Young Adult Fiction: An Editor's Viewpoint

The department I work in publishes, among others, young adult books. By "young adult books" I mean, broadly, books for readers who are between childhood and adulthood.

We do virtually no young adult nonfiction. One collection of poems and one biography are the only young adult nonfiction books we have produced in the three years I've been there. While nonfiction books published by the adult trade imprints of Random House regularly find their way onto the Best Books for Young Adults list, young adult nonfiction published by the Books for Young Readers department has not sold well enough in the past to encourage our efforts in that direction.

We do publish young adult fiction, by such authors as Robert Cormier, Robin Brancato, Sue Ellen Bridgers, Susan Shreve, Avi, Winifred Rosen, and Bette Greene. And we do so with remarkable consistency: four young adult books in 1981, four in 1982, five in 1983, two in the works for spring 1984.

Like many numbers, these don't tell the whole story. First: of the fifteen young adult books I've just referred to, nine are by authors who had published young adult books with Knopf and Pantheon before 1981. There is very little new blood.

Second, while the number of YA's on these seven lists has averaged a very consistent two, the total size of the list has grown from fifteen books, in the spring of 1981, to a projected twenty-seven for spring 1984. Proportionately, we're publishing only about half as many YA's as we did three years ago.

Why?

Well, it isn't because there are fewer young people out there. That's for sure.

What are the other possibilities? A number of economic factors have cut into the institutional market for children's books, including YA's: the overall downturn in the economy, the increased cost of book production, the cutbacks in library funding. Young adult hardcover books have traditionally sold primarily to the institutional market, with little or no sale through bookstores. In the past, publishers of these books looked to income from the sale of paperback rights to make up for the modest expectations from hardcover sales. But recently, paperback houses have been offering less money than formerly for the rights to hardcover books, and for many books they are offering nothing at all. It has become more cost efficient for paperback publishers to originate their own projects than to buy the rights to hardcover originals. Nowadays a young adult title, like any other title, won't necessarily have the help of a subsidiary rights sale to pay its way.

This increased economic pressure had undoubtedly led to a tightening of editorial control. We are certainly in no great hurry to publish young adult books we feel are marginal. But then we never were. No, the diminished role of young adult titles on our list doesn't result from a change in editorial policy.

I think it's safe to say we publish proportionately fewer young adult books because we receive proportionately fewer publishable projects for the young adult age group. There may be any number of explanations for this. For one thing, a certain number of writers are now selling their work directly to paperback publishers. But I see the dearth of good young adult submissions as indicative of something more widespread. It seems to me that at this point in our history, speaking from the viewpoint of an editor of hardcover books, young adult literature is an endangered species. To show how I arrived at this conclusion, I'd like to share with you my highly subjective notion of where young adult literature came from.

Once upon a time, when my mother was a girl, there were two kinds of clothes for females: girls' and women's. So what if you had already outgrown a girls' size 14 at the age of ten, or if you were still small enough to wear a girls' size 10 at the age of fourteen! Then someone clever out there in marketing land invented "subdebs" and "junior misses." And then came teen sizes, and young...