Very insightful, Kate. Learned tons about YA traditional publishing. The point about not obsessing about trends surprised me. I had believed that traditional publishers were all about cashing into trends (see Twilight=more vampire fiction. Hunger Games=more dystopian fiction)
Anyone interested in working with Kate Angelella, you can reach out to her here: Absolutely, you can reach out to Kate anytime here: reedsy.com/kate-angelella
Oh MT Anderson's Feed - my all-time favorite YA narrative voice. When I read it for the first time I was like wow - it must take so much work and practice to craft such a tight narrative voice. I was blown away. Thank you - this is very helpful. I'm still working on my YA novel and have gotten much of this advice but your insights offer nuances that have helped me to clarify my choices and given me direction and points for revision.
Million dollar idea: a super meta website/blog where Holden Caulfield writes insufferable, but somewhat insightful, reviews of different YA books, and gives his thoughts on various plot points and characters, judging them on the basis of an arbitrarily designed “phoniness scale”. It would be interesting to know what the OG YA protagonist would think of his modern descendants.
I'm currently writing a YA sci-fi story. Some of these tips really help. It's actually my first YA, so lots of learning. I usually do adult and middle grade.
So I believe my novel is between YA and Adult. It takes place in 1340AD but in its own universe. The main character, Catharina, sees her own mother kill herself at the very beginning. Thus throwing her into the rebellious 19 girl that she is. Basically its a novel about conquering, conquest, and death. My novel can be summed up as a series of battles and realizations. The point is, almost everyone dies at the end due to their beliefs and desires. The MC(Catharina) throws herself off the tallest peak of her home country. She does this because everyone and everything she cared for died because of her. She realized that and just couldn’t take it. Book ended.
If deep topics such as existentialism, anthropological difference and repressed sexuality are main themes in the story can it still be considered YA? If there's no whacky humour in the story can it still be considered YA? I'm very confused about this bc I never liked YA novels as a teenager yet I really want to write about young people for young people.
As far as novels if it were a perfect world novels would defy catagory and alot of times even if your idea for a story might be a good story you might have to either alter stuff or remove thing that was perfectly good ideas in order to fit into a specific catagory and therefore you might not be able to write something the way you specifically want it to write it that is if you want to get something published.
New Adult and Young Adult are often confused with one another because of the word adult so therefore late teens and early twenties might be confused with young adult.
Thanks for making this video and one thing i want to mention is you should have a script or a topic page that would make you video more shoter and you don't have to think while recording the video what to say next 😇😇😇
I find that old people put themselves in the shoes of teenagers and try to write in that way, and it’s usually just absolutely cringey to read because it’s so off
That’s where you separate the good writers and bad writers. It’s their ability to pull that off. It’s also less about the age and more about the personality of that character
I'm sorry, Simon & Schuster (and all other publishers who made this happen), but teens below 19 are NOT adults unless they're all magically 18, so restricting YA to teens 13-18 is bullshit, and not having a separate category of novels FOR and ABOUT teens but marketed to adults in the US (because there is--gasp!--sex) is ridiculous. This makes me want to move to France. Okay, a lot of things do, to be fair. And Christians want to know why I'm agnosgtic and non-religious... The French are MORE Catholic than the Americans are Christian, and yet they don't have this pathetic problem of pretending like teen hormones are not a reality of life (and a beautiful reality at that). Pffft! No, but seriously, why is YA not actually about and for YOUNG ADULTS. "New" adults? Pathetic again... As previously stated, those 13-17 ARE NOT ADULTS, so how did this come about?
Fuck it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to write an INTENTIONALLY "MA" or "NC-17" YA novel and market it as such. I bet a top publisher would take it on if Amazon was fine with it, unlike half the cinema chains with NC-17 films (though clearly Netflix and HBO are down).
