too much fairy tale fiction in MG?

Roly

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I'm wondering your thoughts on the prevalence of fairytale fiction in middle grade - is it saturated right now?
 

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I honestly don't think there's that much of it actually. There's far more in YA with tons of fairytale retelling. And of course picture books are always putting out the latest version of the classics.

Do you actually mean fairy tale? Or do you maybe mean high fantasy? (if you mean the latter, I don't think MG is particularly even saturated with that either :) )
 

GeneBWell

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I would say fairy-tale based fantasy is sort of its own sub-genre of MG, but it definitely hasn't saturated the market. Even within the sub-genre each book has such a wildly different take on things that I doubt readers would burn out.
 

Curlz

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I'm wondering your thoughts on the prevalence of fairytale fiction in middle grade - is it saturated right now?
What makes you think it's saturated? Fairytales are popular with that age group, it's natural to have lots of that type of books out. An MG reader won't be able to notice if the market is saturated simply because they will grow up before they have the chance to explore much of it. It's not the same as with the grown-ups who could have decades of reading behind them and would easily recognize a story that's been done to death. Besides, "fairytale fiction" is a really wide variety which is near impossible to exhaust.
 

Kjbartolotta

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Fiction based in fairy tales, fine but I'd rather see the genre move forward. Fairy tale fiction in the sense of "A take-off of Bill Willingham's Fables, where every Grimm, Perrault, and Andersen character live in the same town, along with various non-related public domain creations and characters from Disney movies", then I badly want to see this trend end. It's played out.