On Friday, I’m giving a talk to the Snohomish County Tutors Association. One of the topics I’m covering is how to find great blogs for discovering children’s books.Some of the blogs which I’ll be talking about are:
Teach Mentor Texts
Two National Board Certified teachers talk about current children’s books and how to teach them in the classroom
http://www.teachmentortexts.com/#axzz2OZBtRyUA
A Chair, A Fireplace, and A Tea Cozy
A New Jersey librarian shares her reviews on children’s books. This is one of the most-well known children’s blog in the industry.
A listing of the other School, Librarian Journal Blogs
http://www.slj.com/slj-blog-network/
Stacked
Three librarians who review all types of children’s books from audio to graphic novels to print to ebooks. They also do great posts on specific topics in children’s literature such as cover art trends and sex in young adult literature.
The Cybils Blogger Literary Awards
The Cybils are the Children’s and Young Adult Blogger Literary award. Award winning books are selected by bloggers.
http://dadtalk.typepad.com/cybils/
You can find the rest of them on this handout: Blog Resources for Children’s Books Tutor Talk
The talk is based on one of my classes that I teach to educators–Discovering Excellence in Children’s Literature. In the class, educators have the opportunity to learn about all types of awards which are given to children’s books such as The Alex Awards, The Texas Bluebonnet Awards, and the Maud Lovelace Awards. (The entire list of awards covered in the class can be found here.)
Most educators are aware of the Newberry and Caldecott but few have heard about the other awards. My students always tell me how much they enjoy the class and learning about all of the awards. The class is available as a distance learning, independent study class through Seattle Pacific. More information about my educator classes can be found here.
As an author, one of the downfalls of losing so many of our bookstores is our books don’t have the opportunity to get discovered. In the last eighteen months since both my books, WEAVING MAGIC, and STAINED GLASS SUMMER have published, I’ve done many, many guest blog posts and interviews. Most of them, I’ve linked to the book’s pages on my website. WEAVING MAGIC can be found here. STAINED GLASS SUMMER can be found here.
Blogs are an important part of both an author’s platform and how a reader discovers a book. Most of the young adult books I read are found by reviews on a handful of blogs I subscribe to. (Most mentioned above).
I read most of my blogs on my Google Reader on my phone in the morning while my coffee is brewing. So, I was very dismayed to find out that after July 1, the Google Reader will no longer be available! (You can find that article here).
This means, that as an author, it is extremely important to have an email subscribe button on our blogs. If you are a reader of my blog, be sure to sign up to have the post delivered to your email before July 1! The button is on the sidebar of my blog here.
Mindy Hardwick's Blog 
Thank you for this informative blog post. I learned a lot from it.
I’m glad this was helpful!