1. Almost everything else is way down but YA is way up.

2. Much more of the YA audience is turning out to be people 20-35.

My guess is something really crude and simple: the YA was ignored/neglected for so long that it ended up as the place where people could write a traditional novel, i.e. a long story that deals with the inner state of someone undergoing a personal crisis, with no more irony than is called for by that particular story. If you want to write about someone moving along in the world, becoming better or worse or just different, as long as that protaonist is in YA age territory, you’re fine. In all the genres I read, the adult novel has largely moved away from that — either the presentation is too ironic for the fictional problem to be taken seriously, or the problem is too small or too interior, or the protagonist is struggling mostly with something other than the problem, etc. etc. etc.

Go to YA and you’re back in the home country of everybody from Fielding to Dickens to James&Woolf&Conrad and all the way roughly to Norman Mailer in English. And for a lot of people it’s simply more satisfying.

Sadly, my ten-year-old was saying just this morning that she didn’t want to be caught reading a particular beloved book at school because it’s too thin, and if her teacher catches her, she’ll be made to read something thicker. Way to encourage a lifelong love of reading there.

Absolutely, adolescence is the central matter of my work. But that’s a subject of interest for those who are about to be adolescents, for those who are adolescents, and for those, like me and the readers who say they are not my target audience, who were adolescents.

Lovely! Adolescence as a “subject of interest.” Yes, I honestly find adolescence interesting– the drama, the coming of age, the extremes, the reconciling the dreams of childhood with the realities of adulthood, so on and so forth– that interests me! It’s another good reason to like YA, rather than just a reason to not-dislike it.

I wrote about my annoyance with people’s obsessions with “reading up” a few posts ago in my own blog, but that was sort of a different angle– that it’s more than okay, it’s NECESSARY, for kids to occasionally read about people their own age even if they’re “capable” of reading “harder” books. But this goes the other way around– it’s also okay to read about people NOT your age, if the story is compelling enough!

Well I guess that would be the difference for me. I never went to school.

I also wonder if in part there’s a sense of discomfort felt adult readers of books marketed as children’s/tween/YA because they’re worried that they’ll be perceived as perverts trolling the children’s section of the store.

Personally, I think a lot of the YA fantasy currently being published is better than a lot of what my local chain store stocks in the adult SFF section.

I first read the Lord of the Rings when I was six (…yeah…), my dad read it aloud to my brothers and me three times, and between the ages of 12 and 14 I read it a further three times (plus the Silmarillion twice), but when it came to other adult fantasy? Psh. It was all so DARK. I didn’t like the characters. I played Dungeons and Dragons (three brothers leads to love of “boy” games) and I knew a flat D&D imitation when I saw it.

(That’s a gross overgeneralization but it’s true for far too much of the genre. And how weird, I blogged about this yesterday…perhaps there’s a bug going round.)

I don’t think I came to YA lit (still clinging to my DWJ, Lloyd Alexander, Patricia C. Wrede, Robin McKinley – I know she’s often considered YA, but my library shelved her books in the children’s section – ) till I was sixteen or seventeen. At which point I was semi-tired of fantasy (with the exception of Robin McKinley’s and DWJ’s books, which I still reread pretty much nonstop) and started reading other stuff (including your books, which I suppose *are* fantasy but of a different variety).

Suddenly – whoa, what happened? – I’m 18 and a half and reaching the upper edge of the YA bracket, yeah? Somehow I don’t think I’ll be moving away from it anytime soon…

As for being someone’s target audience, I just squealed with joy over a copy of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs in the store the other day. My boyfriend and I were buying holiday presents for our tiny nieces and nephews, but you better believe that one came home with me.

“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
— C.S. Lewis

Interviews/ProfilesThe Agony Column interviews Jeffrey Ford (podcast).The World SF News Blog interviews Richard Calder.NewsKatee “Starbuck” Sackhoff to write her own comic book.The Church Re-Releases Shriek: An Afterword CD, based on Jeff VanderMeer…

Do you think that the YA label is good, ie does it show better results marketing wise, or do you think it might be limiting your/others readership?

I think nice plain english (well apart from some flavouring like clart, boffins etc) used in both makes for an easy read. You can still tackle some quite delicate themes, but when you strip away fancy( read: artistically clever) writing all you have to go on is a good story and both of these writers have it in my opinion.
I am currently reading the 2nd Bourne Trilogy by Lustbader, not enjoying it the writing doesn’t feel honest to me.

Agree with A Grey, a good book is a good book.

I did the same thing around that age. But I was also surprised, as an adult, to find other adults around me snubbing children’s and YA lit simply because they were children’s and YA. I had thought people grew out of that.

“But – but that’s just the silly posing people do when they’re still kids and want to be seen as grown-ups, isn’t it?” I wondered when I encountered the attitude. “What actual adult could be that insecure about their presented age?!” But apparently, some people never grow out of the nervousness that others will still see them as little kids. Pretty bizarre, if you ask me.

Folks, once you hit 20 or thereabouts, I think you can stop worrying about that. We can all see that you’re big girls and boys, now. Really. Promise.