This week! Books!
News came this week that after years of increasing market share, young adult fiction is now among the only categories posting declines in sales.
The #takes have rolled in, and many people cited book bans, a decrease in B&N shelf space for YA, and a lingering lack of diversity. Librarian Karen Jensen notes that YA circulation in libraries is down also, and cites the decline of YA paperbacks, the lack of stand-alone and shorter novels, and a dearth of 13-16 year old protagonists as the industry tries to appeal to adult readers. Katherine Marsh cites screens and a general problem with the way a love of reading is instilled in schools that is catching up with the book world.
My own take: YA defied gravity for a long time, but sales are cyclical and driven by megasellers, which come and go. This could just be noise within an overall positive trend. But if there is something more fundamental afoot, my theory for the primary culprit is that trend chasing and group thinking have run rampant in the children’s book world, which used to be a hotbed for experimentation, originality, and risk taking. This has led to a plunge in overall quality amid a glut of cookie cutter YA fantasy series especially, eroding reader trust in the category.
My wish for the YA world is that it gets back to taking risks again, that they stop living in fear of the loudest voices on Twitter and sanding the edges off of everything, and just bravely publish really good books instead of chasing yesterday’s trends.
Meanwhile in the publishing world, the long saga of the mysterious book thief, who for years duped many people in the publishing world into sending him unpublished manuscripts, has finally come to a close. Filippo Bernardini will be deported and fined $88,000, but will avoid jail time. Bernardini claims he never profited off of the manuscripts and instead just really wanted to read them.
I still don’t really get the hype around ChatGPT, but for a more thoughtfully bullish take on how AI will impact the book world, I enjoyed Dan Blank’s newsletter today, where he cited some positive examples of how AI could help authors, but argues the bedrock of marketing should still be human-centered.
Author Erin Bowman extols the virtues of handwriting ideas in a single notebook per book (I heartily agree).
I really enjoyed this wide-ranging interview with Min Jin Lee, where she discusses show don’t tell, her writing process and the crunch of time, and the English language as a source of power.
And Justine Sullivan has a fun roundup of books featuring heroines who are hot messes.
This week in bestsellers
Here are the top five NY Times bestsellers in a few key categories. (All links are affiliate links):
Adult print and e-book fiction:
- I Will Find You by Harlan Coben
- Hello, Beautiful by Ann Napolitano
- It Starts With Us by Colleen Hoover
- It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover
- Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Adult print and e-book nonfiction:
- Saved by Benjamin Hall
- Spare by Prince Harry
- Paris by Paris Hilton
- The Courage to Be Free by Ron DeSantis
- The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
Young adult hardcover:
- Five Survive by Holly Jackson
- Lightlark by Alex Aster
- Nick and Charlie by Alice Oseman
- The Stolen Heir by Holly Black
- The First to Die in the End by Adam Silvera
Middle grade hardcover:
- Wonder by R.J. Palacio
- Refugee by Alan Gratz
- The Complete Cookbook for Young Chefs by America’s Test Kitchen Kids
- Iceberg by Jennifer A. Nielsen
- Two Degrees by Alan Gratz
This week on the blog
In case you missed them, here are this week’s posts:
Don’t forget that you can nominate your first page and query for a free critique on the blog:
And keep up with the discussion in all the places!
And finally, with AI serving as the hot new tech thing of the month people aren’t talking about the metaverse much anymore, but I enjoyed this thoughtful essay by Anna-Verena Nosthoff and Felix Maschewski about the extent to which current versions of the metaverse reflects a world where hardly anyone believes tech can actually solve our problems, and is instead continuing to build worlds for the rich that replicate our existing problems.
Have a great weekend!
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Photo: The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA
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Hmm. For several years I’ve thought about rewriting and re-self-publishing my first novel, a YA fantasy I called The Key and The Crest; The Unlikely Adventures of Frances Westerly. I hadn’t read a lot of YA fantasy, but enough that I believed my story was a wee bit more original than most others: The MC is a 16 year-old handicapped girl whose crutches turn into a flying machine with the power to travel through time. The time travel thing isn’t original at all, but I felt the angle of Frances condition and her magic crutches was.
I first published this book back in 2004. Several people said they liked it but because of circumstances I’ll not mention, I took it off the market in 2011. When I started seeing the popularity of YA, I decided that maybe I could do better this time around.
Now… not so sure the time and effort would be worth the trouble.
My god, that is also my wish for YA. Take the risks! I want more weird and more character heavy. I used to love to read YA, but I’m having a harder time lately finding books I want to read.
I agree. Character is more important than action or place or whatever else there is. My YA novel is definitely character heavy on the protag, as well as several others. Maybe more authors will begin to realize this. We can always hope.