I was trying to recall the name of an author I knew through the on-line readers' community Readerville, so I thought I'd go over there to find her in one of the forums. Lo' and behold, I found that this very month Readerville is closing up shop.
I never see any references to Readerville at the blogs I frequent these days, but it was my big entree into Internet communities back at the turn of the century. I went there looking for a reading community, which I did find, but I also found writers. It was the only place where I knew any writers, and I learned a huge amount from wandering among them, or rather, their posts.
It was at Readerville that I learned about listservs and blogs. I learned a great deal there about writers and marketing, probably more than I wanted to know. Readerville was my favorite time waster back in the day. Whenever I became the least bit distracted with work, I went over to see what was happening at Readerville.
At the time I was part of Readerville, there weren't a lot of children's or YA writers there. So after I started spending a lot of time blogging and, more particularly, after a kidlit blogging community started to develop, I left Readerville to focus my attention on my own work. (Yeah, like that ever happened.)
Oddly enough, over the years I've seen a number of names from my Readerville days on YA and children's novels.
Readerville was a big help to me years ago. I'm definitely sorry to see it go, even if I was no longer part of the community. I liked knowing it was there.
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