A massive, massive thank you!

I…wasn’t going to write this post. The niggling voice in my head keeps telling me that to do so would be vain. But I can’t help feeling so overwhelmed with love for the book community in recent days, and so my need to give a proper thank you has managed to stamp that voice down – if only long enough for me to write this post. I may regret it after, but for now let’s go.

A lot has happened in the past week. I’ll go into it more below, but basically…

I’ve been shortlisted for the UKYABA’s under “Best Content and Design”!!

The UKYABA’s are blog awards for UK Young Adult bloggers, the event held after YAShot in April. And I honestly cannot believe I’m on the shortlist. I am astounded that I was even nominated by enough of you in the first place to have been on the longlist – and then the shortlist – and to be in this situation now.

Thank you so, SO MUCH! I honestly don’t know how to put into words what this means to me. I never for a second imagined when I set up this lil blog, it could possibly be up for an official award one day. I just hoped to be let into this wonderful community, and any interactions or friends made in the process is beyond amazing in my eyes. I will forever be grateful for the support you’ve all shown me, on here, social media, youtube, everywhere.

And this is why I didn’t want to write a blog post – I’m over-selling it. I don’t want to ask for votes, or mention it too often, or anything like that. But I’ve seen other nominees talking about it, and if there’s anywhere I should mention it, here ought to be the place. It is about this blog, after all!

That being said, if you DO want to vote in the awards, here’s how:

*Unfortunately, you can only vote if you’re an active UKYA blogger or UK author

UK Bloggers: Request a form by emailing ukyaba@gmail.com with the subject: UKYABA Shortlist Voting – Book Blogger Voting Form

UK Authors: Request a form by emailing ukyaba@gmail.com with the subject: UKYABA Shortlist Voting – Author Voting Form

You will then be sent a form. Save the form, edit it by checking the boxes of those you wish to vote for, and send it back!

Voting closes 31st January.

There are SO many wonderful bloggers on this list! Mia @ The Cosy Reader is under the same category as me – I wanted to vote for her but I’m not allowed to vote under my own category, but still, I’m rooting for her! If you’d like to see the full shortlist, click here to see the twitter thread or blog post. And if you do feel inclined to vote for me (don’t feel like you have to! there are so many others deserving of it!), please know that it means the absolute world to me! It’s you guys here – every single one of you – that have gotten me here. It’s you who supported me in this community, encouraged me to keep this blog running for as long as I have, to start the booktube channel I always wanted, and ultimately provide me with a platform to share my love for books with people who genuinely care. And for that, I am forever grateful ❤

 

Speaking of booktube, if you follow bookish people on twitter then I’m sure you couldn’t avoid seeing the YouTube problem this week. YouTube changed their guidelines, basically kicking smaller channels out of their Partnership Programme until they reach 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time (which is really bloomin’ high, by the way. I’m only halfway there after a year). This means we lose the ability to monetise our videos, and newcomers won’t be able to use features like the custom thumbnails and end screens we all rely on so much to personalise our channels.

I’m not going to go on about it too much, as everything has been said already numerous times on twitter, but it broke my heart a little to see so many people with smaller channels become discouraged by YouTube’s lack of support as a platform.

So the online book community did as we always do, and came out in troves to show our support to each other. SO MANY PEOPLE created threads where people could share links to their channels, sharing them for all to see. Hundreds of people have dedicated hours of their time to subscribing, recommending, watching and commenting on people’s videos. And it filled my heart with so much joy. 

Seeing that level of compassion being shown to so many people just makes me so proud of this community. And with some of that love being shown towards me and my channel too, I quickly became overwhelmed to near-tears, just full of all the love. Cringe to say, I know. But I just wanted to acknowledge that this kind of thing isn’t just a click of a button. It isn’t just a “follow”. It isn’t just a quick message. It’s something that sticks. Something that really, truly matters. And once again, I am forever grateful.

If you’d like to see my thread featuring many smaller channels, click here. I’ve spent the last 4 days making my way through all the channels there and any others from threads/recommendations I stumbled across, and have discovered so many wonderful people! You can also find more channels under Kate’s thread, Jay’s thread, and Jess’ video!

 

So it’s been an overwhelming week(end?) in the best way possible. And while this post is long and rambly, I just felt the need to acknowledge how incredible this community is.

Thank you ❤