Teens and 2.0

In his October 15 Booklist Carte Blanche column "Social Networking R Us," Cart discusses the impact of the internet on YA publishing with vice president of marketing for HarperCollins’ Children’s Books, Diane Naughton. He writes,

As we talked, however, I felt my spirits rising. As Diane explained that in the last 12 to 18 months Harper has shifted the bulk of its teen marketing to the Internet, it occurred to me that this might be a terrific way to involve Web-savvy teens with books, reading, and writing.

In that connection, Diane says, Harper has entered into a new partnership with the social networking site MySpace, which will build and launch a new “create and share” tool that will give teens a chance to, well, create and share their own writing. Meanwhile, Harper is also signing up from 20 to 25 of its YA authors to begin blogging and interacting with their readers. The publisher will also be launching a new version of its HarperTeen Web site later this year and is currently extending its First Look book program to middle-school kids. This program, which makes advance reading copies of forthcoming books available to teens in exchange for their feedback, is premised on the long-established notion that kids will kill to get their hands on something new before the other kids do. And so long as that something is a book, it’s fine by me.

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So, that's kind of encouraging, right?