On the Topic of YA Not Being True to Its Audience

This isn’t a new topic as far as discussions in the book community go, but I’ve seen a few Twitter threads floating around that seem to be talking about this. So, I decided to add my tuppence.

I will say this. Many, many librarians, teachers & authors have been talking for a while now about how actual teen readers are being pushed out of the YA market as it becomes increasingly focused on adults. This is not about

— Teen Librarian Toolbox Karen Jensen (@TLT16) April 8, 2019

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I honestly have a problem with the category being called Young Adult, and that’s mostly because technically, young adulthood is from late teenage years to mid twenties (some people say it ends at mid thirties, but I draw the line at 28). That is very broad, but it’s a bit more accurate, because thirteen year olds are not young adults.

But in the book world, young adults are age 12-18. So, for the purpose of this post, I’ll go with the classification of teenagers as young adults.

I should preface this by pointing out that I agree that the YA audience should be young adults (teenage readers). But the problem is that it’s not, and this means that a lot of teenagers are left out of the YA narrative.

As someone who just left teenagehood, I can also attest to feeling left out, especially when I was in the early stages of that time (13-15 years), because a lot of the books were not for me. I had no relatable books to read between Middle Grade and upper YA. I’ll admit that I didn’t feel too discouraged about that because I’ve not exactly been one to stick to “age appropriate” books, so I simply switched my attention to Adult books. But many young readers wouldn’t feel the same way. Many young readers are simply not interested in reading about characters they can’t relate to on some level. So, not having books for them to read is, like many people have pointed out already, isolating those readers.

It’s great that we remember that a lot of YA marketing strategies target adults because they are the ones with the purchasing power, and publishers are all about making as much profit as possible. Young Adult fiction has become a lucrative category, so while it seems like there are more books being published with teenaged characters, these characters don’t actually face any teenage problems. They’re pretty much like adult people in teenage bodies, facing adult problems.

This is why I think making New Adult a more legit category would be a good idea, but that’s a topic for another day.

By the way, Vicky Who Reads has a post that addresses this topic, so some of my points are just reiterating what she, as well as some other people, has already said. But I wanted to add to this conversation, especially because I think there’s something a lot of people are forgetting:

YA books are written by adults.

We’ve considered and agreed that adults are the ones who mostly buy these YA books, partly because most teenagers don’t have income, but also because a lot of adults enjoy reading these books. But I feel like few people really consider that adults are the ones that write these books in the first place.

Why is this important?

Many writers, adults or otherwise, write for themselves.

In other words, they are writing what they want to read before anything else. Sure, they’ll consider their audience when publishing and marketing comes to play and they start worrying about making profit, but self-fulfilment plays a part in what authors write. So, if an author is an adult, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that they would write what makes them happy, and it might not turn out to be very realistic for teen readers.

They may have forgotten what it was like.

Sure, they remember some things, but the fact that they’re adult just means chances are, even if they tried to put themselves in the shoes of teenagers, they wouldn’t be very accurate. They can’t help but apply adult logic to things they write about, even if they think they aren’t. And if they’re writing about things they couldn’t relate to as kids, they might end up writing about what they think they would have done.

Of course, this is what writers do: use imagination. But let’s face it. Our imagination does not always accurately represent reality.

They may be writing what they think young adults should be reading.

There’s a whole lot of differing opinions when it comes to what exactly is age appropriate for YA books. Sex? Foul language? Drugs? Violence? The authors that write these books write what they think is age appropriate. You might not agree with their definitions, but it doesn’t change much. This is where adult gatekeeping becomes very prominent. Some adults think teenagers should think or act a certain way, and so they write about characters doing just that, never minding that what they think should be is not the way it is.

This may explain why I found a lot of fan fic written by teenagers more relatable to me.

Of course, there are other reasons like harmful marketing strategies (marketing books to be a different category than they really are), and the fact that YA is too broad a category (a thirteen year old would not relate to the same books a seventeen year old would). But I think we’ve examined those reasons to death.

So, how do we combat this?

I don’t know.

There are several things that can be done to help, and these things have already been talked about by other people having this conversation. But looking specifically at authors mostly being adults, I don’t know that there’s much anyone can do to change that. We can’t exactly ban authors from writing books that are not specific to their age group or make an #ownvoices thing out of this. I think this is partly because age is an identity that changes, unlike race, etc. Also, while it would be great to see more teen authors, as things stand presently, I don’t see that happening overnight.

What are your thoughts on this topic? How do you think the focus of YA can be shifted to where it belongs?