Has interest in YA died down? Are there no huge titles anymore?

Harlequin said:

Hrm. Because it feels like a bit of a bandwagon, perhaps?

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That may be, and if it is just a fad the market will correct itself, eventually.

Harlequin said:

By and large it's a good thing. But the execution is sometimes clumsy in practice.

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It's change, it's not always easy or pretty.

I think if you're concern is will there be a market for your work, it's best to write what your passionate about and find the market later. Seems to be a recurring theme among those that are successful at this gig.

lol! I've already been told by quite a few people that there is no market for what I'm passionate about, unfortunately, but that's okay; I'll write something else more accessible.

I don't object to the change--certainly it's good for me, on a personal level! A lot of good books will come out of it, and continue to do so.

Harlequin said:

Hrm. Because it feels like a bit of a bandwagon, perhaps?

This has come up on other threads but one of the issues for me is that there's an element of these categories being defined by people who themselves don't fit into either the diversity or ownvoices bucket (ie, agents). A hint that perhaps people are seeking exoticism in some cases.

By and large it's a good thing. But the execution is sometimes clumsy in practice.

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I think this is a fair & generous assessment of my opinion, though looking back I'm not sure what crawled up my butt 2013-15.

To be practical, it takes about two years to publish a book after a publisher has bought it. It takes a year or more to sell your book to a publisher even with an agent, and finding one of them is one to a few years. It takes a year to a few years to FINISH a book for most beginners having to juggle their lives and their infant career.

That's hateful to contemplate, but true.

Worrying about where your book will fit into the market is useless when you start the book, or even when you're deep in the writing process. By the time your book comes out the market will likely be completely changed from today. What is popular today may be boringly passé, and some off-the-wall book or kinds of books may be all the rage.

And your book, the one you love almost more than life itself, and so put all your best into creating, may be the new thing that others will long imitate.

QUIT WORRYING and WRITE.

ManInBlack said:

Seanan McGuire's October Daye novels featuring a magical world barely hidden beyond the surface of the mortal world, a variety of threats that affect only the magical or the entire world, magic passed through the bloodline, a reckless "chosen one," and their friends.

Pierce Brown's Red Rising novels start with a competition between the perpetual lower class to get enough food to feed their families. Admittedly, I'm pretty sure they diverge very quickly (Hunger Games is still in my to-read pile), but I thought them similar enough to acknowledge.

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So apparently the series in bold is actually considered YA, which has me thoroughly convinced that whether or not something is YA is entirely a marketing decision and not at all a writing one.

ManInBlack said:

So apparently the series in bold is actually considered YA, which has me thoroughly convinced that whether or not something is YA is entirely a marketing decision and not at all a writing one.

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Hmm... I know the first book in Brown's Red Rising series is sometimes called YA, but by Book 2... I'd call them not YA. (Not that teens can't read them, of course; it's just that the characters are adults and it thematically feels more grown-up. It's also a lot darker and more intense, and it was a dark, intense series to begin with.) Sort of like how Orson Scott Card's Enderverse has Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, two books that can be (and have been) marketed at younger audiences due to younger MCs, but the rest of the series is most definitely adult.

And YA is, IMHO, largely a matter of marketing, though with some rough unifying parameters of MC age and themes. You see crossover titles all the time. (You also sometimes see books initially marketed at grown-ups re-issued and aimed at a YA or even MG audience; IIRC, they recut the first of Robert Jordan's epic fantasy Wheel of Time as two MG/YA novels a while back. Same exact story, just different cover and marketed differently. McCaffrey's Pern novels have gotten the same treatment.) Still, since marketing is a big part of selling a book, it's a good idea to read enough YA and grown-up titles similar to your own to get a feel of where your story would likely be more at home, and pitch accordingly. Let the agent and/or publisher make the final call.

I don't think it's all marketing. There are differences, not always binary, and a lot of fluidity, but I don't agree with the assertion I see (in some FB groups I mean) that YA and adult are no different and can cover everything. They often are different, and they cannot always overlap.

Well, as a teenager, right now - a lot of people I know don't really prefer reading. (We all just love social media) XD

But, as a writer, I've noticed a huge trend of YA Fantasy books so I don't think its dying out. There's also a loot of ownvoices novels which is completely AMAZING because it means more representation so hopefully more reading by teens because they can finally see themselves as the character.

I'd say definitely not! The Hate U Give has been on the best seller's list for almost a year, Love, Simon is YA movie adaptation, and so much more. A large percentage of book bloggers are YA readers, especially the big ones. YA is adored by many, many people. I don't think it'll disappear for a long time. It may seem like things are cooling down now, with Twilight and such in the past but that's not true. Like others mentioned, something big will come along and everyone will jump to YA again.

I definitely think, in the "lull" after agents went nuts for contemporary - ANNA AND THE FRENCH KISS, ALL THE BRIGHT PLACES, John Green and John Green-like novels - adult genre fiction jumped on YA with GONE GIRL. I definitely feel like that's had a very similar arc to TWILIGHT and THG with buzzed film adaptations and reader hype which, if anything, had a longer shelf life than the YA comps, perhaps because as a trend, nothing beat GG but there were a fair few more blockbuster successes - THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN, obviously, so much so that I still see these being circulated as comps a wild five years after GG came out. I think these successes "stole away" a lot of the primary female adult readers that would read YA post-Twilight. Why? I think it's as simple as a) what young people like and primarily read has always been mocked (I'm still hearing jokes about teenagers in love with sparkly vampires in the year of our Lord 2018!), and b) the "anything Girl" (Dragon Tattoo, Train, Gone, Before, etc. etc.) is a far more flexible genre comp. When the main markers of the subgenre are "intelligent femme fatales doing fucked up shit, usually in multiple POVs" it's faaaaar easier to make that into a longer lasting trend. We've simply seen the shift in energy publishing-wise.

On the other topics brought up here, I agree with everything here:

Putputt said:

^^ This.

Bmr, I think your theory might have more credence if it isn’t for the inconvenient fact that:

1. Non-diverse books by non-diverse authors are still being published with a lot of hype.
2. Diverse books are recently getting the hype they deserve and simply outselling their competition.

So you’re ignoring the fact that THUG pretty much flattened the books slated to be “the next Hunger Games” (i.e. Caraval and Carve the Mark...and CTM was written by a big-name writer to boot!) in an effort to prove your theory. But what about the non-diverse books which just aren’t making it super huge? There’s a ton of them out there. I see PM announcements being made all the time of non-diverse stories selling at auction. They’re still being released. Diverse books are still a very small part of the market, so it’s a bit of a reach to blame the lack of “the next Hunger Games” in YA on them. When your theory requires such impressive mental gymnatiscs, maybe it’s time to consider that it might be wrong?

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But wanted to pick up on the idea that Harlequin posed - of "exoticism." I think this is a fair criticism of a lot of the manner of YA publishing, but it's also to be expected when YA marketing is naturally done so much via social media. A couple of things that jumped out at me from this thread:

One WILDLY successful book isn't a trend (yet). THUG was a very organic success. I heard about it from the insane reader reactions to ARCs, saying it was the new big thing. Then it was topping the NYT bestseller lists week after week after week, then it was getting made into a film -- there really was a lot of reader-led hype around that book. However, it wasn't "just" successful because of an "agent-led narrative" - leaving briefly aside any questions about craft or quality, it had a combination of an absolutely brilliant premise which combined the ever-popular idea of "the teens are the resistance, the teens are rising up!" which we've seen as far back as THG (sorry if that seems like an insensitive comparison), but completely changing it up with the stuff of news stories that teens see everywhere on social media, and fired up by BLM.

I think, if it seems like diverse novels have come out of nowhere and now ALL the agents want them, it's because of that organic success. They've realised, to put it bluntly, that they almost missed the boat on this one. While they were out emulating Game of Thrones (which I know isn't a new product, but back in 2013, it seemed like all anybody wanted) or Outlander, those kind of teen-led, teen-centred social thrillers were what the Facebook/Twitter teens of today want to read, to talk about, and tweet about.

Sorry if this got way long and rambling. I'm up watching the Oscars and now it's morning here in England (how?!?!).