This week I had the honour of being part of The Notes from The Slushpile team, along with Teri Terry, who attended a Book Trust Bloggers Brunch. The idea was to learn more about what The Book Trust do . I knew they were involved in the Laureate scheme and I knew about Book Start, giving books to all preschool children. But I had no idea about the amazing Letterbox scheme, designed to get books to children in care so they can build their own libraries and the new Story Hunters scheme to assist under-privileged children in the same way. In the days when our public libraries are under threat, it was so great to see there was a broad government funded organisation really supporting the importance of books. I hope to be sharing more of what they do in the future.
Books and libraries are so much a part of my life, it’s hard to imagine how anyone couldn’t recognise how important they are, especially when you like to hang out with the UKYA crowd.
So, I’ve been thinking a lot about blogging and bloggers, particularly about the UKYA people. You’d be hard pressed to find a more friendly and passionate group of readers and writers. They get together on twitter under various hashtags #ukya #YAtakeover. Probably the most dynamic of these chats is organised by blogger Lucy Powrie under the #ukyachat tag. It usually happens on a Friday night and I usually miss it because I am out doing this:
But when I have holidays or when, hoorah, it’s bumped to a Saturday night, I get to join in. I absolutely love it – so many people sharing your passion, even though we’re all sat behind a computer or a phone I can see their hands flapping as they recommend a book or excitedly share some thing we all know from some book we’ve all read. I can see it because that’s what I’m doing!
As we gathered to chat this week, I was reminded of a tweet from someone asking how to find book bloggers. It was a good question – if you don’t know, you don’t know right? So here’s a good place to start:
Follow hashtags on twitter: the ones above and also these #bookbloggers, #tbr #books and #yabooks .
Google them! To make it even easier, I’ve made a list of as many as I could remember before I had to cook dinner. I even included the one who didn’t really like my book *sniffle*, because that’s OK, not everyone is going to like every book or every character – that would be weird. Besides, she didn’t hate it, she just didn’t connect with Teva, which seriously, I’m fine about it, really…
–
Okay, enough of that. Book Bloggers! There are heaps of them, please add more in the comments and correct me if I’ve got any information wrong- I thought it might be good to add Instagram links too – let me know if you’d like to.
Here’s the list so far – In alphabetical order according to Twitter name:
Who’ve I missed? Over to you!
PS This fab list has already been done by Mr Ripley’s Enchanted Books: Book Bloggers.
On my goodness and there is this amazing spreadsheet from @snugglingonthesofa SpreadsheetofWonder
Kathryn Evans 