YA and OK
Margo Rabb’s essay in last weekend’s NYT Book Review opens with good news and bad news: the good news being Random House made an offer on her book within twenty-four hours, the bad news being Random House wanted to publish it as a Young Adult (YA) book.
Rabb writes, “My literary novel about death and grief, which I’d worked on for eight years, was a young adult book?” At MacDowell, a fellow writer said, “That’s such a shame.” Rabb quotes children’s author Mark Haddon (who also wrote the adult book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) on people’s reactions to his work as an author of children’s books: “as if I painted watercolors of cats or performed as a clown at parties.”
While in the UK, such crossover books are often sold in both sections of the bookstore, American publishing hasn’t quite gotten there. But while it may seem initially disappointing for an author to find his or her book envisioned as YA instead of adult, it’s becoming increasingly common to find familiar authors in the YA section (among them, Sherman Alexie, A.M. Homes, James Patterson, and many others). It can be a tough call, when a book is somewhere in between. Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Prep, before being published as an adult book, was initially rejected by 14 editors who thought it was YA. Sittenfeld said, “You write the book you want to write, and then publishing has its way with it.”
And authors would do well to be flexible about the marketing of their books. Alexie’s first Y.A. novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, won the National Book Award for young people’s literature last year, at which point he said, “I obviously should’ve been writing Y.A. all along.”