Trends in YA and Middle Grade publishing
July 26, 2024 11:36 AM Subscribe
Some years ago I read an article about the history of the YA novel which posited that YA is a marketing term. (Example: The Outsiders probably would have been marketed as a YA novel today but the category didn’t exist then). I’m looking for historical information about YA and middle grade novels.
Specifically:
- when did the YA novel come to be?
- what were (or are) the “boom times” for YA novels in terms of sales? In terms of readership
- when did the middle grade novel come to be?
- what were (or are) the “boom times” for middle grade novels?
This is for a professional development day for educators as background information on reading and culture of reading.
Specifically:
- when did the YA novel come to be?
- what were (or are) the “boom times” for YA novels in terms of sales? In terms of readership
- when did the middle grade novel come to be?
- what were (or are) the “boom times” for middle grade novels?
This is for a professional development day for educators as background information on reading and culture of reading.
I'm a big fan of middle grades books.
My great grandma, grandma, and mom were all elementary school teachers; my grandma was even an elementary principal, and my mom exclusively taught 4th grade for 40 years. They are also all book hoarders. I grew up in a house with hundreds and hundreds of middle grades books, and I read most of them.
The concept of a middle grades book, with or without that specific naming convention (also: juvenile book), has formally existed since at least the 1920s when the Newbery Medal was established.
Anecdotally, based on the books I had access to, middle grades books hit a boom in the late 40s and really never stopped. You just had different trends and eras.
posted by phunniemee at 11:55 AM on July 26, 2024 [2 favorites]
My great grandma, grandma, and mom were all elementary school teachers; my grandma was even an elementary principal, and my mom exclusively taught 4th grade for 40 years. They are also all book hoarders. I grew up in a house with hundreds and hundreds of middle grades books, and I read most of them.
The concept of a middle grades book, with or without that specific naming convention (also: juvenile book), has formally existed since at least the 1920s when the Newbery Medal was established.
Anecdotally, based on the books I had access to, middle grades books hit a boom in the late 40s and really never stopped. You just had different trends and eras.
posted by phunniemee at 11:55 AM on July 26, 2024 [2 favorites]
I'm really sorry to answer this way, but this Wikipedia page seems to have a decent overview. You might be thinking of Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn rather than the Outsiders?
I am a literature librarian, but not a YA literature librarian, but I can poke around some for middle grades as a named and defined category. It's a good question. The Newberry tends to lean more towards what we think of as children's lit, I think.
posted by bluedaisy at 12:27 PM on July 26, 2024
I am a literature librarian, but not a YA literature librarian, but I can poke around some for middle grades as a named and defined category. It's a good question. The Newberry tends to lean more towards what we think of as children's lit, I think.
posted by bluedaisy at 12:27 PM on July 26, 2024
This 'middle grade' term is new to me. I went to Junior High, not Middle School (this was a long time ago) and those novels I was enjoying most (say between grades 5-9) all had a "J" on their spine. But the best room in the new library at that time was where all these books were shelved, which was labeled the Young Adult Room. So, Juvenile transitioning to YA in the mid-1960s?
posted by Rash at 12:30 PM on July 26, 2024
posted by Rash at 12:30 PM on July 26, 2024
Middle grades (juvenile) books are aimed at readers who are 8-12 years old and typically have protagonists who are in their tweens. They aren't children's books (themes are more complex and often sad or socially distressing) and there's typically zero romance or violence like there's plenty of in YA. Every Newbery book I've read or am familiar with fits in this category. I'm sure there have been some that are pushing the low side of that age range but they're the exception.
IMO the gold standard of a middle grades book is Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry. Beautifully written and heartbreaking story, delivered to an audience who is old enough to understand and still young enough to be changed by it.
posted by phunniemee at 12:42 PM on July 26, 2024 [1 favorite]
IMO the gold standard of a middle grades book is Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry. Beautifully written and heartbreaking story, delivered to an audience who is old enough to understand and still young enough to be changed by it.
posted by phunniemee at 12:42 PM on July 26, 2024 [1 favorite]
Best answer: Roger Sutton, the former editor of the excellent children's literature review journal The Horn Book, identifies a few different "waves" of young adult literature (unfortunately, the article is paywalled, but here's the citation if you want to look it up: Sutton, Roger. “Problems, Paperbacks, and the Printz: Forty Years of YA Books.” Horn Book Magazine, vol. 83, no. 3, May 2007, pp. 231–43. EBSCOhost)
The first wave is right after WWII and was categorized as "junior novels," including those by Mary Stolz. 17th Summer by Maureen Daly (1942) fits in with these and is sometimes called the first young adult novel.
The second wave is the late 1960s. The Outsiders is in here, along with Paul Zindel, Lois Duncan, the early problem novels, including Judy Blume's Forever in 1975...
But it still isn't entirely wrong to say that young adult didn't really exist as a publishing category in the 1960s-1970s. There weren't separate publishing imprints for it. There often wasn't a separate section at the bookstore for it. Increasingly (and since the 1940s), librarians had been creating separate sections for books that would have teen appeal, and an article in The Atlantic discussed The Outsiders as an example of "books for teen-agers" (alas, I don't have digital access to this)... so maybe it would be more accurate to say that this was part of the transition toward young adult books being recognized as a separate category, in the same way that all the rock bands of the early 1960s were categorized as "pop music," and it's only towards the end of the 60s that we got a really firm sense of "rock" and "pop" as separate categories.
I think that part of this was that The Outsiders and the books that came after it really made people aware that there should be a young adult category: books that were perceived as being too mature or serious or racy to belong side-by-side with the books for nine-year-olds.
For middle grade - there's a sense in which middle grade novels have been around for a very long time. The Secret Garden (1911) and Charlotte's Web (1952) are middle-grade novels. But the term is pretty new. It was around during the 80s-90s, but it was mostly publishing jargon; there's only been a Wikipedia page for the term since 2014. My sense here is that this is driven by market segmentation, and the fact that in order to sell anything, you need to be able to articulate very precisely who you're selling to. And it used to be that public libraries and school libraries were a massive part of the children's book market - and they still are a massive part of the children's book market, but children and teens have more money of their own these days, they have more purchasing power, children and teens are buying more of their own books these days, and publishers have to care more about being able to market directly to children and their parents.
posted by Jeanne at 1:03 PM on July 26, 2024 [8 favorites]
The first wave is right after WWII and was categorized as "junior novels," including those by Mary Stolz. 17th Summer by Maureen Daly (1942) fits in with these and is sometimes called the first young adult novel.
The second wave is the late 1960s. The Outsiders is in here, along with Paul Zindel, Lois Duncan, the early problem novels, including Judy Blume's Forever in 1975...
But it still isn't entirely wrong to say that young adult didn't really exist as a publishing category in the 1960s-1970s. There weren't separate publishing imprints for it. There often wasn't a separate section at the bookstore for it. Increasingly (and since the 1940s), librarians had been creating separate sections for books that would have teen appeal, and an article in The Atlantic discussed The Outsiders as an example of "books for teen-agers" (alas, I don't have digital access to this)... so maybe it would be more accurate to say that this was part of the transition toward young adult books being recognized as a separate category, in the same way that all the rock bands of the early 1960s were categorized as "pop music," and it's only towards the end of the 60s that we got a really firm sense of "rock" and "pop" as separate categories.
I think that part of this was that The Outsiders and the books that came after it really made people aware that there should be a young adult category: books that were perceived as being too mature or serious or racy to belong side-by-side with the books for nine-year-olds.
For middle grade - there's a sense in which middle grade novels have been around for a very long time. The Secret Garden (1911) and Charlotte's Web (1952) are middle-grade novels. But the term is pretty new. It was around during the 80s-90s, but it was mostly publishing jargon; there's only been a Wikipedia page for the term since 2014. My sense here is that this is driven by market segmentation, and the fact that in order to sell anything, you need to be able to articulate very precisely who you're selling to. And it used to be that public libraries and school libraries were a massive part of the children's book market - and they still are a massive part of the children's book market, but children and teens have more money of their own these days, they have more purchasing power, children and teens are buying more of their own books these days, and publishers have to care more about being able to market directly to children and their parents.
posted by Jeanne at 1:03 PM on July 26, 2024 [8 favorites]
Response by poster: Jeanne, I’m almost certain this is the exact article I read before! Thanks! I have a follow up or a twist if that’s allowed: I am going to be speaking to educators and as some of you may know, not all educators are reader. (And according to PEW a typical American reads 4 books a year.) I’d like to talk about why educators should use some of their limited time to read middle grade and one of the points I wanted to make is that there’s a LOT more middle grade fiction now than when they were that age and because of that there’s a lot of variety and quality to pick from. Can I back up this point with data or examples?
posted by CMcG at 1:11 PM on July 26, 2024
posted by CMcG at 1:11 PM on July 26, 2024
CMcG, I don't know if I could back that up with hard data. But I would just point to books like Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky, or Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee, or A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcy Little Badger, or Iveliz Explains It All (which seriously made me cry...) books that are trying really hard to be engaging and exciting and relevant.
posted by Jeanne at 1:26 PM on July 26, 2024 [2 favorites]
posted by Jeanne at 1:26 PM on July 26, 2024 [2 favorites]
A brief history of young adult literature (CNN, updated April 15, 2015)
Who Is YA For? (Editors discuss the category’s shifting boundaries; Publishers Weekly Oct. 13 2023)
Young People Are Reading More Than You (McSweeneys, Feb. 8, 2011; non-satirical with interesting statistics; part of its 'state of publishing' column)
posted by Iris Gambol at 1:41 PM on July 26, 2024 [1 favorite]
Who Is YA For? (Editors discuss the category’s shifting boundaries; Publishers Weekly Oct. 13 2023)
Young People Are Reading More Than You (McSweeneys, Feb. 8, 2011; non-satirical with interesting statistics; part of its 'state of publishing' column)
posted by Iris Gambol at 1:41 PM on July 26, 2024 [1 favorite]
I read Sylvia Engdahl's account of her life and various of her other essays on her site yesterday, and she makes the point in a couple of places that she has lost readers and sales because "young adult" wasn't a fully recognised genre when she started writing.
I was fortunate in having written it [published 1970] just at a time when a trend toward issuing more mature fiction as “young adult” was beginning. For of course, Enchantress was never intended for preadolescent children, and its Newbery Honor status was therefore somewhat misleading. ...posted by paduasoy at 1:44 PM on July 26, 2024
The reason I mind being classed with children’s authors is that it tends to prevent my books from being found by the majority of readers most apt to like them. Teenagers do not consider themselves children, after all. Comparatively few of them visit the children’s rooms of libraries. The larger libraries shelve extra copies of my novels in their young adult or adult collections; that’s where teenagers are most likely to come across them. ... the “junior” label limits my audience, especially by keeping my books out of high school libraries ...
bluedaisy is right to point to much earlier material that we would now call middle grade or YA. For didactic fiction in particular there's no doubt the audience was in those age groups, e.g. A Peep into London for Good Children (1809) was clearly aimed at very young readers, but A Family Tour through the British Empire ... Particularly Adapted to the Amusement and Instruction of Youth (originally 1804) is just as visibly a long fictional narrative aimed at more advanced middle grade or YA readers.
There are many similar examples, e.g. the novelist Charlotte Turner Smith's Conversations Introducing Poetry ... For the Use of Children and Young Persons in 1804 was in a sub-genre of textbooks in dialogue, common ca. 1795-1815 or so.
We remember all kinds of classics that might work for young adults in part because they might work for adults too, e.g. the novels Robert Louis Stevenson serialized in Young Folks, but by that time--late 1800s--churning out novels for teens was totally a thing, e.g. the dozens of teen adventure novels by G.A. Henty.
Just in terms of labeling, the Google n-gram viewer shows the use of the terms juvenile literature vs. young adult literature, etc. over time and tends to indicate there was continuity in these categories from roughly 1880 to the present. Juvenile may have always been usable as a pejorative but it was still common when I was a kid in the 1970s to call a lot of fiction "juveniles." Anyway, I'd suggest browsing online collections of historical children's lit to see how much of it might fit the history you're assembling.
posted by Wobbuffet at 2:00 PM on July 26, 2024 [2 favorites]
There are many similar examples, e.g. the novelist Charlotte Turner Smith's Conversations Introducing Poetry ... For the Use of Children and Young Persons in 1804 was in a sub-genre of textbooks in dialogue, common ca. 1795-1815 or so.
We remember all kinds of classics that might work for young adults in part because they might work for adults too, e.g. the novels Robert Louis Stevenson serialized in Young Folks, but by that time--late 1800s--churning out novels for teens was totally a thing, e.g. the dozens of teen adventure novels by G.A. Henty.
Just in terms of labeling, the Google n-gram viewer shows the use of the terms juvenile literature vs. young adult literature, etc. over time and tends to indicate there was continuity in these categories from roughly 1880 to the present. Juvenile may have always been usable as a pejorative but it was still common when I was a kid in the 1970s to call a lot of fiction "juveniles." Anyway, I'd suggest browsing online collections of historical children's lit to see how much of it might fit the history you're assembling.
posted by Wobbuffet at 2:00 PM on July 26, 2024 [2 favorites]
Best answer: Michael Cart is a librarian and expert on the topic of YA literature. You might be interested in his book, Young Adult Literature: From Romance To Realism. It's in the fourth edition now, but there are older editions for less, and check your local library for editions if you don't want to buy. And here's the text of a talk he gave on the exact topic.
posted by bluedaisy at 5:07 PM on July 26, 2024 [4 favorites]
posted by bluedaisy at 5:07 PM on July 26, 2024 [4 favorites]
I looked into this when I joined a writer's FB group, and I was told, anecdotally, that one of the reasons YA came to be was how libraries stock the shelves. Teenagers don't want to get their books from "children's" section full of picture books. Eventually libraries and publishers created separate categories / sections for middle grade and YA. I have no idea how apocrythal this may be.
posted by kschang at 8:34 AM on July 27, 2024 [1 favorite]
posted by kschang at 8:34 AM on July 27, 2024 [1 favorite]
I'm sure that's exactly why my library created a Young Adult room (which nowadays would be labeled The Teen Zone, or something) - teenagers don't want to read kids' books. And the little kids don't like the big kids hanging around.
posted by Rash at 9:25 AM on July 27, 2024
posted by Rash at 9:25 AM on July 27, 2024
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posted by CMcG at 11:38 AM on July 26, 2024