MG books to lead into YA

tommyb said:

If agents still stop by, I have a question.

Do you think publishers are interested in a 'set' of books for different ages?

I love MG fiction. I have come up with a world for a YA book/series (80-100 years in future, kids and teens are main population). What I am working on is plotting the YA world/story, and three MG stories that are set in the same world and might use some of the same characters.

I wouldn't want to necessarily stay in the series myself; kick it off and hopefully a publisher runs with it. I see the MG angle working well with different writers; there could be science based, horror/creepy based, adventure based, etc, and can be set almost anywhere on the planet (potential stories set in India, China, SA, are exciting to me).

I started thinking of this as a way to hook boy readers at MG level and hope to carry them into YA.

Obviously things would hinge on me providing quality at the start.

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That bolded bit? That's really not how publishers work. (Book packagers sometimes will do something along those lines - buy a setting/characters/pen name from an author which they can then pass off to other writers at a later point if it becomes necessary. But I think even with book packagers that's really not the norm.)

A publisher will pay you for the license to distribute your work (print rights) but you still hold the copyright on the intellectual property. The publisher cannot just hire someone else to write books set in your world because the intellectual property remains yours. (Unless, as I said above, you have sold everything to a book packager, but that has drawbacks.) Now, if you wanted someone else to write the books with you, you could do that. (I've been working on a series of short stories with a co-author that is set in a different author's intellectual property. That last fellow pays for work he determines fits within his world and benefits his IP by bringing in other readers and more sales.)

And, if a publisher has led you to believe that they will have control of your intellectual property, you need to take a step back and do some research because that's not how it's supposed to be done. Contracts that try to make that kind of rights grab are predatory and should be avoided.

You're trying to sell an idea, and there are already more than enough of those to keep writers busy with their own. If you think this will work, then you need to write it, not pitch it.

As others have said, you have to write the books before you can sell them; and very few publishers would be interested in acquiring just an idea.

So why not write this the way you want it to be, then see how you get on with selling it? If it's as good as you think it is you could do well with it. You never know.