Looking For A Blogging Classroom Teacher

This post is going to be pretty much a repeat of the last one, but if you're a classroom teacher for grades one through three, or have been a classroom teacher for grades one through three, you may not have read the last post because it was for booksellers. This one is for you.

I'm going to be doing a blog tour the week A Girl, a Boy, and Three Robbers officially hits its on-sale date. The hosting bloggers will be interviewing me about Three Robbers in relation to early chapter books in general. So we'll be promoting both my book and the...market? age group? field?

I have librarians, a professor of teacher education, and a literacy advocate lined up for July 1 through 5. (The book will be published July 3.) I'd like to find a classroom teacher familiar with kids in the early grades, their reading preferences, etc. to interview/host me on June 29th or 30th. My idea (and hope) is that all these different people will come at the subject from a different angle and ask different kinds of questions. It's an experiment. We'll see what happens.

I've found a number of blogging classroom teachers who teach 5th and 6th grade, but I haven't stumbled upon any who work with the younger kids. I can't believe you're not out there.

So if you are a blogging classroom and are interested in being part of this tour on either June 29th or 30th, e-mail me at gail@gailgauthier.com.

If you're interested but those dates aren't good for you, e-mail me, anyway. We'll double up on one of the other dates.

Looking For A Blogging Bookseller

Well, folks, thanks to a suggestion made by Kelly from Big A, little a, I'm going to be doing a blog tour the week A Girl, a Boy, and Three Robbers officially hits its on-sale date. In order to give the blog a bit of a twist and feed one of my interests, the hosting bloggers will be interviewing me about Three Robbers in relation to early chapter books in general. So we'll be promoting both my book and the...market? age group? field?

I have librarians, a professor of teacher education, and a literacy advocate lined up for July 1 through 5. (The book will be published July 3.) I'd like to find a bookseller with an interest in books for early readers, say, kids in first through third grades. Or, you know, those children who are between picture books and middle grade novels.

My idea (and hope) is that all these different people will come at the subject from a different angle and ask different kinds of questions. It's an experiment. We'll see what happens.

So if you are a blogging bookseller and are interested in being part of this tour on either June 29th or 30th, e-mail me at gail@gailgauthier.com.

If you're interested but those dates aren't good for you, e-mail me, anyway. We'll double up on one of the other dates.

Blogs And Writers

I just stumbled upon a couple of blog posts that discuss blogging and writers.

Colleen at Chasing Ray has a post up called Which Blogs Matter? on the subject of authors seeking out blog reviewers.

Editorial Ass has a question and answer post called Author Blogging, which is about authors blogging themselves.

I will add a point here that will be a sort of link between these two posts: Once you are a blogging author and part of the blogging lit community, as...ah...Moonrat...at Editorial Ass suggests, it becomes very difficult to approach bloggers to review your books, as Colleen at Chasing Ray suggests, because you know everybody. It's too much like asking the guy down the street or the woman in the cubicle next to you at work to put in a good word with you somewhere. The people being asked feel they can't say no, even if they want to, because they know you. Or else they feel they have to say no, even if they don't want to, because they know you. And how much good will the good word do you when the person receiving it knows the person giving it travels in the same circles with you?

It's sort of like finding out that that person you were getting on with like gangbusters at a conference and e-mailing with afterward is the children's editor for a review journal. You get all excited because you know this editor and she seems to like you. Then you realize "@#!!. Now she can never review anything I write because we know each other."

Really, it gets to the point where you begin to feel that networking is actually counterproductive and why don't you just lie on the couch and watch HGTV in your spare time?

Authors As Bloggers

Bookseller Chick has a couple more posts on authors and blogging.

Not Better, Not Worse, Different

Members of the blogosphere (at least the portion I inhabit) are wondering if blogging has had a negative impact on reviewing. This line of thought was inspired by an article in n+1 called The Blog Reflex, which was excerpted at a blog called Jess. (Just out of curiousity, has anyone read the entire article?)

Anyway, Fuse #8 saw the arguments made in The Blog Reflex as being "a slightly rehashed version of the eternal Should a Blogger Post Negative Reviews question that keep popping up."

Read Roger's response was that kidlit bloggers have "created a community of interested parties heretofore unknown in the children's book world...But I'm not sure it has lead to better reviewing: can we truly "all be in this together" at the same time some of us are judging the work of others?"

Here is my spin, which I know everyone is desperate to hear: We should be keeping in mind that the Internet is a different medium. What is published here is not supposed to be the same as what is published in traditional print media. Anyone who is posting "5,000-word critiques of their favorite books and records", as the original n+1 article suggested, hasn't researched her market, as we say in writing. I hate to sound simplistic and simple, but material written for the Internet is supposed to be short. Long stretches of unbroken text are deadly on the Internet.

Readers don't come to blogs to read the equivalent of one of those endless New Yorker articles on say, the quality of literary critism. They come to blogs to learn that those endless New Yorker articles exist and how to get to them should they wish to do so. Literary blogs, in particular, are a sort of directory of, a response to, a conversation about what is being written and read elsewhere and everywhere.

A metaphorical salon, perhaps.

Roger Sutton at Read Roger said in one of his comments that blogging is an "undifferentiated mix of news, gossip, shoutouts, trivia--and reviews." I don't think he meant that to be insulting, and I don't think it is. That is the salon aspect of blogging. The blog is different from other forms of writing. Not better, not worse, different.

Will the "coziness" (again from Roger) of these salons and their blog reviews have some kind of impact on reviewing altogether? I'm not sure. I learned a great deal about writing from reading the New York Times Book Review years ago and not because everything I read there was cozy and positive. Many of the reviews I read (I could get through) indicated a knowledge about writing and literature on the part of the reviewer that went beyond what he or she had to say about that particular book. Blog reviewers may very well have that same knowledge but when they only discuss what they like, they aren't necessarily getting an opportunity to share everything they know. If the coziness of blog reviewing makes the jump to traditional print reviews, I think something very well could be lost.

On the other hand, print reviewers seem to have such a bias against blog reviewers that it's hard to believe they'll be influenced by anything we're doing. In which case, we can all remain in our different worlds doing what we do...differently.

Managing Blogs

A few days ago, my computer guy e-mailed me to ask, "how come you don't list motherreader in your list of blog links?" My response was, "I didn't realize I didn't."

I have a long, long list of blogs on my personal favorite list, which is what I use each day (or my blogroll at FlapJacket). I'm kind of overwhelmed and scattered in my reading, as you've probably surmised from other things I've said here. So MotherReader has finally been added to the official blogroll to your left. (Really, I would have sworn she was already there.)

During the question and answer portion of one of the panel discussions I attended yesterday while everyone was discussing work habits, one of the panelists said, "Whatever you do, don't start blogging." The feeling there was that blogging was a blackhole as far as sucking up time was concerned.

Personally, I don't think writing the posts is that bad--it's reading all the other blogs that takes a lot of time. Over the past month or two, I've been trying to find ways to cope with the workload. My newest brainstorm--scheduling. Read some blogs daily, some weekly, some on even days, some on odd days, some during a full moon. I think I'm on to something with this one.

First, though, I'm going to have to take some time to create a spreadsheet or flow-chart or something to work out my schedule.

Something I Missed

I was just cleaning out the in-box for one of my listservs when I found a link to a blog called Three Silly Chicks. The significance? Three Silly Chicks focuses on humorous books for kids.