Trends in YA

I think contemporary is still big, especially own voices diversity where the diverseness of the characters isn't the point of the story. This is racial, ethnic, neuro, gender, sexual orientation, and any other kind I may have missed. And it's true for genre fiction as well as biographies and contemporary with and without romance.

It feels like all I see in YA is contemporary anymore, but that doesn't mean you should give up.

Never write to a trend, by the time you have something finished the trend is OVER.

Write the best possible story YOU want to read. Period.

Here's the punchline: those shiny "new" books in the stores and being released via online sellers were bought 18-24 months ago. The trend on the shelf today is potentially already out of date.

Somewhere an acquisitions editor is looking at a new submission right now that she thinks will make money for the house. She just has to sell it to the company Suits. That can take weeks while they figure it out, then it's months to cut a contract, then maybe more weeks for the writer to send her final draft, then months and more months of editing, cover and interior design, sending the edited MS to the writer, rewrites, send it back to the editor for another round, galleys to the writer (more months), then final edit approval, then the printer who may or may not have a slot open for a print run, prepping catalogs, lining up promotion and marketing, getting distribution lines sorted.

That's what to expect from any of the Big Five. In the meantime, the editor is hacking away at all those other submissions that have come in.

To suit a trend, you have to guess what readers will be buying 2 years from now. If publishers knew what would be selling 2 years down the line then every one of their releases would be on the NYT list.

So that's why you write to please yourself. When done right that never goes out of style.

I was told again and again to not bother trying to sell my first novel back in the day. I was told the whole genre was dead, box it and write something else. Only I didn't want to write something else. What I did do was polish that book each time it collected a rejection and kept sending it out.

It got picked up and snagged me a multi-book contract. Pretty good for a dead genre.

I don't consider trends. I write the book I want to write and then try to decide where it fits. You can't keep up with trends because they change before your book is finished. They change in the background even as you're looking at the current one. I am 100% contemporary...and I think that will always be there. But so will fantasy.

My latest YA manuscript has a man in his 70s as one of the main characters. I was told by a couple people that it would be a hard sell. I'm thrilled with who it went to...like, ecstatic. I wrote that book because it was the book of my heart...a 100% love song that was stuck in my head. It didn't find a home because it followed a trend...it found a home because I wrote the most authentic book I could write.

Contemporary is popular. But I think the kind of contemporary that is being acquired is changing. Certainly here in the UK there's less interest in issues based contemporary than there was, which no doubt reflects the general caution publishers have here with YA in general.

I see a lot of agents and editors on the hunt for romance (especially and also including LGBTQ+) and also horror, in addition to own voices. I would take this last one with a pinch of salt, however, as horror has been billed as the next big thing for about two years now and it hasn't yet happened.

I tend to avoid the trends, one because I like to try and keep my work different and two because trends tend to change. However, there are some trends that stick around. In YA romance and love triangles. Even though people moan about them, that trend sticks around.

I myself am going through a YA Fantasy phase and there are so many great stories to choose from! I do see a lot of contemporary romance, but have had no problem finding several top-notch fanatsy and dystopian-ish YA novels. Sarah J. Maas' world is unbelievable, Marie Lu's characters are wonderful and then there's Holly Black, Sabaa Tahir, Leigh Bardugo, just to name a few. Dig in and enjoy whatever thrills you at the moment. Who knows, maybe your WIP will be what drives the market towards it's niche!

My new book is a contemporary science fiction adventure with a lot of humour. I haven't written YA before, but my daughter lamented the lack of all-out adventure stories with well-adjusted female protagonists (without missing parents or excessive angst), so I wrote one!

I have no idea of trends or what the reception will be like, but I really enjoyed writing the book and my publisher got rather excited