December 18

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Nerdy Site News: Schedule Change

Posted by on December 18, 2016 in Nerdy Site News | 8 Comments

Since Nerdy Book Club began on December 1, 2011, we have featured a new blog post every day—sometimes two. Over 1000 people have written for Nerdy—sharing their love for children’s and young adult literature and their commitment to the reading lives of young people. Whether you are a first year teacher or a 30-year veteran, an award-winning author or a debut novelist, a new parent or grandparent of twenty, there’s a place for you on Nerdy Book Club. Your ideas are valuable and we are delighted to provide you a forum.

 

The blog continues to grow and thrive. Subscribers and readership increase every year. 2016 has been our best year to date with almost one million page views (so far). The four of us remain committed to providing the best content from as many voices as possible. As we begin our sixth year, we have decided to make a change to our posting schedule in order to maintain the blog’s quality and reduce the work it takes to run the blog.

 

We solicit posters through social media, conference presentations and workshops, and in-person events like Nerd Camp. Guest posters sign up to write posts through our Would You Like to Be a Nerdy Blogger? page. The Nerdy team contacts interested posters and encourages them to submit a post. When we receive a post, we scheduled it on the blog. Unfortunately, many people sign up to write posts, but never submit one. We also have a backlog of people interested in writing reading lives posts and author posts, but fewer people interested in other types of posts. These challenges cause gaps in the schedule and continuous follow-up from the Nerdy team with posters who have expressed interest, but haven’t submitted posts or changed their minds.

 

We won’t run posts for the sake of filling the schedule. Over the years, we have relied on a few people to write emergency posts for us, posted content on Nerdy instead of our own blogs, and run poll questions as a last resort to fill holes in the Nerdy Book Club schedule, but we need a long-term solution that maintains the sanity of our schedulers and the quality of the blog. Beginning in January, we will run posts five days a week instead of seven. On Thursdays, we will run reviews for either newly published or older titles. On Saturdays, we will run either a Pay It Forward or Top Ten post. We will not run regular posts on Wednesday or Fridays, but we may feature new content on these days if we receive a time-sensitive post. The rest of our weekly schedule will remain the same.

 

If you’re interested in submitting a post, please sign up. What have you learned about engaging children and young adults with reading? What are your personal reading and writing stories? What books have you loved? What books do the children in your life enjoy? We would love to feature your voice and perspective. If you have written for us in the past, please consider writing for us, again.

 

Thank you for supporting Nerdy Book Club. We look forward to many wonderful years of sharing and learning together.

 

Donalyn Miller has taught fourth, fifth, and sixth grade English and Social Studies in Northeast Texas. She is the author of two books about encouraging students to read, The Book Whisperer (Jossey-Bass, 2009) and Reading in the Wild (Jossey-Bass, 2013). Donalyn co-hosts the monthly Twitter chat, #titletalk (with Nerdy Book Club co-founder, Colby Sharp), and created the annual Twitter summer and holiday reading initiative, #bookaday. You can find her on Twitter at @donalynbooks or under a pile of books somewhere, happily reading.