August Highlight

Subscribers Update, Book Club Announcement, and more

Hey, everyone!

Abby, Jack, and Ken here with the monthly highlight post. If you’re new here, monthly highlights are basically just a bunch of announcements to help kickstart the upcoming month. Today, we have a HUGE subscribers update, an important book club announcement, an all-new application opportunity, and more! Let’s dive in.

Firstly…

Subscribers Update

As you may have heard around Substack Notes or on The YA Section subscriber chat…

WE REACHED 100 SUBSCRIBERS!!!

It’s been exactly three months on Substack and we’ve amassed over one hundred blog subscribers in that time! We are overjoyed that what started as a tiny Blogger blog for our friends has evolved into a community of writers and readers of all ages. Thank you all so very much for this achievement! We are forever grateful for the support.

On that note, we didn’t achieve 100 subscribers alone. We’ve hosted numerous guest authors and short story contest winners on this blog. That said, you can also be a guest author for The YA Section! All you have to do is fill out the form below and DM the Google Docs link or PDF to one of our authors. It would help us out so much and would also help elevate your writing skills to a broader audience.

Secondly…

The First YA Section Book Club

For the first time on this platform, we’ll be hosting book club! A few days ago, we posted the announcement and requested book suggestions from our subscribers. Now, we have filtered out the most popular suggestions and created a poll that you all can vote on! So, whether you’re participating in the book club or not, vote for the book you think would be the best for reading collectively with our book club.

We’ll announce which book won via a Substack note. Make sure to vote by this Friday and register if you haven’t already (registration via the form below is required). And if you haven’t seen it yet, check out this post for book club details:

Adventurous August

Next…

Join The YA Section Team

As you know, The Young Author Section is run by only three teenagers, and we try to post once or twice every week. However, with some of us being busy at times with school work, travel, and such, it’d be really helpful to have another member of the team. And we don’t just mean guest authors, though those are extremely helpful. We’re talking about recruiting another full-time author of The YA Section. After Jo and Sarah left the team during our transition to Substack, we were discussing recruiting another team member. But with summer rolling around, we never really got to it. Now, however, with school starting, we thought it would be a good time to start trying to recruit another author to help lighten the weekly post load.

So, this is what we’re looking for in a full-time author:

• Someone who’s…

  • A teen

  • An experienced writer

  • Good with deadlines

  • Well acquainted with the Substack platform

  • Been following The YA Section for a bit

  • Aware of the responsibility this role entails

• Someone who can…

  • Write posts of one to two thousand words fairly quickly

  • Write posts consistently: at least once every other week

  • Access Google Chat and Google Sheets

  • Join the team with their parent/guardian’s permission

  • Stay on the team for at least five to six months

If any of this describes you and you’re interested in joining the team, by all means, apply! If not, no sweat! Don’t feel bad if you can’t join us; we’re well aware that blogging is not for everyone and that our schedule isn’t one-size-fits-all. If you’re satisfied with simply writing guest posts or just being a reader, that’s great! However, if you are available to become a co-author of this blog, we’d love to have you. So, if you can, please consider applying with the form below. But before you do, note that we do ask for a model post (in Google Docs or PDF form). So go ahead and write a post (devotional, Tips & Tools, book review, or book rec) before applying.

Finally…

Post Changes

We won’t be making many changes to our posts, but we will make some. Firstly, our Reviews & Recommendations posts will now be split into two different categories: Book Reviews and Recommendations. This way, our YA literature reviews are their own separate category and our Recommendation posts can be broadened to not just book recs but resource, website, and blog recommendations.

Secondly, our Debate of the Week posts have officially been terminated. However, their replacement posts, called Threads, will only continue to be posted if they receive any attention. So, if you will, when the Thread posts come around, try to participate in this to some degree. It would really help strengthen The YA Section community as a whole.

Thank you all for reading! That’s all we have to say for now. We’re really excited for this month and hope you are as well. If you haven’t already, feel free to subscribe to The YA Section and give this post a like.

We appreciate you all. Thanks again for 100 subscribers, and we’ll see you in our next post or at the book club! ;)

Have a blessed day, y’all!!