Networking with LGBTQ+ Librarians, Authors, and Other Queer Bookish Folks on Social Media

via pinterest.com

For a lot of LGBTQ+ people when they’re first coming out and beyond, especially ones living in rural areas, the internet—social media being an important part of that—is the go-to place for information. For one thing, it can feel a lot more private and therefore safer than say, checking out a big gay book from your school or public library. Another thing that so many LGBTQ+ folks find on the internet is community; often, in fact, reliable information about being LGBTQ+ comes from LGBTQ+ communities. Although in urban areas there are now some pretty awesome in-person resources like GSAs (other more inclusively named LGBTQ+ clubs) for teens, finding like-minded people on the internet to know that you’re not alone can be empowering and fun and potentially life-saving, particularly at a young age.

One of the amazing things about finding LGBTQ+ community on the internet and social media in particular is that you can find niches of queer people and build up a community that you might never be able to in person, simply because of sheer numbers. For me, when I first started my other blog Casey the Canadian Lesbrarian, that community was queer women book lovers. One of my other first forays was starting to write reviews for the amazing, comprehensive, enormous resource that is The Lesbrary, a lesbian book blog run by Danika Ellis and featuring reviews of all different kinds of books featuring LBT women, as well as round-ups about every two weeks on queer women’s bookish stuff happening on the internet. There is an awesome rotating group of women who write for the blog—which I obviously recommend checking out—but that community was only the beginning.

When I started my own blog, I really had no idea the journey of networking with LGBTQ+ bookish people that it was going to put me on. I also had no clue how exactly to go about getting followers, which has happened very gradually and probably reached its peak (after all, people interested in LBTQ+ Canadian fiction are a pretty niche group). But one thing I did do initially to reach out to people, in addition to promoting my blog on my personal facebook page, was join twitter.

It was on twitter where I really discovered the array of LGBTQ+ librarians, authors, book bloggers, publishers, and other queer bookish folks there were. (I say LGBTQ+, although most of the bookish people I’ve connected with via twitter are LBT women, actually). It was pretty cool when I realized I had actually started networking with librarians way before I was even in library school! And it was awesome to see what the perspectives of LGBTQ+ librarians on their profession were.

Like with the followers on my blog, it has taken me quite a while to build up my network on twitter, but a few things I’ve noticed that help make connections are:

1) Not just retweeting someone, but adding your own comment so they know you’ve actually read the article they’re linking to (and sometimes written themselves), understood the context of their tweet, etc.

2) Asking for help / advice from people by directly tagging them! I’ve been so surprised at how complete strangers—sometimes people I don’t even follow on twitter—are so willing to offer their expertise and knowledge when I’m doing research for my LGBTQ+ reader’s advisory column or just looking for personal recommendations. LGBTQ+ people like sharing what they know—I guess it’s all a part of the idea of community and all of us knowing how hard it can be to find the kind of queer books you want!

via houseofanansi.com

3) Complimenting people! I pretty much always tag an author—if they have twitter—in a tweet about my positive review of their book and I get responses from a lot of them! At first I was pretty star-struck when I first started communicating with authors via twitter (I remember being super pumped when Zoe Whittall said thanks for and retweeted a review I had done of one of her books), but realized that authors really appreciated that I was essentially promoting their books for free!

4) Ask interesting and sometimes difficult questions—they’ll spark a conversation. I ended up tweeting with Malinda Lo (who’s kind of a big deal in the LGBTQ+ YA world!) after I tweeted my blog post about how hard it is to find LGBTQ+ fiction and how the blurbs on back covers often disguise queer content.

Oddly enough, I’ve begun to realize lately that I’ve been so immersed in the queer women’s bookish online world that if I want to be more well-rounded as a librarian—one specializing in LGBTQ+ materials and just in general—I should probably actually start reading some books by/about/for GBT men and—gasp!—non-queer books. So I guess that is kind of coming full circle. But the queer women’s book world will always have a special place in my queer heart.

I Have So Many Questions: Using Social Media for Library Promotion

Last week I had my first chance to actually use social media in a kind of professional setting related to the library! To be specific, I am volunteering for Friends of the Vancouver Public Library, and I’m part of the communications committee. One main thing I’m going to be doing as a part of that committee is taking over the organization’s twitter feed for a week at a time.

via wholesaleclearance.co.uk

I have my own twitter account, which is mostly a network of people I don’t know in real life who are somehow related to the queer and/or literary world—usually a combination. I mostly use twitter to keep up-to-date with queer bookish things (new books coming out, literary events, blog posts, etc.), educate myself on other people’s perspectives (I’ve made an effort to follow trans women and/or people of colour in particular), and talk to people about LGBTQ+ books, often when I’m writing a post for my queer reader’s advisory column (see my other post for more about that!).

From the website of the same name

Taking over an organization’s twitter, however, was a totally new ball game. The main objectives of the FVPL is to “volunteer, fundraise, and advocate in support of the Vancouver Public Library.” I’ve certainly never done any fundraising through my twitter feed, and no explicit advocating or promotion, although I guess implicitly I do that all the time for LGBTQ+ authors?

I wasn’t expecting to, but I had so many questions about what I was doing after only about a day of tweeting for FVPL.

The first question was: how many tweets are good and is there a limit? I was aiming for 22 tweets a day, which was the goal the organization set for me. I was sick in the middle of the week I was tweeting and fell behind a couple days—I wondered if I could make that up the next day. Or do you just cut your losses? In contrast, on the last day I was in charge of the account, when I was at home doing schoolwork on the computer all day, I didn’t keep track of how many tweets I did and I realized at the end of the day that I had actually done like 30! Is that bad? Does that annoy people who are following you?

via freedomtoread.ca

Another thing that came up a few times was how to interact with people when you are using an organization’s twitter account and not a personal one. Do you use “I” when you’re speaking from an organization’s platform? Or should you use “we”? Do you talk about personal experiences? I ended up doing a bit of using “I” and taking about personal things so that I could connect with people who responded to the tweets. For example, I tweeted a bunch of times about Freedom to Read week, and asked people what challenged books they’ve read or were reading that week. When people told me which books they had read / were reading, I responded with some examples of my own. Is that weird? I don’t know.

via twitter.com

It was also hard to find a good balance of content to post. There’s certainly no shortage of fun book, library, and literacy related material on the internet. I looked at the twitter feeds of Goodreads, CBC Books, BookRiot, Buzzfeed Books, and lots of others to find book-related content to retweet. The thing is, I’m promoting books and literacy, but specifically in relation to VPL. So, how many of my tweets should be directly related to VPL? Does every tweet need to have direct link to VPL? What is a good balance? Obviously, I retweeted everything that VPL tweeted. The problem is, VPL doesn’t actually have that much action going on on their twitter feed. Like, way fewer tweets than I am aiming for. But finding other content and creating a connection to VPL (such as doing a search in their catalogue for related material) adds up to a lot of time.

The other thing about retweets I wondered is: are they a lazy way of doing social media? What kind of ratio of original content and retweets should you aim for when your mandate is specifically to support and promote another organization? I always like it when someone retweets me on my personal twitter, but I think at a certain point they can become just kind of meaningless noise.

Lastly, and I guess this is the big question for anyone doing promotion through social media: how to get more people engaged? Is it hashtags? Is it photos? Is it the time you post? Do people respond better to your tweets if you consistently retweet them? I felt like the tweets I made that got a lot of attention (relatively speaking, ha ha) were kind of random. What did I do right? I don’t really know.

Has anyone else had a foray into this kind of social media use? Do you have any answers to the many questions I posed in this post?

Using Social Media for LGBTQ+ Reader’s Advisory

On my other blog, Casey the Canadian Lesbrarian, I have a column called Ask Your Friendly Neighbourhood Lesbrarian, where LGBTQ+ people send me emails / tweets / comments about the kind of LGBTQ+ books they want to read and are having trouble finding. I do some research, and then I put up a post on my blog with a bunch of recommendations for them based on what they’ve told me. I’ve always loved recommending books to people and for years some of my friends have treated me and my bookshelves as a personalized recommendation system. I didn’t realize when I started the column a year ago that what I was doing was “reader’s advisory” in library speak, but it is!

A novel a commenter added to a post about queer magic realism!

Social media can be both a venue for contacting and communicating with people who want reader’s advisory, and a tool for finding the books that those people want. After all, I put the word out about my column and communicated with readers through my blog. A few of the questions I’ve got have been over twitter as well. The awesome thing about putting my answers to these questions on my blog is that I usually get a bunch more recommendations in the comments, which can augment my answer and gives the reader’s advisory experience a collaborative feel. Instead of the librarian (me) being the authority, the only one with book knowledge, the person asking the question can get feedback from a bunch of different people with different experiences and book tastes.

I also use other kinds of social media to find the books people ask me for. Some of the queries readers send me are pretty tough! For example, one reader asked me to find young adult books with characters who were asexual but had different romantic (i.e., biromantic, homoromantic, etc.) orientations. Another reader asked for books with toxic lesbian bad girl characters. I don’t know how I would have found as many books as I did without using social media.

From the Gay YA

In fact, what I usually do first when tackling one of the questions is go to twitter. I’ve amassed a pretty amazing network of queer literary types, and I’ve learnt about so many LGBTQ+ books from them. I’ve found that directing messages with the @ symbol to people I think would be especially interested or knowledgeable about the kind of books I’m looking for works the best for spreading the word. For example, I always tag the folks at the Gay YA whenever I have a question about young adult books. Often people that I tag in a post asking for help will retweet it and then I get suggestions from people I don’t even know or follow! Sometimes I get authors recommending their own books—they know them best, after all. I’ve used hashtags like #queerlit or #gayya but I haven’t found that they result in a lot of responses. Maybe people just aren’t into queer literary hashtags. Or maybe I’m using the wrong ones.

The second social media site I use the most for reader’s advisory is Goodreads. Actually, I don’t even know why I bother googling what I’m looking for sometimes, because it pretty much always leads me to Goodreads lists. Do you know how many awesome LGBTQ+ themed user-generated booklists there are on Goodreads? I just found a new one today called YA LGBT Books – Not “Coming Out”. Other ones you should check out are: Trans SF/F by Trans Authors, Novels with Bisexual Protagonists, and LGBTQ Children’s Literature. There are lots more! Beside the explore tab at the top of the Goodreads homepage, there’s an arrow icon; if you click on that, then click on listopia and do a key word search, you’ll find a ton of awesome lists!

From the blog of the same name

After Goodreads, I probably consult other blogs the most for reader’s advisory help. For example, I’ve been asked a few questions about books with asexual / ace characters and this was a totally new topic for me when the first person asked. Luckily, I found a remarkable blog called The Asexual Agenda, which turned out to be an amazing resource of not just which books have ace characters, but whether the representation was good or not. I’ve already mentioned them, but the Gay YA is also a really great resource. Don’t be fooled by the name: this site does a great job reflecting the diversity of LGBTQ+ YA books.

Has anyone else used social media for reader’s advisory? Was has worked / not worked? Has anyone had success with using hashtags? Are there any sites I’m not using that would work well for reader’s advisory?