Christina Reads YA

This might not be a topic a lot of people are interested in, but one of the most frequently asked questions on my bookish rounds posts is 'how do you do it?' Sometimes, it's rhetorical, like how do I find the time and energy to make such long posts full of MG/YA/NA publishing news, cover reveals, discussion posts, etc. But sometimes, I think that people are very earnest and would like to know how I've gathered my links and kept up with the news. Asti once explained how she created her very popular Bookish Games feature. I figured that I might do something similar.


I'll split this up by the same sections I do for Bookish Rounds.

Publishing/Discussion/Movie/TV show News:

• The single most important element of gathering all the links for bookish rounds posts is knowing which twitter accounts to follow. Probably the most helpful for publishing news, at least, is Children's Bookshelf run by Publisher's Weekly. For discussion, I know that I can always count on the teen blog for Barnes & Noble to have recommendations to post; or Epic Reads to have a Book Nerds Problem video or a discussion post or one of their lovely infographics designed to promote YA books first and their HC books second. So, essentially, I've made a list of accounts that I go through on Tuesdays to find the appropriate posts. Publishers, agents, bloggers, etc. Some accounts are more helpful than others, like Epic Reads, whereas another publisher might just be promoting their books alone. Sometimes that helps; I'll get book trailers, interviews, excerpts; but sometimes I'll get book sale deals, like X and X is $2.99 on Kindle, which is an extraneous tweet not related to my doing the bookish rounds. If I'm doing just a week's worth of news, this link round-up can take anywhere from 2-5 hours. The accounts are all good for different things, though.

• Publishers also tend to post when their books have been optioned for film, so that helps me gather movie / tv show news. Sometimes Children's Bookshelf will even mention if a book is being optioned or on the table for optioning. They do "movie spotlights" as well. The two main accounts for movie/tv show news that I used to follow heavily were Page to Premiere and YA Hollywood. YA Hollywood is a little difficult to follow because they cover EVERYTHING YA, not just the adaptations. So some tweets follow people like Shailene Woodley and what films she'll be in next, but truthfully I don't really care about the individual actors; for bookish rounds posts, I like to cover news on the adaptations alone. So, Page to Premiere is ideal, except recently they've been posting a lot more quotes and other material, so I've just been taking to looking at the official accounts of the bigger movies, likePaper Towns and Insurgent. They'll have trailers, stills, etc. just the same.

• As for book blogger discussions, I've given up on using Feedly. It did allow me to organize things for a time -- discussions and cover reveals -- but then I wanted to include more blogs in my discussion section but then my Feedly just became overrun with blogs and so hard to follow. Now I've a Google Doc titled "Discussion." In there I have an already made format of blogger names and their blogs, and so I click the links and search for a discussion post within that week. If I've linked to it previously, I won't link to it again. If it's about something like writing, I probably won't link to it. It's hard choosing what to link to and what not to -- I'm probably inconsistent within my own internal rules for this but oh well. So, essentially, it's like: "** Christina at Christina Reads YA: http://christinareadsya.blogspot.com/." I copy and paste all the bullet points like this so that I can edit freely and leave my template untouched. The negative to this is that I've got to add more blogs. Some bloggers have quit, and I just haven't had the time yet to rearrange which blogs are there. There's over 100 blogs, and convincing myself to add more is a little tiresome, considering that linking to blogger discussions posts takes about 1-2 hours (in addition to the other link round-ups, cover reveals, etc.).

• Well, I've sort of given up on Feedly. Sometimes, if I'm in the mood, I'll look through Feedly for a few giveaway posts. Mostly, though, I've just kept the same bloggers there. Lori of Pure Imagination has "Saturday Situation" each week and bloggers get to link their giveaways there, so why not keep posting that? Why not link to Children's Publishing, which has a giveaway every week? YABC Central, giveaways each month. Most of the time, I'm not in the mood, so I don't actively search for giveaways, so I leave that section least edited.