Way back in the dark ages of March 2007, I had a post that linked to an article about the rise of Young Adult literature (YA for the acronymically gifted) and how the doom and gloom forecasts about how the kids aren’t reading are a little gloomier than the situation warrants (Sure kids don’t read. Except for HARRY POTTER. And Lemony Snicket. And TWILIGHT. And…)
So I was really feeling good about the land of Kidbookdom. But then in last week’s You Tell Me I asked people what they were writing, and Holy Tyra there are a lot of people writing YA!!! Like, a lot a lot a lot of people. More than I could even count. (I didn’t actually try to count).
Presumably if you’re writing YA you read YA. Clearly there are a lot of adults reading young adult literature (including me).
This week’s You Tell Me: is the YA boom driven by adults reading (and buying) kids books? Or are the kids really reading more?
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I read young adult books because I like reading about younger protagonists and that almost always means the book will be labelled YA.
I like writing about younger characters too, so the time will come when I have to send my query to agents and I’ll most likely first focus on the ones who rep older YA. I don’t think that my work is YA, but it seems to fit a very loose bill of being short and focusing on people just hitting their twenties.
I can’t say if more kids are reading, because my only contact with high schoolers are the drop-outs my mom tutors, and they have to be held at gunpoint before they will even crack open a book.
I went to a signing at Books Inc. in SF last night – Jay Asher, Barry Lyga, Ellen Hopkins and Brian Mandabach (we missed you Nathan – where were you?), and there were a large number of teens in the audience. They were very enthusiastic, asking questions and almost giggling in the presence of these great authors. It was heartwarming.
One reason you might have a higher number of YA writers here is that I found your blog through Editoral Anonymous, who is a kid’s editor, and your name is often bandied about on Verla Kay’s Blue Board which is also for kidlit writers. There might just be more of us here.
Because I love dark fantasy, I read YA. Also because I love good stories, I read YA. I’m finding that so many of the new fantasy novels are too full of sex or romantic elements that distract from the cool world and the story, that YA novels (which have a high level of skill, in general, when romance fantasy novels frequently do not)that they fit the bill for me.
Besides, what is defined as YA now is what was considered mainstream adult when I began reading this genre around 40 years ago.
Nathan, along the lines of Dave’s comment, how do you think “The Secret History” and “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” were pitched/queried/submitted to publishers? As YA? YA mystery/thriller? Neither?
These books seemed geared to a wider audience.
Looking back I realize I read some YA as a kid, but they were animal based books like “Black Beauty” and “Old Yeller” – it was the animals that appealed to me, not the YA characters.
All I know is, I’m depressed.
Signed, a wannabe YA author.
During my stint manning the YA area at our local library, I was astounded by the number of adults reading YA. After I began reading a few of them, I understood why. Some really fine authors are writing YA.
I have to agree with several of the other posts, kids are reading more today than in the past. It may be due to requirements at school through programs like Accelerated Reader.
Also, with such a wide variety of books available in YA, even a picky reader can find something.
As the librarian, if I could find one book or one series that hooked a kid, I knew he/she would be hooked for life. I saw this happen with my own daughter. She needed major prodding to read until I gave her the Louise Rennison series. She was hooked and now reads everything and wants to own it for her ‘collection.’
My trips to Barnes and Noble are quite expensive these days.
I write YA so that’s one reason I read YA. But one reason I LOVE YA is because the books don’t have to adhere to genre norms (mostly because they’re all lumped together on one shelf). I feel like adult genre books have to fit that genre while YA books can be all over the place because they’re all lumped together (you can write a romance without a HEA). I love the mixing of genres I find in YA, the lack of convention, the pure imagination.
Josephine Damian: I read a lot about Special Topics In Calamity Physics when it was released, and I recall that Marisha Pessl specifically targeted Jonathan Franzen’s agent with her manuscript. That agent (totally blanking on her name right now) is well-known for repping literary fiction, and I believe, does not rep YA. Special Topics is an adult lit fic novel with a precocious teenage protagonist, though I’m sure plenty of brainy teens have read it. (“Brainy” is a high compliment in my book.) Secret History is also categorized as adult lit fic, though I find it to be much more readable than Special Topics, and probably has more appeal to teens in general.
It’s funny you commented about those books this morning, because they came to my mind last night when I was considering how I could reimagine my WIP if it doesn’t sell as YA. It’s about a nerdy older teen guy protagonist with some very big problems, and there are several adult characters who figure prominently in it. I suspect I could add 10 – 15K words and re-pitch it as adult mainstream. I’ve found that the line between YA and adult has a lot to do with pacing.
Crossover is strong for YA, but I see actual young adults reading them. I take my lunches at Seattle’s Central Library, and see them coming and going from the YA fiction stack all the time.
One of the benefits of aiming for the crossover crowd is it has raised the content bar, creating a separate Tween category. My 11-year old doesn’t read the more earth YA. Yet. But I can tell from his interests that it will be a fresh new adventure for him when he does.
Well, just look at all of the adults who enjoy the Gossip Girl TV show and who were big on The OC, Gilmore Girls, etc. If they like that kind of thing, they’ll like YA. As everyone here has already pointed out, YA has come a long way since the days of those cheesy, tiny little romances with the heroine holding a pair of ballet shoes on the cover and a blue-eyed hunk in the background. I avoid adult literature geared toward my demographic because too often it is about grown women who can’t find/hold onto men and who can’t get along with their mothers. If I’m going to read that kind of thing, I’d rather read about teens experiencing it. With adult characters, I just want to smack them and tell them to grown up.
Oh, and yes, I write YA. But I would read YA regardless.
Lauren, I tried to imagine those two authors sitting down to write their queries, and scratching their heads over which of many ways to present it.
I wonder if they made a decision and stuck to it, or it queried it different ways to different agents, went through trial and error, etc. I also wonder if I would had read either if they were promoted as YA.
The interest in YA doesn’t really surprise me. Of course, there’s the phenomenal success of Harry Potter, but also Lemony Snicket, Artemis Fowl, and others. But more than that, look at what we’ve grown up on.
I think most of us here were raised on 80’s and 90’s TV, and a few of us even go back to the Brady Bunch and beyond. Look at the popular shows: from the MG Full House to the YA Beverly Hills 90210, many of the most popular shows of our younger years were about kids dealing with their troubles, and they were on prime time, not just after school.
Cosby, Facts Of Life, Wonder Years, Doogie Howser, and on and on–you make your own list. Even though the supposedly main character on Home Improvement was a man, he was an adult child, and as the kids grew up on the show, they became more important to the story lines.
Those shows, whether network sitcoms or the teen shows on Disney and Nick, made stories about young people popular with people of all ages. And those shows gave way to reality shows, which are usually about–guess what–young people in extraordinary circumstances dealing with their troubles.
As for books, much of the adult interest in YA is in fantasy, which has always had young characters. Tolkien almost totally ignored children in his stories, but his main characters were little people with childlike interests who got sucked into the problems of a big-people world.
Adolescents are fun to read and write about and to write for. They are searching for their identities, learning to cope with problems they often didn’t cause, and they still have a sense of fun and magic.
And, let’s face it, most of us are still kids. Jung claimed that, for most people, adolescence lasts into the mid thirties, and often well beyond that. And those of us who have more or less grown up, still long to be young and relatively free.
Life is so much more exciting when you are a young adult. The world is yours for the taking and you have so much hope.
A good YA, coming-of-age novel is much more interesting than reading about a stat-at-home mom, divorcee, or over forty-year-old woman whose jealous of her married friends.
o/` o/` o/` o/` o/` o/`
You’re gonna make it after aaaaaalll!
Sorry. Carry on.
I recently went to a cult meeting – I mean Stephanie Meyer’s book signing – hoping to hear her speak. There were three adults (we found each other pretty quickly.)
I’d like to give you a head count of the teens there, but they had to shut the B&N down once they hit 6000. No one counted the mob teens outside still hoping to get in.
I’m pretty sure they all read the books 🙂
Middle school kids read YA lit. because it’s at their reading level. High schoolers are too cool for YA lit, as Merry Jelinek notes. And people in their 20s and 30s read it because it’s retro-cool. I think.
Just found your blog recently … as a writer, it is very interesting and helpful to learn about the industry/business side of publishing. So, thanks!
Kids don’t read adult books.
Tell that to my nephew. He started reading adult books when he was about 13-14 (he’s 17 now). That’s when he started reading Tom Clancy novels.
~Nancy (who’s too lazy to log in)
https://writerlystuff.blogspot.com
Hah! Kids don’t read adult books? I read everything I could get my hands on, including Bob & Carol, Ted & Alice at 11 or 12, because I loved to read and couldn’t drag enough books home from the bookmobile.
Dear Mr. Bransford,
My question is do some literary agents no matter how amazing the manuscript could be, pass on it just based on their own personal taste? For example, suppose a writer submitted a manuscript that was set in the wild west days and the particular agent who is reading it may not care or like reading about westerns and therefore passes on it? Or do they keep an open mind?
Respectfully Yours,
Cocaine Princess
I work with teens, and believe me, they read YA. (I read it, too. They are always borrowing from my shelves.)
I prefer YA because it is often more cohesive than adult (in a YA you can’t just skip over the climax, for example, or have a sudden random setting/personality switch stuck on at the very ending of a novel, or have the cynical characters at the beginning just as miserable at the end of 400 pages as they were at the beginning–just thinking of a few lauded adult books I’ve read.) I like the power in a YA–small choices can lead to tangible change in the world.
I suspect that there’s a lot wider scope of YA out there today than there used to be. So many adults seem proud of the fact that they never read any YA books–they just went straight to adult. And I remember being frustrated when I’d maxed out my library at age 12 and wasn’t really interested in paperback pulpy teen romance. But there’s a lot out there today, and it’s not all just “airplane reads.”
Actually, I disagree pretty strongly with the assessment that all YA is just another name for pulp fiction and airplane reads. Octavian Nothing? The Book Thief? House of the Scorpion? Speak? River Secrets? These are only a handful of well-written, interesting YA novels with depth as well.
My 6th grader is instructed to choose a YA Novel for his Language Arts class. MG Novels are not acceptable.
“Kids don’t read adult books.”
I read books like the Count of Monte Cristo in middle school for fun and some of Tolkien’s books (including the Silmarillion) starting around fourth or fifth grade. I actually had more patience for the classics when I was younger than I do now.
Everyone reads YA. Well, not my three-year-old, but you know. Everyone else.
Well, my kid reads YA like it is going out of style. This time of year, everyone is asking me for recommendations for Christmas presents and I’m saying “NOT popular boys books because he’s almost certainly already read it.” Thank god for the school library or else I’d go broke trying to keep him in reading material.
Yes, he’s also addicted to the computer and the Xbox and the gameboy – I’ve not banned electronics or anything like that. But you can tell if it’s a really good book because he’ll pass on all of them in favour of lying on his bed and finishing the book.
This hit extreme levels with Harry Potter:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/sylvia/53114887/
He’s done some branching out to adult books but is less than enthralled.