National Libraries Week - Savita Kalhan

 

National Libraries Week has moved from its traditional slot in February. It will will now be held from the 9th to the 16th of October. It’s planned to be a week-long celebration of what libraries are, what they can do for you, for children, students and adults. Libraries will be showcasing their services, events, with themes such as digital, creative, family, inspirational, health, employment, education, families and diversity. Libraries week covers not just public libraries, but all libraries - including school libraries. 

The Facts

According to statistics compiled by the Carnegie Trust, 250 million visits were made to libraries in 2016. 15-24year olds visit the library more than over 55s. Three out of four people in the UK say that libraries are essential to their communities. 51% of us have a library card, and 41% have used a library over the last year.

Looking at these facts makes me wonder why libraries are still being closed, librarians continue to lose their jobs, and children denied easy access to their local libraries, when libraries are clearly fundamental to communities.

After a month long closure, Finchley Church End Library reopened last week in its new premises. My teen reading group met there for the first time after the summer break on Monday 2nd October. It is the only day of the week that we can hold our teen reading group meet as under-18s are not permitted to enter a library without an adult. Because it is classified as a "Core Plus" library, most days are self-service and for adults only. Some of my teens typically go directly to the library after school, which they will no longer be able to do. Kids in Year 11, aged 15, will be allowed access but only with a registration form signed by their parents and stamped by the school. 16-18 year-olds will need a signed registration form from their parents. 

But still the library staff there do their best to support the teen reading group, and provide us with enough books, which have to be gathered from across the borough. Teens are reading and they want more choice, they want more books. 

My local library was full of kids doing their homework, reading, hanging out, after school, before going home. They can only do that on a Monday now. In fact, the situation is much the same across the whole of Barnet, and, from stories I've read, it is possibly the same across the whole of the UK. It is a dire situation.

So please visit your library during libraries week, and use the hashtag #librariesweek and tweet/facebook etc to help publicise and celebrate libraries – while we still have them!

by Chris Riddell

Savita's website

Twitter @savitakalhan

An incident with Instagram by Lu Hersey

Social media can be a helpful marketing tool, if you choose to use it that way. A means of drawing attention to new books coming out, reviews and events. It’s also a way to communicate with other writers, family and friends. But very occasionally it can backfire in a spectacular way, as I found out recently with Instagram...

Fab cake made for me by YAfictionados (cakes feature a lot on Instagram)

Unless you choose to have a private account, Instagram is a public platform – a bit like twitter, but with more pictures. Great for improving mediocre photos with its selective cropping and filter options, and for the most part, fun. It’s become an increasingly popular site for authors and book bloggers, and a social media site currently popular with nearly all teenagers.

YA event at Foyles, Bristol - writers always Instagram events...

Some writers and illustrators have a ton of followers and a zillion ‘likes’ for everything they post (look at Chris Riddell’s amazing Instagram feed and you’ll see what I mean)…although if you take a look at teen profiles like Zoella’s, the rest of us have a lot of catching up to do!

Like all social media, Instagram is another way of keeping up with what your writer friends are doing – and on a bad day, making you feel really inadequate looking at other people’s amazing book tours, fantastic book covers, new book deals, and countless foreign editions (even though you’re delighted for them!)

Social media can sometimes make you feel like this...

Anyway, as Instagram is mostly a public platform, like most children’s writers, some of my followers are kids and teenagers. The audience I write for, in fact. And therefore I’m fairly selective about the images I post.

So when my Instagram account got hacked by a spammer, my new profile pic of a much younger model with surgically enhanced breasts (and wearing very few clothes) was a bit of a worry.

Eeeeep!

It took me some time to actually find my account again. The spammer had blocked me from accessing my own photos, and it’s quite complicated getting Instagram ‘help’ to do anything remotely helpful. I had to send them a photo of myself holding a card with my email address on to prove I was a real person. It took them several days to grudgingly agree that yes, maybe I had been hacked, and let me have my account back with a slightly different name. Now I’m luwrites instead of LuWrites, because Instagram ‘help’ said someone already owned LuWrites. Duh. But I couldn’t be bothered to argue.

Having got my account back, I found my big breasted spammer had kindly started following 5000 random people on my behalf. Some of them had very dubious names like Cmidic and Luvmicok and had messaged to request nude pics...

After hastily blocking all of them (and changing my profile photo, obvs), I had to unfollow the other 5000, which took AGES. Instagram only allows you to unfollow about 100 people in one session before they freeze your account for a while – apparently to ‘protect our community’. Yeah, right. The same ‘community’ where a spammer can follow 5000 people in one go. Pffft.

Surprisingly, in the end, some good came out of it all. I ended up feeling almost sorry about unfollowing some of the 5000 people I’d never met. Quite a few of them had followed me back – though I’m surprised they didn’t wonder why I’d followed them in the first place, especially with THAT profile pic.

By the time I’d slowly waded through, I found it kind of comforting that apart from the porn spammers, the vast majority of the accounts I had to unfollow were people from across the globe, simply recording very similar things in their lives. High days and holidays, families, falling in love, cars – along with some truly spectacular cakes, and a very wide range of pets. (One guy actually appeared to own a pair of tigers and a grizzly bear!)

I ended up with a warm, fuzzy feeling of a global community and shared humanity, something hard to remember in these days of political tensions and rifts between countries.

I still follow a few of the people who followed me back. Mainly young teens I feel might be upset if I unfollowed them, and I wasn’t quite sure if they were following me before or not. After all, at its best, Instagram can be a great public space and a good way to link to others.

But if you’re a children’s writer with an Instagram account, or about to open one, I’d strongly advise making your password impregnable…it could save you a lot of time and effort.

Lu Hersey
Deep Water out now, published by Usborne

@LuWrites on twitter

luwrites on Instagram

Lu Writes on Wordpress

My 5 Point Blog

Like many of us, I was thrilled to hear the news that Chris Riddell has been appointed the new Waterstones Children's Laureate 2015-17. I was a fan of his political cartoons, his swollen fat cats and angular sly faced politicians, long before I discovered his outstanding output for children.

What struck me most from the news of his appointment was the simplicity and clarity of his vision, outlined in his 5 Point Plan. Not only is his plan to increase visual (aka drawing) engagement and awareness in schools a great one, but the way he expressed it was so simple - in a written page- it made me feel sad that everything I write is typed.

So in total homage to our new Laureate, here is my 5 POINT BLOG, on the theme of getting children's literature in Britain the recognition it deserves. Apologies that my pen work is not quite as legible...

Piers Torday
@PiersTorday
www.pierstorday.co.uk