Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
It's all about marketing.
It's hard to define because it has no clear definition. Young adult is whatever the marketing department wants to flag as YA.
What made the category a big seller initially was accessibility: where litfit is supposed to feature elaborate, "challenging" prose and themes, YA is supposed to be more straightforward and young reader friendly, more focused on plot and character than on wordsmithing. Which is to say, good mainstream commercial writing. Which is why despite the "young" part of the tag, the bulk of the readership is adults rather than teens.
Whatever meaning the label might have once had is now lost in the rush for YA market dollars.
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Totally agree. For a reader the label is essentially useless. Whilst some of the books targeted at the younger range of the market may be written in a quite simplistic style, most is indeed just good mainstream commercial writing, largely indistinguishable from non-YA labelled works. Also, you're probably going to find very few pretentious works of literary fiction classified as YA. A plus for YA in my book!
Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
So in short: YA is a message from Publishers to Retailers to shelve these books where they can be noticed by readers who may or may not be the right age to read them, and would probably notice them had they been shelved in the standard genre stacks they were already used to perusing for new material anyway (what with being "readers" and all). That about the gist?  |
Absolutely agreed!
Quote:
Originally Posted by ZodWallop
I've never read Patterson.
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I didn't mind some of his earlier stuff but have managed to steer largely clear of him for years. His writing style is actually on the simplistic side, which is not at all meant to demean him or imply that it is sub-standard. His sales figures say otherwise. But I think most of his work that I have read would be quite at home with a YA label, except for the themes.