Young Adult Books not popular with e-publishers

Sorry, I was assuming you hadn't read the posts since you... said you hadn't read the posts.

Did I misinterpret "Without checking other responses posted here"? What did you mean by that?

ETA: And do you happen to have the source for the market research? I'm trying to figure this situation out, myself, so I'd love to get more information.

Hi Captcha,

My apologies. I was trying to say that I went back after seeing your reply to my initial post and took a look. Sorry that I did not express myself more clearly.

I have some thoughts that I hope you will find helpful, but I’m just getting the kids ready for bed. Give me about 40 minutes and I should be able to get them posted along with a link or two with source information.

All the best…

Burnt Flesh

Hi Captcha,

I got my daughter and son off to bed and cranked this out as quick as I could. I hope the position I put forth is clearly presented. I also don’t present it here as a definitive argument for how things must be. I merely suggest that it is one very real reason for the possible differences between traditional vs. online publishers when it comes to their willingness to accept YA fiction.

YA as an impulse purchase:

You are probably familiar with the data and market research when it comes to small impulse purchases. For these types of purchases, tweens and teens have traditionally been the hottest demographic to target. They have a relatively large amount of disposable income in relation to their fixed expenses. They have also been found to have decreased impulse control relative to other age groups. This is convenient as tweens and teens are our primary (though not exclusive) market for purchasing YA fiction.

Now I know there are better articles than this one, but one that comes to mind is Usman and Jan’s article:

‘An Exploratory Study of the Impulse Buying Behaviour of Urban Consumers (it deals with rising second world markets as well as US data).

http://www.ipedr.net/vol1/34-B10019.pdf

In a nutshell, these researchers were looking at what factors, like gender, age and income affected impulse purchases. I believe the results indicated that age was the biggest factor (possibly the only significant factor) among those that they examined when it came to making impulse purchases. Tweens and teens were found to be most likely to engage in impulse purchases, and that impulse purchasing tended to decrease sharply as people get older beyond their early 20’s.

I suspect that anyone who has ever had teens with an allowance would not find this surprising. I love working with young adults, but for most of them money management is a skill that is acquired though experience...

Now, I forget the exact dollar value that the typical research considers to be an impulse purchase, but I am 100% confident that a paperback of $20 or less would fall well within the parameters.

Also, because impulse purchases are based upon, well, impulse… marketers long ago learned that to maximize sales you needed to remove barriers and allow your target market to act upon their purchase impulses without impediment. They also learned that if there are delays between your target market’s experience of the impulse to buy and their ability to act on the impulse that impulse fulfillment (sales) will drop dramatically.

As example, think about why the candy in grocery stores is always located at waist height (eye height for your child) in the check out line up and magazines, tabloids and paperbacks are at eye height for the average adult. They are designed to catch you or your child right as you’ve got your wallet in your hand and you are already paying for other purchases, and you think to yourself, ‘what the heck…’ If they were located at the far end of the store there are a dozen things that might well cause you to reconsider whether you actually ‘need’ the impulse purchase before you are able to fully act on your impulse.

So just to summarize, YA fiction is primarily (but not exclusively) bought by tweens and teens using discretionary income as an impulse purchase ($20 bucks or less) and impulse purchases work best when there are no barriers to immediately acting upon the impulse to purchase.

Ok, so why should this matter to e-book sales for YA material?

Barrier number one:

If we were to start by firing up Google, I’d suggest looking at searches like:

‘Kindle owners by age’, ‘Ipad owners by age’ etc… you’ll get a lot of good info. As example, you might want to look at:

http://kindleculture.blogspot.com/2009/04/kindle-demographics.html

If memory serves, the percentage of kindle owners that fall within the 10-19 year old category is less than 5%. A similar search for KOBO, Nook and other devices will likely turn up supporting data.

So this is a pretty big barrier for selling YA for strictly e-publishers. Forgetting for a moment that e-readers and e-reading capable devices are still only owned by a small (but rapidly growing) segment of the population, of the portion of the population that do own e-readers or e-reading capable devices, only 5% of this number will actually be tweens and teens! The conclusion that I would draw from this is that our target audience for YA fiction for the most part just doesn’t have access to the actual platform necessary to access it.

A few plausible exceptions:

Now smart phones would be an interesting exception here because most of my data is probably from 2009, and smart phones have blossomed since that time. Still, I don’t know a lot of people who would want to read an entire novel on their phone screen (even though those I phone and Blackberry screens are very nice, as far as phones go).

Also, it’s possible that e-books could be purchased to be read on your computer. But this platform is in large part at odds with some of the reasons why people buy a book in e-format. Today’s e-readers can hold thousands of books and you can comfortably slip one into your bag. You can read it at the beach, on the bus, etc… computers don’t fill this mandate very well, plus many computer monitors create significant eye strain with prolonged reading, reducing the enjoyment of the reading experience.

Barrier number two:

I’d then look at credit card owners by age, and you’ll see that most of your YA market does not own a credit card. In fact, although I’m not a US citizen I believe that it’s illegal for someone under the age of 18 to own a credit card in the United States. (Someone please correct me if I’m mistaken on this one)

The combined effects of these two barriers:

Now if we consider that many/most fiction purchases are of an impulse nature, and we know that impulse purchases are most likely to happen when there are the minimal barriers to satisfying said impulse, you can see how the above two factors become a problem. Your YA target market is unlikely to have a reading platform to begin with.

And even if they are one of the lucky 4-5% that can get one, or a member of an as of yet unmeasured percentage that can gain access to one for a sufficient quantity of time to read a complete novel, then they still have to get access to a credit card, or convince mom or dad to make the purchase for them.

Can this happen? Absolutely, I’m sure it’s going on as we speak. But is it conducive to impulse purchases? Absolutely not.

Given that most publishers can only publish a very select number of stories each year, it seems reasonable that they would select books that their readers would both be able to purchase and have an interest in purchasing.

For traditional publishers, YA fiction is a no-brainer. But for strictly e-publishers, I can understand why many might not see the math behind YA fiction in a strictly e-book format as a profitable choice.

That’s my 2 cents...

All the best...


Burnt Flesh

It isn't illegal for someone under 18 to have a credit card.

Essentially, someone under the age of 18 can sign a contract, but it's unilaterally voidable, meaning the minor can bow out of MOST kinds of contracts simply because they're under 18. Here's a primer.

Thus, the usual method for teens is to have an adult co-signer or make a teen an authorized user on an adult's credit cards. Obviously, the smaller the limit on the card, the better.

Hi Deirdre,

I had heard that the minimum age was 18 but I wasn't 100% certain. Thanks for the clarification.

Burnt Flesh said:

I have looked at the other responses. I was simply offering my own perspective, which differs from some of those posted here.

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It's still a bit rude to state you haven't read other responses. IMO, it's even a bit rude not to read them first. Conversation generally works better when everyone in it actually pays attention to what the others say and then adds to it.

It's fine -- and, indeed, actually interesting -- that your experience as a librarian is very different from another librarian's. That's worth discussing. You just might want to avoid being like the bloke down the pub who inserts himself into a conversation without having listened for a least a few minutes to what everyone else is saying.

I think maybe starting from the fact that most teens don't have e-readers is jumping too far into the question. I agree, most teens don't. But given the amount of money that they seem to be able to find for other electronics that they want (e-readers cost less than most cell phones, most ipods, and all laptops), I don't think we can just say that they don't have e-readers because they can't afford them. I work in a school that draws from mainly low- to mid- income homes (by Canadian standards, at least), so I'm not coming at this from an elitist perspective.

I think teens don't have e-readers because they don't want e-readers. If they wanted them, they'd find the money. I also don't think the access to credit/ability to sign contracts argument makes sense, because the kids clearly have some access to credit in order to buy apps, and they sign contracts for their phones. If kids want the electronics, they find a way to get access to the electronics, in my experience.

So, at least for the kids I'm in contact with, they don't want e-readers or e-books. Burnt, you said your school had success getting kids using the library's e-readers - did you notice any pattern among the kids who were using them? Like, were they a certain 'kind' of kid, or drawn from all across the school population?

Also, while I've got you -- how did you handle the copyright stuff for your e-readers?

Just as a bit of counterpoint, a friend of my son's and his brother spend their communion money on Nooks. That's what they wanted and requested; they are 8 and 12 years old.

I think the color aspect of that gives it a little oomph - you get the full impact of the cover. They read on them all the time, but they DO have to ask if they can buy a book. I suggested to their mother that she buy each of them a Gift Card that she can tie to the reader, and that's their book budget. Anyone could do that, and then the child can choose their own books.

I can't take credit for that; it was my aunt's idea. She does it for herself, because otherwise she'd have the National Deficit in book debt.

Christine N. said:

I think the color aspect of that gives it a little oomph - you get the full impact of the cover. They read on them all the time, but they DO have to ask if they can buy a book. I suggested to their mother that she buy each of them a Gift Card that she can tie to the reader, and that's their book budget. Anyone could do that, and then the child can choose their own books.

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Many public libraries are beginning to offer e-book loans (audiobooks, too), so pass that along. I 'load up' my e-reader with library loans before I go away on vacation.

Terie said:

Many public libraries are beginning to offer e-book loans (audiobooks, too), so pass that along. I 'load up' my e-reader with library loans before I go away on vacation.

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Those are so popular up here that there's a huge waiting list at the library! Great idea, because I can do it from home, even. But... the waiting list is frustrating.

Terie said:

It's still a bit rude to state you haven't read other responses. IMO, it's even a bit rude not to read them first. Conversation generally works better when everyone in it actually pays attention to what the others say and then adds to it.

It's fine -- and, indeed, actually interesting -- that your experience as a librarian is very different from another librarian's. That's worth discussing. You just might want to avoid being like the bloke down the pub who inserts himself into a conversation without having listened for a least a few minutes to what everyone else is saying.

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Hi Terie,

Clearly I’ve made a breach of etiquette, although it was not my intention to do so. I suspect the faux pas that I unintentionally committed here was to engage in GRUNCHING in a thread or forum where that may not be the accepted norm.

I’ve been playing poker seriously for years and GRUNCHING is extremely common/often expected in online analysis over at forums like 2+2 (which I realize is not here).

GRUNCHING means taking an interesting problem and offering independent analysis. It’s done when deciding on difficult poker hands or complex mathematical situations with the specific purpose of trying to promote different avenues of thought.

In this instance I was just skimming the forum, saw a very interesting question from the original poster, and decided to offer a quick GRUNCH of independent analysis. That’s why I stipulated ‘without reading other postings’ – I was only attempting to convey that this was an independent take.

I’ve clearly erred here in mistaking one common and encouraged posting convention in one medium for one that would be recognized and understood for what it is in another. I apologize if I came up as abrupt or in some way unfriendly, it was not my intention. I wished only to add my thoughts to a great question by the OP, not be perceived as being dismissive of others.

An honest mistake on my part. I hope you will extend to me the benefit of the doubt.

Best wishes,


Burnt Flesh

Hi Captcha,

A fair and interesting rebuttal.

It is a possibility that I’m getting ahead of myself by starting there, but I decided to start there simply because it seemed at least like a very plausible idea.

As a teacher librarian (and former marketer, back before I became a teacher) I’m fascinated to watch how technology moves and disseminates within different age groups. It can be such a difficult thing to assess because it moves and changes so quickly.

Many of the younger generations have more disposable income than ever before (acknowledging for socio-economics as a big variable), so I’d have to agree that often their ability to purchase a reader is becoming less of an issue. But what I wonder is, is it because they don’t want one, or because the cost of an ereader/ipad/etc… is still not yet low enough to be an impulse purchase for them. I suspect at some near future point it will be, and I’ll be very curious to see what happens.

I also agree with you that if a kid really wants something (like a red ryder bb rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time) then there’s a good chance that they are going to eventually get their hands on one.

No argument from me here. But I lump the readers in with the ebooks themselves as being part of an impulse purchase. Teens undoubtedly could purchase one, but they are unlikely to because the sticker price is still too high for it to be an impulse purchase. The barrier is less their ability/inability to purchase one, and more that the price is currently too high for most of them to want to purchase one.

And a similar view regarding credit card access. Kids can make mom and dad reach into their wallet, but it takes sustained effort (the antithesis of making an impulse purchase) so it’s less likely to happen.

Access to e-readers and credit cards are not absolute barriers, but I do want to suggest that the hassle for kids to overcome these barriers is sufficient to put a real dent in impulse purchasing, which I suspect is why strictly e-publishing outfits will remain stand offish when it comes to publishing YA.

Regarding e-readers and patterns, I can share with you a few things:

My district is what I’d call mixed socioeconomic. We’ve got sections that are quite affluent, and other sections that are very much inner city. We’ve had success with the e-readers at the high school level, and I was the first to introduce them at the elementary school level to grades 6-7.

One thing that may have been a factor in our decision was that our school is very hands on with kids and tech. Lots of computers, laptop carts, IPADs, etc… by upper intermediate the kids are very proficient with the tech and handle it naturally. The specific school where I introduced them was also in an upper middle class neighbourhood. Mom and dad both tend to be university grads, there’s lots of tech around the home, and mom and dad tend to see tech literacy as being as important as numeracy or traditional literacy.

Before we rolled these out, I took the liberty of getting reps from Amazon/Kindle and KOBO on the phone as we were breaking some new ground and I didn’t want to blunder over copy write issues. These companies seemed to feel that copy write issues were still in flux, but that I could safely load one book file on up to 6 e-readers at one time w/o being in any danger of copy write violation.

For some of those really popular books like the Alley Carter series or Cherub, this format and copy write allowance made tremendous sense for a few reasons. 1. It meant that I’m functionally getting 6 copies for less than the price of 1 paperback. 2. These books normally got trashed, but because they are in e-format we’d have them forever (I figured the cost of periodic reader replacements into my calculations). 3. It meant we’d have lots of copies of the newest titles so that there wouldn’t be huge waitlists.

All the best…


Burnt Flesh

Here's my $0.02.

I'm a college student right now, and don't have an e-reader. I have an app for books on my iPhone, and I could probably get one on my laptop if I really wanted it. I have a job and money for an e-reader if I really wanted it. But I read like crazy; I don't have money for the amount of books I would probably buy.

And I'm a college student now. When I was in high school, I didn't have a job. I didn't have a debit or credit card. I didn't have any money except what my parents gave me. They offered to buy me an e-reader for Christmas and/or my birthday a few times, but I said I didn't want it, because I just didn't have money for all the books I would buy. (My parents have always said that if they had had to buy me books all my life, instead of taking me to the library, they would have gone broke.)

So I guess I'm saying this is a lack of money/lack of access to money issue. Or at least for me it is.

A bit of an update from my library - the e-readers are catching on!

We started putting the popular series books on them - Hunger Games, Gone, and a few others. The voracious readers were really happy to come in and sign out a single item that weighs less than a paperback and take at least six books home with them for the weekend.

And they've proved to be a good way to get kids to try new books, without any effort on our part. They'll sign the reader out for one book, finish it, be stuck with nothing to read, and start in on one of the other books on the reader.

It's still only maybe five or ten percent of our clientele that use them, but those that use them love them. So - slow adapters, apparently, but they're getting there!

Deirdre said:

It isn't illegal for someone under 18 to have a credit card.

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Yes, but someone under 18 can have a debit card, and many of the kids I knew in high school did. You can use a debit card to purchase ebooks.

Nakhlasmoke said:

I'm def not a teenager, but while I'll read ebooks, and I work completely digitally, I love a "real" book.There's something about paper and ink and cover-love that makes the experience more fulfilling for me. And if I really love a book in ebook format, I have to eventually buy the actual book or else it doesn't feel like I really own it.

So...maybe some of that thinking is also involved - the completeness of experience?

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I get this feeling too. When I read an ebook, I get the same feeling that I do when I read a book borrowed from the library. "That was good," I think, "I should buy it." Then I have to remind myself that I already have.

Also, though I frequently re-read the physical books I own, I have never done so with an ebook. I'm not really sure if that's related, but it's a strange thing I noticed.

I borrow books for my Kindle fire all the time from the library. My son has now picked up my old Kindle to read a book he wants (he's 9) because he has the next in the series.

If he gets Honor Roll this last quarter (he's gotten it three in a row now), he get his own Fire. Fair deal, I think. I just will shut off the wi-fi so he can't buy books willy-nilly.

I think the credit card point is really onto something - depending on the political climate where you live, book banning (grrrr...) might be an issue at certain schools, and certainly there are always parents distrustful of what their kids are reading and wanting to censor it. YA romance, especially, even if it has the most tame references to sex, might be restricted by some. Really, at the end of the day, most teenagers just don't want their parents getting up in their business, including what they're reading.

With regards to the 'feel' of books, I think that's something many readers of all age groups relate to, not just teenagers. I often hear readers talking about the simple pleasures of smelling, touching, and seeing a physical book. Why might that phenomenon be particularly true of teenagers? The only thing that comes to mind (and I really don't mean this to sound condescending of teenagers at all) is that teens are fresh out of childhood, and people that are readers were often read to as children. I don't think parents often curl up with their kids at bedtime and pull out the kindle (though I don't have kids, so maybe I'm wrong). So the physical book is associated with things like home, family, comfort, safety, and all the good things that come with a bedtime story ritual. Those associations are still very fresh.

I think teens are often a lot more sentimental than they like to let on.

You don't have to have a credit card to buy books online. All you need to do is buy an Amazon/B&N etc gift card, which you can pay cash for, and use it on that site. They sell gift cards everywhere nowadays, from the grocery store to the book store. Or you can ask for one for your birthday, Christmas, etc. Either way kids have money to spend online on what they want without a credit card.

Also, in the YA Romance field there is a very large number of adult readers that enjoy YA books.

Well, I don't know if anyone's mentioned this or noticed it yet, but my buying decisions for e-books are based totally on price. I prefer hardcover books or the full-sized paperbacks, especially for YA - which tend to have awesome covers, and I only buy an e-book if it's more than a couple of dollars cheaper than the hardcover or large paperback edition.

For adult books, or classic literature of course, the Kindle edition is often ten dollars cheaper than the hardcover.

But that's not the case with YA. YA hardcovers are frequently the same price as the e-book versions, sometimes even less. So I almost always buy them instead.

This is a very interesting conversation. Where I live - in San Francisco - many of my kids' friends (3rd & 5th graders) have nooks or kindles or ipads. They even read on them at school. Several of the local high schools even give ipads to their students for the year, and it's not unusual to see kids reading ebooks on the bus, etc. Heck, even toddlers play on iphones and ipads in restaurants.

However, when we travel to Northern Michigan, this is not the norm. People thought my kids were "spoiled" for reading on a nook (same people who buy their kids $100 jeans they'll grow out of in 6 months, but hey, that's their choice).

Anyway, I write YA and my ebook sales outpace my paperback sales. And after attending the RT conference in April, I will say, many YA fans are in fact, adult women. So why epubbers think there isn't a market for it, baffles me.

I'm finding this conversation interesting for a different reason: our YA line at Musa is one of the biggest lines we have. We are going to a weekly release schedule at our YA line in order to keep up with the demand. Since we are also uploading our catalog to Overdrive for school and public libraries, we expect our sales to rise. That, along with our young writers quarterly contest, makes me seriously question the validity of the OP. I don't think the OP was wrong, necessarily, but by the same token there are requirements for selling YA ebooks that companies like Samhain or EC might not find practical. These are major romance epubs, primarily recognized for their huge sales in romance and erotica. *And, yes, I realize they publish other things.* So to sell YA books, a publisher has to think not only of the viability of the market but also the sales process for a young reader. I don't want a 12-year-old having to order a YA book on the same site with adult content books; even if Mom is using the credit card it's still Junior who is picking the books. In addition, I think that as more kids get into high school and definitely college, the accessibility to e-readers and tablets increases. When you factor in the number of adults who enjoy YA fiction, I think it's a broad generalization to claim that YA isn't popular with epubs. Instead, I would say that for an epub that specializes in books with adult content and sells tens upon thousands of those titles every year, it's not as practical to split off their focus to a properly run YA line. But for an epub that is steadily building up a strong sales base in YA, sales percentages are rising and the accessibility of young readers to the technology needed for digital book consumption is increasing as well.

My son (YA reader) asked for and received a Kindle for his birthday. He isn't alone. Alot of my friends have bought ereaders for their kids too. And like Ann said, I just put money on his account like it was a gift card and he can buy up to that amount.

I don't understand this since more and more e pubs are adding a YA line. They must see something.

I think things are changing. Fast. This thread started in August of last year - in e-pub terms, that's ancient history.

I agree that YA seems to be a definite area of growth in the e-pub world. But I also agree that as of last year, it was an area that a lot of e-pubs had tried and abandoned.

Things are in flux, as usual. Who the hell knows where we're gonna land!