News Round Up! 23rd March

Welcome to my News Round Up! I've decided to make this a weekly feature with a new news post every Saturday, which recaps that week's news. Here's what's grabbed my attention this week!

There's one story dominating the YA world this week and that is the release of Clockwork Princess, the final book in Cassandra Clare's Infernal Devices trilogy. I'm yet to get my hands on a copy but I'll be borrowing from a friend as soon as she's done! Is this a book you'll be reading? Are you sad to end the trilogy?

Another end to a trilogy came in the form of Requiem  Lauren Oliver which was published in the UK on Thursday. To celebrate the release, Lauren visited Waterstone's Piccadilly this week. You can find pictures of that event over on the UK Delirium Facebook page. And there's more great news for UK YA fans as Marissa Meyer will be visiting Waterstone's Bromley on the 26th March to talk about her latest novel Scarlet, the second book in The Lunar Chronicles. And Maggie Stiefvater (author of The Raven Boys) added a second UK date and will be visiting Waterstone's Finchley Road in London on the 24th, on top of her Manchester event today.

Because it's impossible to go a week without somebody being cast in something - more casting news! And it's a big one. This has been strong rumour for a while but we've finally had the confirmation we've all been waiting for that Shailene Woodley will be playing Hazel Grace in the film adaptation of John Green incredible The Fault in Our Stars! Read more about the story here on EW. What do you make of this casting choice? First Divergent, now The Fault in Our Stars - us YA fans will be seeing a lot of Shailene in the future!

The winners of the Waterstone's Children's Book Prize 2013 were announced this week. In the
5-12 catergory the winner was Wonder by R. J. Palacio - a book I adored and am very happy to see recognised! In the teen catergorie the winner was Ketchup Clouds by Annabel Pitcher. I'm yet to read that one but I really loved her previous book My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece so I'll definitely be checking out this one. You can find out more about those books and the other nominations over on the Waterstone's website at this link.

If (like me) you missed Beautiful Creatures whilst it was in cinemas then there's good news! The DVD is now available for pre-order on Amazon UK with a release date of 17th June.

Now for a blog related news story. There's been lots of talk about Google Reader after Google announced it was shutting down the service in July. You can read my post on that here and find out more about what it means over on TechCrunch here.

Which news stories have got you excited this week? Let me know in the comments!

New book releases:
Requiem by Lauren Oliver
Buy: Amazon|Waterstone's|Book Depository

Clockwork Princess by Cassandra Clare
Buy: Amazon|Waterstone's|Book Depository

Another Post About Google Reader and Bloglovin!

If you read a lot of blogs (like I do) you'll have noticed a wealth of people posting about the closure of Google Reader. I'm not entirely sure what the consequences will be to my GFC followers when it shuts down on 1st July, but if you use Google Reader to keep up with your blogs then you'll definitely need to find an alternative.

As a reader of blogs myself, I decided to sign up for Bloglovin' on the recommendation of Lucy over at Queen of Contemporary. After a few days of playing about with it I've decided it's the site for me! So I wanted to do a little blog about it to explain how it works.

It's free to sign up (you'll need an account by either logging in with an email or your Facebook account) and once you're on there, you can start following blogs either by searching manually or by importing your blogs from Google Reader. (It took me a few goes to import my blogs but then I realised you just need to be logged into the right Google account when you try and import them - duh!).

Once you've followed a few blogs they'll start showing up in your feed on the home page. Unread posts are marked and they'll switch to read once you've clicked through to read the post, or you can manually mark them as read. This makes it super easy to keep up the latest posts. I would definitely recommend downloading the app which is really handy for reading on the go. I use my iPod touch a lot for checking things like Twitter and I'll now be adding Bloglovin' into that routine. You can also "like" posts which makes it really easy to go back and find posts you want to remember or look up again.

What's great is that it works for both Blogger and Wordpress blogs so now I can follow them all in one place - hurrah!

If you want to get ahead of the game before Google reader closes then you can now follow Total Teen Fiction on Bloglovin'. There's a button in the sidebar over there ---> or you can find the blog at the following link:

Total Teen Fiction on Bloglovin'

If you're looking for other ways to keep up with my posts in future then I also use NetworkedBlogs which is another alternative. Again it's easy to follow blogs and have them all in one place. You sign up using your Facebook account. You can find Total Teen Fiction on NetworkedBlogs here:

Total Teen Fiction on NetworkedBlogs

But don't panic! I still link all my posts to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr as well as adding all my reviews to Goodreads, so it won't be too hard to track me down!

I hope that's made things fairly clear. I was totally confused by all the Google Reader talk because I'm not that up on my tech, but basically looking for a new way to read blogs is sounding like a sensible idea right now. Do you have any other recommendations for ways to keep up with your favourite blogs? Let me know in the comments because I'd love to check them out! If this post has confuzzled you then let me know that too and I'll do my best to make it clearer.

Thank you so much for following and supporting Total Teen Fiction. You're all awesome!