Can someone explain the YA label to me

[OtterBooks]

Originally Posted by Barty

I like the label; it lets me know what to avoid.

Recently I've felt the opposite. Seems like YA is where most of the good writing is going these days.

[Skip Wyona]

Originally Posted by OtterBooks

Recently I've felt the opposite. Seems like YA is where most of the good writing is going these days.

Very true. The selling of the 'YA' label might have changed over the past years but in the past YA books were better written because the buyers, mostly libraries, were more demanding. And as many writers know, it is more difficult to write short novels of quality than lengthy ones.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Skip Wyona

Very true. The selling of the 'YA' label might have changed over the past years but in the past YA books were better written because the buyers, mostly libraries, were more demanding. And as many writers know, it is more difficult to write short novels of quality than lengthy ones.

But why should "YA" novels be short? Most people would probably categorise the Harry Potter books as "YA", and they (the later ones at least) could hardly be called "short" .

[Skip Wyona]

Originally Posted by HarryT

But why should "YA" novels be short? Most people would probably categorise the Harry Potter books as "YA", and they (the later ones at least) could hardly be called "short" .

Harry Potter books was one of the surprising exceptions. I have observed children selecting books for decades and size was often the primary consideration. YA novels were limited in size by publishers because of the assumption that children will not read long books. Book contracts were frequently written with page count restrictions. There are other book length exceptions one can find in the history of children's and young adult publishing and the physical size of many current YA books indicate that book length may no longer be an issue. Only a word count comparison can provide any hard evidence because many YA books use large fonts and a lot of white space. I haven't seen any comparisons yet.

[DiapDealer]

I heard size doesn't matter. Was I lied to?

[elizilla]

I remember as a kid, choosing books by size, trying to get the longer ones, and finding that this doesn't work at all - the largest books are the ones with the least text.