Quote:
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.