Resource Spotlight: YALit.com
YALit.com isn’t flashy and consists of just five pages, but its content fills an incredibly useful niche. It simply lists upcoming YA book releases in chronological order and allows users to subscribe to an RSS feed to get updates on new books. Created by a YA librarian, the site provides the title, author, publisher, release date, format, and a link to Amazon. They’ve also added a commenting feature, but it hasn’t gotten much use yet. I registered for the site, which allows me to add books to my profile, but it’s not clear what purpose that serves. It’s also unclear what criteria they use to select books for the site — is it just what the publishers say is YA? — and how comprehensive it is — does it include niche and independent publishers?. Still, it’s a great resource to get an overview of upcoming books or to look up a book’s release date without sifting through Amazon pages or looking at each publisher’s catalog.
Update: Keri, the librarian behind YALit.com, has answered some of my questions in the comments. Click through below to check out her response.
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Thanks for the nice review!
To answer some of your questions, registering for your own profile is supposed to help you in case you are a YALit buyer or just for your own personal use. It is rarely used though and I’m honestly surprised so many people have signed up (and then not added any books to their profile).
My criteria is a little fuzzy for one reason. When you’re adding books prepub, there’s not always a ton of information about the book available. Often I’ll track down a title and author but it’s a guessing game to see whether it’s a true YA or not. (Some middle grade sneaks through because of this, particularly if the author has written YA before, and I do add crossover MG/YA books like Percy Jackson). I do go through the publisher catalogs I can find online. I do include smaller press books when I can find them, but I do not include self-published books, partly due to a lack of a quality filter, but mostly because I don’t have time to put everything up there.