YA New York

Today’s New York Times boasts an article by Margo Rabb about being published as a YA author … accidentally. Rabb, author of Cures for Heartbreak, writes, “When my agent called to tell me that my novel, Cures for Heartbreak, had sold to a publisher, she said, ‘I have good news and bad news.’ The good news: an editor at Random House had read it overnight and made an offer at 7:30 a.m. The bad news: the editor worked at Random House Children’s Books.”

Rabb goes on to say that she was shocked, at least at first, that her “literary novel about death and grief,” which she’d worked on for eight years, was YA.

I’m sorry, and I know this is going to sound snarky, but, just a few things:

1. Oh noes! You’re a YA writer! Wherever did you go wrong?
2. Now that the NYT has caught on to this whole “YA Ghetto” thing, maybe we can forget it permanently, right? I mean, I know this wasn’t published in the Style section, but can we treat it that way?
3. No, seriously, though. Margo Rabb is getting some crap for what she’s got to say, but let’s try to be fair. (More inside, including a comment from Margo herself!)

I haven’t read her novel, but it sounds like she wrote from the heart and ended up being stuck in a genre she hadn’t thought about. A demographic. Not just the normal “fiction and literature” section for Ms. Rabb, but “young adult fiction.” Which, let’s remind ourselves, was not always what it is now. Let’s try and remember that for awhile there YA was frothy and sickly sweet, and then it was rebelliously frothy and spiked with a bit of Ketel One, and only after a very rough passage did it reach the state we know and love today.

I’ve said this before, but it’s really worth repeating. There have always been amazing books for young adults, but there hasn’t always been an entire section of the bookstore that is practically bubbling over with incredible literature written for and about teens.

I was discussing this with The Boyfriend last night, and he said, “Well, can’t the publishers just tell the bookstores to stock the books in both sections?” I suppose that they could, except publishers don’t — from my limited understanding of the business end of book-selling — really get to tell buyers what to do. I mean, they can make suggestions, but it’s not like they get to say, “THOU SHALT purchase this book, and stock it in many sections, for WE have spoken.” (If I’m wrong about this, let me know, yeah? Because if I’m wrong, I totally have to get into that whole voice-of-God end of the publishing business.)

Then I said to the boyfriend, said I, “The real problem is that adults don’t think they should be reading young adult literature, and a lot of them haven’t caught on yet to the fact that they’re allowed to walk down that aisle of the bookstore.”

And he said, “Who actually thinks like that? Nobody thinks like that.” Oh, poor sweet boy. I wish he was right, but I’ve heard adults talk about YA like it’s junk one too many times to be so foolishly idealistic.

And then, with a bit of insight, he said, “Isn’t the main difference just where the marketing dollars are coming from?” True, sort of. Except that maybe the marketing departments don’t always have the opportunity to think big. Publishers aren’t going to package books with “adult” covers and “teen” covers every day of the week. For Philip Pullman? Yeah, after he’d already hit it big. For the rest of us? Not so much.

Raab talks about how Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Prep was rejected fourteen times, mainly because a lot of editors thought it was YA. Well, I don’t think that’s a bad judgment call, myself. I think teens can and should read Prep, and I’ve got it shelved alongside Scott Westerfeld and Lucy Maud Montgomery and E. Lockhart and Meg Cabot and a whole big bunch of other authors who write (or, in Lucy Maud’s case, wrote) mainly for teens. Because it’s about teens, and I think it would be good for teens to read.

Not because I think it’s only good for teens to read, though. Otherwise, where would I be? I’d be a weirdo grownup who can’t stop reading kids’ books. And everyone would be like, “Why is she still reading kids’ books? What is that about? That’s really, really freaky.” Which a few people already say.

I thought about writing about this whole big thing yesterday, but I decided to wait until today, because I wanted to wait for a few literary types to tell us what they thought. Justine Larbalestier weighed in early, saying, “I must be living in a lovely cocoon. I honestly have not experienced the kind of snobbery Margo Rabb describes in the article. I suspect that’s because pretty much all the publishing people I know are YA people. Whereas most of the people quoted in the article either come out of the adult literary world or aspired to write for adults.”

The Young Adult Library Services Association’s Megan Honig discussed the NYT story and other related issues here, saying, “I’m glad adults are warming up to teen literature, but I also know that publishing is a business and that adults far outweigh teens in buying power.”

And Janni Lee Simner got a tiny bit snarky — which, let’s admit, we all want to do — and then asked “The question really isn’t ‘Is YA worthy of my efforts?’ It’s ‘Are my efforts worthy of YA?’”

True, Janni, from an artistic or maybe a noble-minded perspective. But (a) lots of folks still haven’t come around to that way of thinking, and (b) most writers want to bring beauty and insight to the world, but they also want just a tiny taste of fame and fortune — or at least food that doesn’t come from a can.

The last thing to consider, and maybe the most important, is … what does all of this mean for teens? Does it mean we’ll be getting a lot more teen lit that isn’t really directed at teens, because the YA category is so big right now that any novel with a sixteen-year-old protagonist is going to get shelved on the YA rack? (Yes.) Does it mean books for teens won’t be as good? (No.) Does it mean more publishing dollars might go to the YA sector now than ever before, and that book buyers will eventually find themselves looking at YA whether they meant to or not? (Hopefully.)

Remember Frank Cottrell Boyce? Yeah, that thing. I’m not even going to link to it. But you remember the shenanigans; they were only like a month ago. Well, he had some fair concerns, in the end. He doesn’t want kids to get stuck with chicken nuggets. (Honestly? I think the bigger concern right now is that adults won’t get to try a chicken nugget every once in awhile, because those things are way better than most of the stuff on the dollar menu.) And what if, like, all the steak starts being stocked in the YA section and the adults are left with hot dogs, and they don’t even know there is steak being served at all? Wouldn’t that be hilariously dystopian and kind of awesome? I’m totally keeping my fingers crossed for that one.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 20th, 2008 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Ephemera, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.