Genre, Forms and Marketing Terms in the YA and Children's Markets

I frequently hear people refer to picture books, graphic novels and YA fiction as genres. So to clear this up once and for all, here's a cheat sheet:

A Form

A form refers to what the thing is, not what it's about. Not its content, but how that content is delivered. Its format.

Examples: Novels, short stories, comics, picture books, poems.


A Genre

Genre is a way to categorize stories by content usually based on the tropes and conventions that distinguish them.

Examples: Science Fiction, Mystery, Romance.

Fiction that doesn't fit in a particular genre is by default referred to as "literary fiction" but this doesn't necessarily make genre fiction any less literary. In the past if you wanted to write literature with a capital "L" it couldn't contain genre tropes, but this is changing.

Non fiction genres would include history, biography, autobiography or anything in the realm of the arts and sciences that you could put a general category around.

Genre can also be discussed in terms of form, but in a story sense rather than in a format sense. This has  more to do with structure than category.

Picture Books vs. Storybooks

The true picture book is equally dependent on words and pictures. Take out the pictures and it wouldn't make any sense. Some picture books work just fine without any words at all. Picture books like comics fall within the general area of sequential art--stories told with pictures set in sequence.

 Storybooks, and there are fewer and fewer of them these days, are illustrated prose, but with lots and lots of pictures. Storybooks fall into a looser formal category because some of them can just as easily fall in the realm of novels or illustrated short stories.

Great Picture Books Are Great Literature!

Nothing to add here. I just thought it needed to be said.

A Marketing Term

This is how you categorize books in order the sell them. The difference between a genre and a marketing term is that marketing terms don't necessarily dictate content. Note: I said, "not necessarily." Sometimes genre in itself can serve as a marketing term. But what I'm referring to here specifically is terms like "Young Adult."

Young Adult Fiction is any fiction that contains characters in their teens as protagonists. This does not necessarily refer to the sophistication of the writing, and does not refer to genre. It can refer to reading level--young adult tends to be written at a higher level than middle grade or early reader--but not necessarily.

Middle Grade Fiction is a marketing term for books written for ages 8 to 12.

Early Reader and Early Reader Chapter Books are books written for ages 5 to 7. These are the earliest books for young readers that have chapters in them.

And here's the kicker: Graphic Novels are actually, believe it or not, comic books. There's no real page limitation, it's just a self-contained comic book with a beginning, middle and end. In fact, even that might be stretching it. This is simply a term used by booksellers to sell any comic book that is not in periodical form. And just as comic books aren't necessarily comic, or books, graphic novels aren't necessarily novels, and just what a novel in comics form might be is a contentious debate that I don't even want to touch here.

 So there you have it. Not a genre, and not exactly a form, since a graphic novel could be just as easily the equivalent of a short story as a novel. Maybe even a poem. The term makes all of this all the more confusing to the new initiate, and has caused a lot of eye rolling from a lot of frustrated cartoonists who have long been ambivalent about the term.

How the Marketplace has Changed How We Read

There's been a recent push towards getting kids to graduate more quickly from picture books to chapter books. The storybook, the natural intermediary has gone out of vogue. There's more of a concentration on getting kids to progress developmentally than to have them simply read good books. Books with chapters and more words somehow equal a greater level of sophistication, when this isn't necessarily the case at all. Some of the best picture books have very advanced vocabulary, especially those that were written before the last decade. Picture books can be some of the greatest literature there is.

More recently word counts for picture books have diminished. 500 to 700 words has become the standard. Chapter books and Middle Grade books follow a similarly rigid format. These formats are so specific that books like Winnie the Pooh or anything at all written by Beatrice Potter are hard to market strictly on the basis of format in the current environment. It's telling that there are so many modern versions of these stories abridged to match the current industry standards. Look up Peter Rabbit and you'll find anything from board books for toddlers to picture books that contain simple variations on Potter's text, sometimes replacing Potter's illustrations with illustrations that look more contemporary. The Potter originals are thought to be a hard sell not because of how well they might hold up to a contemporary audience but because they don't fit in with a publishers Early Reader list. They're not the right word count. They can't put a "for ages 5 to 7" sticker on the front

Beatrix who?

On the plus side, the quality and sophistication of content of the young adult book has expanded dramatically, particularly in the fantasy genre due in large part to the success of Harry Potter, technically a middle grade book. When I was a kid there were few books around for the YA fantasy market as sophisticated and progressive as A Wrinkle In Time. Now I could name dozens. The appeal of these books has widened and they've even garnered a considerable adult audience. now YA, or at least YA fantasy is one of the few growing markets in fiction.

So kids, especially teens are reading, and reading more. There's a whole new generation of enthusiastic young readers. But the market place, at the same time, has become more conservative, and readers expectations have become more specific. We'll see what happens.

Messiah Stories in Contemporary YA Fantasy

1.

Protagonist is born with a special talent because of his/her lineage. His/her parents may be keeping this secret from the protagonist, or they may be dead, or he/she may be adopted, or one parent may be absent, and the absent parent may have a special power or may otherwise be a stand-in for God. Of course, specialness can take on many forms, and doesn't necessarily involve superpowers, but generally, it does.

2.

Protagonist discovers said talent when they come of age, and are initiated by a mentor or mentors. Protagonist discovers that he/she must use said talent against the forces of evil, usually one particular antagonist. Despite the awesomeness of their circumstances, the protagonist is at first reluctant to take on this new responsibility, but eventually they give in. They may be fulfilling some prophesy, or they may be the world's only hope. If the author has decided to just screw it and nail the point home by hitting it square on the nose, the protagonist will be referred to as "The Chosen One."

3.

Usually the evil antagonist is exceedingly boring and lacks complexity. Usually wears a cape. May or may not be horribly disfigured. The disfigured are bad. The color black, is bad. 

4.

Insert love interest here.

5.

When called upon to do so, the protagonist rises to the occasion, conquering the evil with not just their power, but their cunning. 

6.

Repeat for as many sequels as you can draw the sucker out for. 

And no I'm not only talking about that book, the book that must not be named. I'm sure you can come up with at least a dozen others that follow the same pattern, even if you don't read young adult fiction. YA isn't the only guilty party. But seriously, I think we can do better. 

What Would Jesus Do?

So Jesus starts out with circumstance number one, but rather than a stand-in for God, it's God himself. Then there are those missing years. Jesus may have had a mentor. Who knows? What we do know is that he had magic powers, but he didn't exactly use those powers to fight the forces of evil. Jesus mostly just talked a lot. He preached. He told people to be humble, and to be nicer to eachother. And what happens in the end? Does he conquer the forces of evil? Well, not exactly. The Gospels really aren't about the devil. It's a more complex, richer story for its ambiguity. It doesn't take the low road by presenting us with easy villains. People are flawed, and Jesus acknowledges that even he, is flawed.

 There's your messiah story, but it's just not exciting enough. Where are the capes? Where's the love interest? 

I'm not a religious person, but I will say, as messiahs go, Jesus makes for a more intriguing and complex messiah than Harry Potter, or Luke Skywalker, or any number of others. 

No More Villains and Messiahs Please

It's harder to write a compelling story without a villain, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. You don't have to preach to your readers to give them something other than black hats and white hats. Your protagonist doesn't have to be Jesus or any other messiah. You can have all the spaceships and dragons you want--who doesn't like spaceships and dragons? But you can still rewrite the script. That doesn't mean eliminate conflict, but not all antagonists have to be quite so antagonistic. People are more complex than that. People are people. Villains are plot devices. So please, please, write something different. Your readers deserve it.

The Unsympathetic, Unredeemable Antagonist: From Fables to Fantasy, The Achilles Heel of Genre Fiction

I grew up on Science Fiction and Fantasy stories. Loved them. From my childhood to my teenage years I read almost nothing else. From my very first fairy tales, to the books I read as a teen, there were inevitably bad guys. The best were the science fiction stories that were more about ideas than battles between good and evil, books by writers like Theodore Sturgeon and Phillip K. Dick, and these were my favorites, but even Sturgeon and P.K. Dick resorted to bad guys in their weakest moments.



The Epic of Gilgamesh: Literature's first Redeemable Villain

Bad Guys have been the anchor of Fables for as long as there have been fables. But not always, and not all of them. The oldest written fable on record, The Epic Gilgamesh, is about a tyrant who redeems himself. So precedent tells us that we've known how to tell a different kind of story for a very long time. But still, we resort to unsympathetic, unredeemable antagonists more often than not. The bad guy continues to appear, particularly in genre fiction, over and over and over again. And it's not only in genre fiction that this occurs, but genre fiction is the most guilty of the trend, since genre fiction most often employs the purest of archetypes, the evil, unredeemable villain, more force of nature than character, the simplest and most basic way to anchor your plot, since there's no easier way to generate instant conflict that has an easy resolution than the unredeemable villain. No matter how many ways you decide to twist the plot, the resolution is always simple: vanquish the villain. If you want to resolve your story irrevocably, killing the villain is the best way. If you want your protagonist to sustain their purity, have them offer the villain redemption before the villain dies of his own folly. There is also no better way not to challenge your reader, to provide them the neatest and easiest form of black and white morality.

The Influence of Harry Potter on Young Adult Fiction



My most frequent form of reading these days is--and sometimes I hate to admit it--but the way I'm able to read as much as I'd like to and still be as productive as I need to be, is to listen to audiobooks. In the last few years, since it's been my goal to write young adult fantasy fiction, I've listened to well over 200 genre young adult novels. I cannot think of one of them, not a single one, that hasn't anchored itself on an unsympathetic, unredeemable antagonist. The most popular and enduringly popular series of book in the Young Adult market, the series that single-handedly revived the young adult market and got millions and millions of kids to read again, is anchored on this very device: the Harry Potter series.

I'll admit that I've yet to read any of the books. In fact, I've avoided them for the most snobbish of reasons: I'm suspicious of anything so popular. I've read, and enjoyed other popular books, so distaste for the Harry Potter series is for entirely personal and less than objective reasons. I did begin one of the books and immediately put it down, not giving it the least of a chance. So any qualitative evaluation of them is more than presumptuous, and I hate to hinge my opinion of the books on the worst excuse imaginable, that I've seen most of the movies, but I've seen most of the movies. Movies have a way or reducing the complexity of books, of distilling hundreds of pages into as few as 90 minutes. And here's another horrible excuse for my assumptions: someone I know has read the books and confirmed my opinion. That someone is my wife, so I consider her a reliable source, but still, it's a lousy excuse.

So I will concede that I could be very wrong about the Harry Potter series. But I'm probably not. My opinion is not a qualitative one, but the simple assumption that the books offers us a bad guy, an unredeemable villain, and the resolution of the books offers us the death of that villain. If I am wrong, please correct me. If I'm wrong, I'm doing an injustice to a book that I admit, I've never read. Unredeemable villains by no means negate the quality of a great work of fiction. There are many great works of fiction that follow this exact same pattern. So I wouldn't presume to judge the quality of the books, or whether or not they represent the best of what young adult fiction has to offer, but from everything I've been able to gather, Harry Potter is a classic tale of good versus evil, and my best guess is that it follows the same essential pattern of the vast majority of stories about good versus evil as earlier described.

I can't blame Harry Potter so much on the trend, since it's a trend that dominates most all of the fictional media we consume. It does, however, account for the dominance of fantasy fiction in books targeted at young adults. Now that teens are reading more than ever, this is the kind of book that they tend to read. Again: no surprise, and nothing new. But now that we've got their attention, now that we've gotten kids to read, why not use it as an opportunity to give them something else?

Why Feeding Children and Teens Nothing but Tales of Good versus Evil Can Contribute to Making Them Less Empathetic Adults

There are often said to be only a few basic plots that most stories follow, of stories of conflict and resolution, and the fact that many of these follow the pattern that I've described would be a facile way to condemn them. I am not condemning every good versus evil parable as a failure. I am condemning, however, the pervasiveness of the trend. So whats wrong with a good old fashioned tale of good versus evil? It's what all of us have grown up on, and most of us consider our sense of morality to be reasonable and just, but I think that these kinds of stories have effected our sense of empathy more than we would care to admit.

We may try to teach children to search for redeemable qualities in people who have done them wrong, to find forgiveness for people who have hurt them, but the stories that have shaped their sense of morality, that have encouraged them to root for all of those good guys so often and so vehemently, has given them the easiest reason to condemn them. Even as our sense of morality evolves, the reflex to demonize is something that so many of us carry from childhood to adulthood. I don't think that stories about good versus evil are the cause. It's a natural enough human tendency. But stories about good versus evil reinforce this distilled sense of black and white morality, and if you don't offer an alternate narrative, it becomes harder for us to learn to truly empathize with those who are responsible for even the most minor injustices in our lives. Our immediate reaction is to condemn. But empathy, and the evolution of our empathy should be a natural part of becoming an adult.

Authors: You, Yes You, Can Provide Children and Young Adults With a Different Narrative

This is why I think that it's the imperative of the people that tell stories to children to offer a alternative narrative. There are many different kinds of conflict. All stories don't have to have antagonists, but antagonists are often a critical part of genre fiction. But all antagonists do not have to be villains. Villains portrayed as evil and unredeemable not only reduce your conflict to a black and white morality tale, but they make your stories less complex, and less interesting. The key to great character development is identification. If your reader can identify with some aspect of the character, if they can have a sense of what it's like to be in that character's shoes, it enriches their understanding of what it's like to be a person. It provides a model for empathizing with real life people whose motives and actions you don't always agree with.

Right now, in young adult fiction in particular, we're failing miserably to do this. Right now, as young adult authors, you have the attention of young adult readers in a way that hasn't had precedent in many many years. So if you've presented the reader with a morally questionable antagonist, how can you make the reader better understand their motivations? How can you allow your readers to empathize with someone with whom it isn't easy to empathize with? Stories with redeemable, but flawed characters are better stories. The more that you allow your reader to identify with your characters, with all of your characters, or at least your principal characters, the richer your story becomes.

Why Kids Need Scary Stories

The first printed stories for children were based on folktales. From the Brother's Grimm to the English penny dreadfuls, stories for children weren't occasionally scary, they were practically always scary. And these weren't just a little bit scary. These stories were terrifying. Witches ate children. Giants ate children. People were tortured and murdered and otherwise dismembered. For some reason the German's were particularly good at this, but it was a tradition that went back long before The Brother's Grimm:






A popular character from English folklore, Krampus would collect bad children on Christmas, put them in chains and steal them away in a barrel.

The Brothers Grimm collected folktales that were told for generations.

You can sugar coat it all you want...





That witch wants to eat those kids.



With these classic tales, illustrators working today, for some reason, are given a little more latitude than they are with more contemporary material. Here's one of my favorite contemporary versions of the story illustrated by Lisbeth Zwerger:



One of my favorite German children's books was a book written and illustrated by Heinrich Hoffman. It was originally released with a title that translates as, Funny Stories and Whimsical Pictures with 15 Beautifully Coloured Panels for Children Aged 3 to 6, and later released under the better known title of Struwwelpeter. In Struwwelpeter, there's a story about a about a girl who plays with matches who burns to death. There's another story in which a boy is warned not to suck on his thumbs. When he fails to take heed, a tailor comes to cut his thumbs off with giant scissors.

Oh, he doesn't threaten to cut them off--he cuts them off...



Recently, children's author and illustrator Bob Staake did my favorite version of Struwwelpeter to date, when he was asked by progressive publisher Fantagraphics if there was any book he wanted to do that traditional publishers wouldn't allow him to do.





I'm not sure that a lot of parents bought this one, but they should have!

One of my favorite Russian Folktale characters is Baba Yaga. Baba Yaga is a witch with long spindly legs who lives in a cabin that walks around on giant chicken feet. She might help you out, or she might eat you (and she dines principally on children, of course), depending on her mood at the time.



And then there are the French and the English. Here's a charming illustration by Gustave Dore for Tom Thumb...



Now this isn't exactly the version of Tom Thumb that I would suggest you read to your kids, but it might have been more appropriate at the time. But I'll get into that more, in a moment.

Jack the giant killer...



Well, killed giants.

You can sugar coat it all you want...



But the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk "smells the blood of a an Englishman" because he wants to eat Englishmen.



So why are these stories so scary? Were parents trying to torture their children? The way some of these tales were told did have something to do with a less enlightened form of child rearing, but the harsh morals became more obvious as times became more puritanical. The earliest of these stories didn't typically have an obvious moral. Maybe the moral of Hansel and Gretel is "be resourceful" or "avoid temptation", but whatever the moral, it wasn't quite as in your face as Struwwelpeter. I don't think the moral was the objective of the story. So what was the objective, beyond telling a compelling story?

"Objective" might be overstating it. Theres no denying that violent stories are compelling. The threat of violence is the easiest way to put your character in jeopardy. But I think there's another reason these stories are so brutal, even if it wasn't a conscious one. Before modern medicine, children were surrounded by death; death in childbirth, death by disease, death from violent mishap. People simply didn't live as long, and you never knew when someone you loved or cared for might die some horrible death. I think these kinds of stories served as a buffer for that. As a safe container for, and point of transition to accepting real death and real violent misfortune.

One interpretation of the classic Beauty and the Beast tale reflects another reality of the time: young girls were often married off to older men of means who were thought to be able to better provide for them. The story was a metaphor for discovering the "prince" inside old men whom these young women (and by young, I mean barely in their teens) might otherwise find less than appealing. The men didn't always turn out to be princes, but regardless, the arrangement was a practical necessity. There were less choices in general for women back then.

Even with the introduction of modern medicine and a greater level of gender equality, adulthood was, and continues to be filled with many difficult and terrible realities. Many of these realities present themselves to us at a very young age, and until very recently, children's stories continued to reflect these realities.

And even in more modern tales for children, like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...



It wasn't always pretty. These ladies want to put that baby in that steaming pot!

Entering the 20th century, children's stories continued to have an edge to them. L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz, in many ways, wasn't any less terrifying than The Brother's Grimm.



This is one of the original illustrations by W.W. Denslow for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

In the late 1800s, Randolph Caldecott wrote and illustrated some of the first true picture books designed for young children. In Caldecott's books, the pictures were as important as the words. It's Caldecott for whom the Caldecott Medal, the award for excellence in children's picture books, was named for.



These stories were based primarily on children's nursery rhymes, but at the time, young children were still read the Brothers Grimm, and other folk, and modern tales.

Later in the 20th century a trend towards greater censorship began, with morals groups rallying against what was considered harmful or obscene. The Hays code was introduced to censor film in the 1930s, and in the 1950s Fredric Wertham cracked down on comic books, which were then thought to be the cause of juvenile delinquency. By the late 50s, picture books in particular had taken on an even more saccharine tone. It started with the Dick and Jane books in the 1930s--some of the first books available to young children designed to teach them to read. These books were incredibly bland. The object was first to teach, and to entertain, came a distant, to nonexistent second.



In the 60s, Dr. Seuss was given the task by his publisher to use the same basic vocabulary used in the Dick and Jane books to write a book that was genuinely entertaining. His answer was The Cat in The Hat.



And the Cat in the Hat changed the face of early reader books forever. I remember as a kid in the late 70s still being subjected to Dick and Jane in school, but now these books are long gone.

There are two kinds of picture books: those designed for children to read themselves, and those designed to be read to children. By the 60s, books designed to be read to young children were starting to emerge that were just a little more scary. One of the greatest examples of a picture book that dared to be scary was Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.



The Wild Things gnashed their terrible teeth and threatened to eat Max, they loved hims so. For a young child, it's scary stuff, but it's a kind of scary kids need. It's also the kind of book that it would be hard to get published today.

In the nineties, scary started to come back in a big way in the form of middle reader chapter books.





Parents tend to hate the popular Goosebumps series, but kids loved them. I wouldn't call it great literature, but for the first time, preteens had their own Stephen King. What you might not remember is that these books predated Harry Potter by a number of years, and in a way, primed its audience for something a little more sophisticated. And that's when the young adult fantasy revolution began:



And continues to this day. Right now, young adult books are the only growth market in the publishing industry. Even authors popular in other genres, like John Grisham and Carl Hiaasen, have taken to writing for the young adult market, but fantasy themed books still dominate.

But when it comes to scary, picture books still lag behind. In the eighties, picture books really lost their footing, returning to an earlier era of squeaky clean.



Good Dog Carl epitomizes this trend to me. Harking back to Dick and Jane blandness, it was the kind of book that appealed more to grandparents looking for a good gift for their grandchildren, than actual kids.

Somewhere between a Good Dog Carl and a Harry Potter there needs to be a transition point. You don't need to terrify children, but you do need to give kids a safe container for their nightmares. Kids are more resilient than we give them credit for, but more importantly: kids like scary stories. But they need scary stories that are appropriate for them.

Where scarier material for children has been introduced in recent years, is in animated films like Toy Story 3 and Shrek. Movies like Toy Story 3 aren't written for young children, and have a level of adult sophistication that doesn't accommodate a kids understanding of reality, but adults take their kids to these movies anyway. There seems to be a real disconnect between what kinds of picture books are appropriate for kids, and what kinds of movies are appropriate for kids. It's a disconnect that I don't quite understand--what makes a scary movie "family fare", and a scary picture book "too scary" for kids? So though I do think kids need scary, they need scary that's specifically written for them, and with them in mind. Not in a condescending way, but in a way that truly speaks to them. Publishers need to understand this, and we need to reintroduce scary stories into the picture book market that make sense for contemporary kids. We owe it to them, both as a developmental tool, and so that they will become better readers. Besides, good scary never fails to entertain.