the authenticity of the blogger that makes it even more resonant.
After Lee’s talk, it was time for Kimberly and myself to present on critical reviews and why critical reviews matter so much. 
We had a short outline and plans for our talk in the event our ultimate plan of having a group-led discussion failed. But it didn’t! 
I don’t want to go into too much detail about what we hit on because I feel like we’ve talked about it a lot here. But the big takeaways were that critical reviews matter because they’re engaging with the text on a deep and personal level. Because of that, they can get easy to become burned out on, and it’s especially true since most people don’t share or comment on our reviews — and we know they’re our lowest traffic sorts of posts. We choose to keep doing them, though, because we like them. 
Some of the questions which came up were about burnout (it happens all the time and there are ways to combat it), how we feel confident in our own writing to point out some of the things we do (wherein Kimberly talked about impostor syndrome and how sometimes you have to take it with blind faith and that yes, we do bounce things between one another to ensure we’re not being crazy), whether we’ve gotten blowback on posts (we have, and we shared a few anecdotes), and how it is we manage critical reviews (neither of us take notes while reading, but sometimes we’ll make notes to ourselves when we finish a book so we don’t forget to talk about something). The biggest takeaway I hope people got was that you find your voice the longer you write and that sometimes it’s okay to say no. 
Further, if you don’t feel like reviewing something, don’t. Let it go. It’s okay. The world won’t end, and people won’t hate you. It’s your blog and you should do only what it is you like doing and want to do. Being authentic to what it is you love is the thing that matters and it should be what pushes you forward. 
We’d mentioned a few blogs we thought did excellent critical reviews, and they are the following for those who are curious:
One of the attendees at our panel asked if we’d share some of our favorite personal critical reviews we’ve done in the past, and it’s something I think we’ll work on for a more in-depth post on the topic. We have enough prior posts we can round them up and share for those curious about the value of and purpose behind critical reviewing. 
I have the best co-blogger, and I am so glad we got the chance to present together. 
The blogging the middle grade panel followed ours, and while middle grade isn’t my reading strength, I was fascinated (and sort of bothered) by the conversation that ensued about gendered covers. The long and short of it is what I tweeted about after the session, and I’m just going to succinctly summarize them here:
  • If you tell a boy the book is a “girl book,” you are the one instilling the false notion of “boy books” and “girl books.”
  • Books do not have a gender. They exist for readers to find. And that’s it. 
  • Perhaps the biggest point is one that Matthew made: if you have a boy who doesn’t want to read a “girly” book, you have a conversation about why there is no such thing as a “girly” book and that there is nothing wrong with reading what interests you, period. 
No, the panel wasn’t about gender and middle grade. But some of the ensuing conversation tackled covers and gendering of covers/book recommendations, so I couldn’t help myself. It’s an issue that starts with the gatekeepers and trickles down, and so I think it’s important to keep that in mind when you are blogging. 
The final session of the day was a panel on the past, present, and future of blogging, moderated by Sarah Stevenson, with Lee Wind, Leila Roy, Sheila Ruth, and Jen Bigheart.  While I could go on and on about this session, I think the handful of takeaways say it all:
  • There are no gatekeepers to blogging. You can gain so much from it. And those who find it valuable and find passion in blogging will and do prosper. You are wholly responsible for your own reputation — and that is empowering.
  • Legitimacy is a constant concern, but if you do the work right, you’re legitimate. And most of legitimacy comes simply through being authentic. 
  • Book blogging isn’t dying, but it might be changing. That doesn’t mean blogging will disappear, but the means through which people share and engage may continue growing and evolving. This isn’t a bad thing — it only enriches the field more. 
When the day wrapped up at the church, we headed over to our closing dinner at Scholz Garten, where we enjoyed German food and delicious beer and dessert (well…I had dessert, at least). It was a nice way to end the event, as it was casual and we all wanted to sit as near to one another as possible to just connect. 
While other people headed to the bar after dinner, some of us were exhausted and instead found ourselves passed out in bed without even bothering to turn off the lights in the hotel room. It was amazing to see everything come together both from the side of an attendee and on the side of coordinating the event. Absolutely no disasters nor crises emerged, and even though KidLitCon was on the smaller side this year, it was no less valuable or fun. 
Final Thought. . .
Overall, KidLitCon left me feeling revived about blogging again. There is honestly nothing like being in a room with other bloggers who love the same things you do and who think about the same issues that you do. That so many of us are feeling burned out and tired from blogging — it was nice to share a camaraderie that wasn’t about giving up but instead about finding new ways to build your excitement again. And without doubt, I’m excited again. 
This event is always so valuable to me not just as a blogger, but as a person. Because there’s really nothing more enjoyable than spending a couple of days with people who love the same things you do and who can talk with you on your level about those very things. 

Comments

  1. Thanks so much, Kim and Kelly, for handling the location logistics. Everything turned out GREAT thanks to you. And thanks for this post, too, in which you were able to capture so much from the conference in one place. For me, it's still floating around in my head, and my Twitter stream.

    • Even as someone who has been blogging a while, I thought a lot of the ideas and suggestions were valuable and helpful for keeping it up. The key is to remember you do it because you like doing it and you're passionate about doing it. That keeps you going.

  3. Wow–what a great round-up! And now I want someone on hand to talk more with about gendered covers and expectations and the role of marketing, and normative assumptions etc etc…..That could be a lovely session for next year's KidLitCon!

    Thank you for your venue finding efforts–I think Saint David's couldn't have been more perfect.

    • I think that would be such an awesome panel idea. I felt like your panel really hit some great points for even further discussion. I know it got me thinking.

    • PERHAPS NEXT YEAR this can happen.

      It was nice to meet you! I finally am putting all of my pieces together here, as you can tell. 🙂

  6. This was a great roundup. I think I missed that suggestion about blogging about a book when one is in the middle of reading it versus doing a complete review after. I often feel most inspired by my first impressions, so that could work for me.

    • I believe it was someone in the audience who suggested it, and I thought it was a really great idea. Sometimes you have nothing to say at the end or you feel such pressure to say something intelligent when really, what you wanted to say or think is most worth sharing is what you're thinking along the way while you're reading.

  7. Wow! Thanks so much. These same issues are coming up for author blogs where more and more people are stopping blogging. Loved how you shared all you learned about blogging and burn out. I have lots of personal things going on next year and am planning to continue blogging, but just cut it down some.

    • As was mentioned a few times at KidLitCon, it's better to be regular than frequent – if that means you only blog the first and third Thursday of each month, that is just as worthwhile as blogging every day. It's putting in what you can where you can.

      And totally take advantage of scheduling posts in advance if you can (that's what we do here many times!).

  8. This sounds like is was such a wonderful and useful event. It sounds like a number of things being discussed link up with what I've been thinking about my own blogging recently, I have new things to think about now so thanks for the write up!

  9. WOW! Now I know what you were typing up Sunday morning as I made my way up and out of Austin. You covered the weekend so well, I'll have to use it to remember what I should have been taking notes on. Great job with that St. David's too!

  10. Great recap! I wish I could have been there longer. But it was wonderful to meet you – and I'm glad you got a Texas-shaped waffle. Yum!
    Now I have to trot over to Bookshelves of Doom and read some of those fabu critical reviews. xo

  11. Some year, I am GOING to attend! This event sounds so fantastic.

    (Also, I had a moment when I saw my name on your list. I am not used to being mentioned in that sort of thing and it totally made my day.)

  12. I completely agree with your concluding thoughts! Kidlitcon always makes me feel energized.

    You and Kimberly did an amazing job finding venues for us–I agree this year was a definite success. I'm jealous of your Texas-shaped waffle, though…