Being Social...the latest trend...

This week I have been mulling over trends. As the mailbox begins to fill up with junk mail advertising pre Christmas sales and this years hot trends for presents. To live a fulfilled life...it’s all about having the latest gadget...I was interviewing children this week about Christmas and they basically quoted their want list from the Dick Smith catalogue, starting with a new laptop and cell phone...these were 9yr olds!

I remember thinking at nine that a holiday would be fantastic and maybe a new book...

This week Publishers Weekly came out with a very comprehensive survey on What Teens Want based on a surveyTeenreads.com took with over 3000 teens. There is some surprising information in this report and some very valuable information to authors- for instance this little quote

We asked teens how they like to interact with their favorite authors. More than eight out of 10 (85%) visit the Web sites of their favorite authors for information about upcoming titles, and 65% would like to interact with an author at an in-store event. Other choices: library events (55%), book festivals (54%), in-school events (44%) and blogs (32%); and book and reader blogs (31%). Social networking sites like Facebook, Good Reads and My Space come in at 19%, lower than we expected

The kind of information that this article is stuffed full of should be passed around among all the children’s lit authors. It is invaluable.

So if you were wondering about whether you need to up your game in the online world the answer is Yes because generally where the teens lead the mid grade follow...after they get over the interactive fairy and pony web games.

You do need a website and some sort of interactive presence. Social media sites? Maybe a presence there, but not an all consuming live my life daily there presence, according to how I am interpreting the report.

Here in New Zealand we are lucky in that we do have time to mull over what we might do, and or how to approach this social media online public lifestyle. Our teens generally follow on a bit later from North American teens.

The speed of change means that we need to be giving some serious thought to our online presence.

Colleen Coble, multi published author, wrote a guest post on Michael Hyatts blog about using Social media to build the author brand. She has an interesting list of things that she is doing with social media and how it is impacting her visibility in the world. She has some good advice which is worth taking the time to think about. And the following video shows the speed of change that we have to be aware of....

In another trend, yesterday, Random House announced that they had bought Longacre Press.

I saw the press release on Beatties BookBlog...No one saw that coming a month ago.

It does change the shape of children’s publishing here in New Zealand, with only one independent left.

Much food for thought this week...

maureen

pic is the cover of my business card...blurry sorry...it is the barred spiral nebula.