Wow, okay so YALC has just happened… It’s been nearly 2 weeks since I came back from YALC, and after seeing so much traffic for my daily YALC posts, I decided to write an opinions piece on it. I feel like this is such an important thing to do, because people need to raise awareness of the good things and the bad, so that the Showmasters can decide which things need improving for next year.

I do have a lot of thoughts on YALC, both positive and negative and I’m going to try and explain the negative as best as I can. Do remember, this year was my first year at YALC, so I don’t have anything to compare it to, other than what my friends have said.

To start things off, I think that it’s safe to say that there were so many amazing authors this year that spanned across a wide range of genres. It’s brilliant to see YALC really bring the community together with such brilliant writers, and this goes for the panels as well. I attended quite a few of the panels this year, because they sounded so good, and there were well-known (and smaller) author who were speaking at the panels. My favourite though, had to be either the ‘Amongst the Stars’ panel, or the ‘Bring a Torch – It’s Dark in Here’ panel. They were just fantastic.

For someone who has major anxiety and depression, it helped me SO MUCH to have a schedule planned out before I even got to London. To help me plan, YALC provided us with a floor plan, and also with a schedule as to what authors would be signing on what days, what panels were to take place, and also what workshops and publishing things were going to be taking place. On top of all of this, Lizzie (over at HuxTales) published a post with all the information on when ARC giveaways would be happening, and which stalls were going to be there. This was just the most amazing thing to have, to be honest. It meant that I could plan the panels and the author signing around the ARC drops, making sure that I had time to get to the giveaways that I wanted to attend.

What was even better, was that all of the publishing stalls stuck to the ARC giveaway slots that they had said, APART from when Harper Collins were giving away Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand. This was one of the giveaways that I was most excited for, and Harper had stated that they giveaway would happen at 3pm. It turns out that they actually did it WAAAAAYYYY earlier, and they didn’t announce it on any social media sites which was so annoying… Oh well… I’ll just have to wait for the release date.

Speaking of ARC giveaways…

I think that the way YALC organised them were so effective (like I said before, with the times already stated), and especially with the use of raffle tickets. When I spoke to a few people about what ARC drops were like in previous years, they said that the drops were ableist as the publishers would just suddenly announce on their Twitter that they were giving out ARCs and it would be first come, first serve. This meant that people in wheelchairs, or people who weren’t able to run or even walk fast couldn’t get to the stall in time. I also found out that last year, publishers would make people do silly games/competitions, and then that meant that people with anxiety didn’t want to take part. Comparing what people have said about previous years with this year, I think that YALC have definitely improved. I wasn’t so keen on the side of raffle tickets at first because I AM SUCH AN UNLUCKY PERSON!

But thinking about it, it’s the only fair way that they can be given out. The stall that did their ARC giveaways the best was Orion. During the Friday, they had giveaways for The Girl King happening every hour. So you knew that from 10am til 4pm, there were going to be 10 ARCs given away. To get an ARC, you had to wait in the queue, and then when it was your turn, you had to close your eyes and put your hand in the box that was available. It was a box full of white petals, with 10 red petals scattered around. You had to pick a red petal in order to get an ARC. If you didn’t get a red petal, you could just join the back of the queue and keep trying until all 10 ARCs for that hour had been won. Then, you would go back in an hours time and try again. This was an absolutely brilliant way to get the ARCs, so WELL DONE ORION! I hope that more stalls next year take this approach because it worked so well. It meant that people had quite a lot of chances to get one, whilst it was fair, competitive, and most of all, FUN!

I feel like now, I need to move on to some of the negatives. Because there definitely were some. Ok, so… Here we go…

Probably the most annoying thing was the queues on the Saturday. Saturday was SOLD OUT, so the event people knew that it was going to be busy. On top of this, all of the BIG NAME AUTHORS were on the Saturday, which meant that loads of people wanted to queue for the same author, i.e Tomi Adeyemi, and Samantha Shannon. Throughout the weekend, if the queues were long, they would be ticketed. This meant that the Showmasters would cut the queue off at a certain point, and anyone in the queue AFTER that point would get a numbered ticket. Once their number group was called, they could join the queue. I thought that this was such a brilliant system, but unfortunately, that system fell through on the Saturday when it came to Tomi and Samantha. I had ticket number 218 for Tomi, but unfortunately, the queue was cut off at around 100 due to Tomi running out of time. It was such a massive shame! As for the queue for Samantha, I didn’t even bother waiting. IT. WAS. HUGE. So I decided to not queue…

I would have thought that the event managers would have come up with an even better plan than the tickets to manage the queues on the SOLD OUT day, but unfortunately, they didn’t.

Whilst we’re on the topic of queuing, after talking to a few friends, I found out that quite a lot of people who had the extra help bands, WEREN’T ACTUALLY RECEIVING THE EXTRA HELP THEY NEEDED. I have no idea why. There were some cases where people who had the bands would ask the Showmasters if they could hop to the front of the queue (as they were allowed to do), and the Showmasters said no. If anything, this was a case of where the Showmasters were poorly educated about the YALC system, and how different people MAY HAVE DIFFERENT NEEDS! Personally, I didn’t have an extra help band (I didn’t even know that they were a thing, to be honest), so I can’t say how good/bad the system was, but just from the people that I have spoken to, it didn’t sound like it was very effective.

SPEAKING OF NEEDS…. UMM HELLO? IT WAS 30 DEGREES OUTSIDE AND THERE WAS ONLY ONE WATER COOLER!! And even that ONE water cooler was promoting the book, Dry by Neal Shusterman. YALC was a big area, and it’s not like the event managers didn’t know that it was going to be hot. The people of Britain have known about the hot weather for months, which means that MORE WATER COOLERS SHOULD HAVE BEEN DOTTED AROUND THE EVENT. Luckily, I had bought about 4 drinks from the Tesco that is opposite the entrance of YALC, so I was sorted. But for people who drank loads and had to keep super hydrated, it wasn’t ideal.

There was also hardly any seats. There was the chill out zone with bean bags but there just wasn’t enough space. If people wanted to sit down, they had to sit on the floor, and with people like me who have a back problem, this wasn’t fun at all as it ended up really hurting my back. At one point, I had great trouble getting back up as my back had locked into position because of sitting on the floor. Fun times.

This is completely off topic, and is a bit of a random moan… But the goodie bags. C’mon, guys… THEY WERE AWFUL. I thought that they would be giving out the ‘goodie bags’ on the Friday, as some people like to get them signed by the attending authors. But no. They were given out on the Sunday (WHY???), and they only included a schedule and map, which were actually provided to us on the Friday. Plus, only the first 500 people who bought a 3-day ticket were able to get the goodie bag. Which sucked. Luckily, I was number 138 so I could get a tote bag.

I know that I’ve just done a lot of moaning, but at the end of the day, I had a really good time and met SO MANY WONDERFUL PEOPLE! It was just so nice to be around people who were like me, and people I could stupid fangirl with over beautiful books. I met some people that I had seen before, I met people that I had spoken to on Twitter but never seen, and I also met people who I had NEVER seen (or spoken to) before. And I loved everyone. I met some brilliant authors, kind and amazing publishers, and I just had a really fun time.

I think that it’s safe to say that I will definitely be going next year!

This was a very long post, so if you reached the end, WELL DONE! Thank you so much for reading, and I will hopefully be emailing this to the YALC event managers so that they can see what needs improving (in my opinion).

I will also be posting a YALC haul as soon as I get back from holiday in a couple of days, so keep your eyes peeled for that!

Anyway, thank you guys for reading and I’ll speak to you in my next post!