Last week was a crazy busy week blog-wise. The SBBT went off without a hitch (I always say that even though we always have interviews come screaming in at the last minute) and the GLW Book Fair for Boys surpassed all of my expectations and has resulted in hundreds of books bought for the boys in the LA County jail system as opposed to the hundred we were hoping for. It was, both in discussion and actual book purchasing, a very literary week and it has gotten me thinking about how the internet works so well to support books and reading and what I need to do to better utilize this medium.

Here's the thing: I have never suffered from confusion over why I blog. There are dozens of reasons why I do it starting first and foremost with a need to be part of the larger literary discussion that is continuously swirling around book lovers. I blog to share opinions on books I have read and writers I enjoy; I blog to find out about books from others; I blog to learn about writing and share my own writing and I blog to expand the lit blogosphere so it can become a more relevant space for book lovers. The only reason the lit blogosphere lives is because we all make it live, so my presence here - while not a large presence - is critical to that effort.

And, also, I blog because it's fun.

But after working on the blog blast tours for the past couple of years and now joining the Teen Book Drop effort with the Readergirlz and instigating the Book Fair for Boys I am starting to see the limits of the lit blogosphere. It is not that there aren't millions of people reading about books online, it is about how to reach them. It seems like the publishing industry in general would want to promote efforts to get books into the hands of hundreds - if not thousands - of potential readers. Through the TBD publishers themselves do donate books (and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt surprised me in the Book Fair by contacting us and offering copies of all the HMH titles on our list), but it's not publishers themselves who are the true marketing engines I'm talking about. (And I'm not talking about publishers just sending a lot of free books everywhere.) It's the blogs and publications who cover the industry - it's everyone who writes about books and book matters on any level. It's the agent blogs, the writer's organizations, etc., who it seems to me have a lot at stake when it comes to making sure that as many readers as possible have access to books. Today's disaffected teens for example (who are chronically not reading as much as their parents according to every poll that ever comes out) (unless you count Harry Potter and Twilight readers of course) are tomorrow's adult book buyers. If you want to keep reading as a significant part of American culture then you need to keep Americans reading, period. So when you see efforts to do just that - to keep reading exciting and relevant and actually put books in the hands of others, why don't you link to that story?

In other words, as I wrote last week, how come everybody and their third cousin doesn't know about the Readergirlz?

It is not that I think what I do is more important than anything else, it's that you don't know about any efforts like the monthly Readergirlz picks or the SBBT or whatever from reading industry sites. The blogosphere really is just a bunch of people trying to get free books and writing gush worthy reviews for all the coverage serious efforts receive. I honestly don't know what the heck is going on out there like the Book Fair for Boys because I haven't read about it - if it doesn't hit my circle of blogs then I wouldn't know. That's where the big news sources come in to play. I'm talking PW, Kirkus, Horn Book, Galleycat, Booklist and whoever else I don't even know. Part of my frustration is that I'm not even sure who all the major players are although I assume there are list groups for literary agents because the Book Fair certainly got picked up by something that saw a lot of agents blogging about us and sending readers our way (thank you very much!) But what about the statewide writer's groups? And statewide librarian associations? Are the Readergirlz and GLW and anybody doing anything similar supposed to travel from state to state and city to city to meet people individually and let them know about their site? Is that what we do to connect?

In the 21st century? Really?

To a certain degree I know that what was accomplished by the Book Fair for Boys was amazing and I know it will have a huge affect on the boys involved. One thing I am planning to do at GLW is follow-up on the books and remain in contact with Eve, our point person at InsideOut Writers. We want to hear from the boys as what books they really liked and post their comments and we plan to run book reviews from them. This way the people who bought those books will remain engaged with the boys and with the project- they will see the very real impact of their generosity. I think this is critical to keeping the whole thing real and not just an abstract experiment in giving. I think if people can see the end result of their gift then they will feel compelled to give again and over time we will build quite the library, while also getting a ton of boys to read some great books.

But beyond what I can do as far as the mechanics of all this, there is what I can't seem to do which is break through the barriers of what constitutes literary news. How do you get people excited about these efforts? And how do you get taken seriously beyond the construct of your own blogger buddies? In other words, how come Seventeen magazine hasn't written an article on the Readergirlz yet and what is it going to take to make that happen?

One thing I do know is that it's full court press time on all this as far as I'm concerned. I have no patience with the endless coverage of what is wrong with reading; with the death of the book and newspapers and reviewing books in newspapers and how boys don't read or girls read garbage or nobody reads like they used to. I'm done with all that. Out here where I'm living reading still happens everyday and a lot of us are doing a lot of work to encourage others to start reading or enjoy their reading experience more. We're highlighting great authors, we're discussing books and - in more ways than one - we are getting books into the hands of kids who don't have much access otherwise. Wasting space on lamenting what's wrong is so yesterday; now I'm up for demanding coverage of what's right and making a case for the literary future of now.

But I'll still be writing about my recent running adventures too though - cause I'm excited about that as well! ha!