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.

99% of All Young Adult Books

Angst ridden protagonist, usually with a dead parent or two dead parents, possibly adopted only to later discover that they're from a fantastical alternate world, a fairy, or an alien. If it's a girl, she's persecuted by the bitchy girl antagonist, but then there's the hunky guy and the best friend who later becomes a love interest thus creating the classic romantic triangle, though our heroine may be in competition with the bitchy girl for the attention of the hunky guy, and the bitchy girl may do something reprehensible to sabotage her chances or otherwise screw her over. Insert fairies, vampires, werewolves, post apocalypse here. Also, single themed dystopias are popular--a future where everybody has to conform to something or other so that the mistakes of the past are not repeated, but that something or other is super oppressive in some way, denying our hero their fundamental humanity, but our hero is somehow unique and transcends all obstacles so that they may liberate themselves and perhaps the world. Oh, and organ harvesting may possibly be involved. Or a horrible trial. There's always some horrible trial or series of trials given to test our exceptional hero to his/her limits in order to discover if they are worthy of something or other, but our hero subverts this awful system, see: Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, etc. may possibly involve a horrible infectious disease, a rebellion or zombies.


Don't forget to visit my website, sketches, illustrations, comics and more! Also comment if you so desire. A lot of traffic lately, but alas, no one comments. I'm a good listener!

Book Dummy Roughs, YA Fantasy Round-Up

These are a couple of roughs for the current book dummy I'm working on. As mentioned, this one is very illustration intensive, so there's going to be a lot of these. The way a friend of mine once described how illustrations for book dummies were to be done, was to make sure it looks like you care, but not TOO much.



The reason for this is to make sure that the format looks flexible, so the illustrations don't look like you're too married to them. Illustrated books are a collaborative process, and for good reason: good publishers know how to put together good books. That means from top to bottom, from both a design and narrative sense. But then, all editors and designers aren't created equal, though if you're lucky, a good designer and editor will make your book better.

I've talked to a number of people who resist this idea, and I've heard more than one person say, "they were interested in publishing my book, but they wanted me to make too many changes", as if the idea of an editorial collaboration was a bad thing. If your editor isn't skilled, it may well be, but if you have a good editor and art director, you're all after the same aim: to make a better book, and its a process worth submitting yourself to. It's not as though great literature has never involved editorial direction, and it's a fantasy that all great artists work autonomously. Painters, for sure, but a book is a very complex vessel that involves many different elements. Architects need good contractors and builders, directors need good actors and cinematographers, and authors often need good editors. I've experienced this to some degree in the limited magazine writing I've done, and I've definitely experienced it with magazine illustration, so though I've yet to have a book published, I'm looking forward to the editorial process.

And here's a small spot illustration:



I was hoping for the opportunity to draw more crazy clowns, but this section of the book doesn't really justify it. For the benefit of the book, I have to fight my tendency and desire to illustrate everything. There's been a lot of shuffling of paragraphs and resizing of illustrations to make room for everything I need to make room for, but some illustrations have to be sacrificed. This format is both more flexible, and more complex than a picture book. Picture books generally have about 15 spreads, and you have to fit everything you need into those spreads, but with a chapter book as heavily illustrated as this one, it's important to arrange all the illustrations so the spreads and page turns work the way you want them to, which means a lot more spreads and page turns. Books like Diary of a Wimpy Kid, a great example of an illustration heavy YA book, demonstrate this dilemma pretty pointedly. The format demands a lot of planning and organization that I hadn't quite anticipated.

Young Adult Fantasy Round-Up

Back when I was a kid, good fantasy and science fiction simply wasn't written for children and young adults. One exception was Madeline L'engle's A Wrinkle in Time, which was written in the early 60s. Despite its age, the book still holds up surprisingly well and has dated very little. There was no precedent for it, and it was a long time before anything like it would follow. Recently, though, there's been a renaissance of YA and children's fantasy, a trend that began with the success of the Harry Potter and Twilight books, and it's a trend that I hope will continue. So here's a round-up of recent YA reads that I can recommend. I've listened to all of these on audio, since that's the easiest way for me to catch up on my reading while I work, and I tend to burn through a lot of them, but these are some of the better ones:

Neal Shusterman's Unwind

A darkly humorous, and generally dark book about organ harvesting. Very much a page turner, cleverly written. The science is a little iffy, but don't let that dissuade you. I'm currently listening to the first of Shusterman's Everlost series, and so far I'm really enjoying it.

The Maze Runner, and the Scorch Trials by James Dashner

The Maze Runner in particular is a great read, though with the Scorch Trials I'm afraid the series might be headed in the direction of the relentlessly bleak, and generally relentless Hunger Games. The Scorch Trials was enjoyable, but not quite as good.

Dark Life by Kat Falls

This one is just a great s story about underwater settlements, with all kinds of maginative science fictiony touches, like glowing skin due to eating bioluminescent fish, and houses made of flexible material to accommodate sea currents. It delivers nicely on it's promise.

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

This one reminds me a little bit of a darker version of Dark Life. It has more of a bleak, post apocalyptic feel, but the writing and characters are very strong. I also recommend Bacigalupi's adult sci-fi novel, The Windup Girl.

Skinned, by Robin Wasserman

A science fiction book about a girl who gets in an accident and has to deal with having a replacement robot body. A great book about body image that reminds me of Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series in theme, which I also recommend. This too, is a series, but i haven't listened to any of the others yet.

Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr

A more smartly written fantasy romance. The romance has an interesting twist, though like the typical love triangle, one of the love interests is a little too perfect. Still, it's a good answer to the much inferior Twilight. Romance is, I imagine, a difficult genre to write well, but this romance/fantasy hybrid accomplishes the feat pretty admirably. The protagonist sees fairies causing malicious mischief wherever she goes, but she and her grandmother are the only ones who can do this, and her grandmother warns her about revealing her secret. The fairies don't know that she can see them, and she has to pretend that she doesn't notice all the havoc they cause. It's a compelling and tense concept.

Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist

The book that inspired the Swedish Movie and its U.S. remake, Let Me In. I haven't seen the remake, but the Swedish film is excellent and the book is even better. I'm not even sure this qualifies as YA since it deals with some pretty sophisticated adult concepts, but the protagonists are kids, and this one genuinely belongs in the realm of literature.

The Skulduggery Pleasant series by Derek Landy

For younger readers, about an undead detective and his girl sidekick. Good fun told with humor and adventure, reminiscent of the equally excellent Artemis Fowl series in tone, and just as Irish.

Peeps, and The Last Days by Scott Westerfeld

Westerfeld books are almost guaranteed to be good reads, though these are my favorites. They're ostensibly vampire stories, but not really. It transcends the genre with both it's humor, and it's wonderfully realized idea of a vampire parasite that mirrors the behavior of genuine parasites in nature, and this becomes central to the story in a way that goes beyond the idea of a parasite as a simple device.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

A book about a boy raised by ghosts in a graveyard. Like most of Gaiman this book relies heavily on white hats and black hats, and I tend to get tired of the two dimensional evil villain archetype, but the concept is otherwise nicely executed.

White Cat by Holly Black

I may have mentioned this one before, but it's my favorite of the lot. Holly Black's Spiderwick Chronicles is also a good read, but this has Spiderwick and everything else on the list beat. Just read it.

That's it for now, but there are plenty more. There's just so many great books right now in the young adult fantasy market that are genuinely fun reads. I hope to do more YA round-ups in the future, so keep watching if this is something you're interested in.