Another expose from AussieCon 4

The panel was actually called “We’re all connected, all the time: blogs and social networking in the world of YA spec fic” and was supposed to have Bec Kavanagh, Lili Wilkinson, Megan Burke and be chaired by Mif Farquharson and I think they were all there.

Anyway to give you a bit of background if you happen to be youngsters. When I was young it was totally uncool to read books and I received a lot of flack about what I read and the fact that I read, the ladies on this panel all agreed with this and consensus was that it’s really only changed fairly recently. It was also rather hard to contact authors, they would have to travel in order to see their fans and that is very tiring, imagine if you’re a young reader and your favourite author is coming to town but your parents insist on you being somewhere else! Series such as Twilight and Harry Potter have made it cool to read while social media have made it much easier to have access to authors.

Let’s have a quick look at the different types of social media. We’ve got blogs which can be written by the authors themselves or by fans and some of them can develop quite good followings. There’s Twitter, Facebook and Myspace all of which have their own particular quirks and then there’s Skype. Skype has made it possible to have the author be in their own home or office and yet come into the classroom and have a chat with the students studying their novel. All of these make the author much more accessible and make it easier to talk with them and other fans.

Social media gives the readers ownership over the authors and enables them to contact the author in real time and have their questions answered rather than waiting for the author to come their way so as they can sit in a crowd and hope their questions will be answered. It’s a very good thing for those people who are shy about speaking up in a crowd but are quite comfortable to put fingers to keyboard, just as an example, my kids are perfectly happy to speak up and ask questions when they’re in a crowd but I generally don’t so if I have something to say or a question then it generally goes unsaid.

There are some wonderful young adult fans who are writing down their thoughts and publishing them on their own blogs but I wasn’t quick enough to write down the details. This is because young adults like to own the work and share their thoughts.

From an author’s point of view social media is fabulous as they don’t have to spend time travelling everywhere and take time away from writing. It also gives the author the flexibility to answer the questions when they have time so they can take the time to formulate good answers. Twitter is challenging for this one as you only have 140 characters. Social media also reminds people you haven’t dropped the radar, beforehand authors were never heard from between books and now they’re a constant reminder and from my point of view that can only be good for reading.

There was some discussion about the type of emails the panel have received. Some of them have been from young adults in the throes of depression and in this case it’s best to refer them to Beyond Blue or some other organisation while also mentioning lack of qualifications in this area and thanking them for reaching out as reaching out is the hardest part of depression.

It’s a very fine line between sharing enough information and too much information. This is something anybody online needs to be aware of. I’m always fairly careful about it and don’t tell people the names of my kids nor anything about my other half other than calling him OH. Every person needs to work out how much is enough.

Just a couple more points. There are more female bloggers than male bloggers in young adult spec fic. Some bloggers have been offered book deals from their blogs.

The panel mention the book about a black girl where the cover had a white girl on it. The cover was changed solely due to the blogging community. I actually wrote a blog about it at the time and you can read it here and then follow the links to read the real movers and shakers in that change. It was quite exciting when Bloomsbury Publishing changed the cover.

One of the panel helps run Inside a Dog, a website for young adult readers and they run the Inky Awards. It’s a fabulous website and makes me wish I was actually the age I say I am so I could join up and enter all the competitions.