Writing Great Books for Young Adults

by Regina L Brooks

The marketing and publishing rationale needs to make the case that there is a strong commercial need for this book. It should show that this book fills a gap in the market somehow—maybe one that the public isn’t even aware of yet.

  • Audience: Who are you publishing to? Why would they be interested in purchasing your book?

  You may feel that everybody needs your book, but I can assure you, not everybody is going to buy it. Have a strong sense of who will be interested in your book and why. Be specific. If you’re writing for YA, think about who might be interested in the topic—athletes, Latinos, kids in rural areas? Be able to justify why your book will interest your chosen audience.

  • Brief description: A one- to three-sentence summary of the book. Think of this as potential back cover copy.

  Imagine that your book is about to be published; if you were going to pick it up off the shelf of your local bookstore, what would it say on the back? Remember, your space is limited, so you’ve really got to grab a reader’s attention. Your brief description should clearly communicate the book’s concept and draw in a potential reader.

  • Book description/chapter outline: A clear description of what the book is and what it’s trying to achieve. This will include a table of contents, chapter heads, and a brief description of each chapter.

  This is the meat of your proposal. Think of it as the blueprint of how your book will develop. Each chapter should have a brief summary, showing how it relates to the book’s overall concept.

  • Key features and selling points: A concise, bulleted list of key reasons why readers will want to pick up the book.

  If you only had thirty seconds to tell someone what they would learn from reading your book, what would you say? What points would you want them to know? Does your book capitalize on any current trends? Consider that when writing your key features and selling points. It can help you effectively communicate exactly what you hope to teach.

  • Author platform and bio: A profile that includes information that will help the publisher understand why you are the ideal person to write this book.

  As fascinating as your childhood hobbies may be to you, that’s not what agents or editors are looking for when they read your bio. They want to know that an audience is clamoring to hear what you have to say. So think strategically when preparing your bio—what does your online presence look like? How many Twitter followers do you have? Have you been published previously? Do you have any media connections? Are you comfortable on camera? What plans do you have to get your book discovered by your audience? Hopefully, your platform and bio will answer these questions.

  • Marketing/publicity plan: Do you have any special relationship to the market? Are there any special conferences, trade shows, or magazines that your book would be an ideal candidate for?

  Now that the agent or editor knows you’re an expert in the field, you have to prove that you have the ability to sell this book to its audience. Think of this section of the proposal as a way to demonstrate that you have the requisite ability and media connections to get people talking about your book, and that realistic opportunities exist to promote it.

  • Competition or related titles: What are some other published titles that resemble your concept or discuss the same topic? How do those books fall short in comparison? How does your title offer a different approach?

  No matter how unique and different your book is, there will always be titles it competes against. The comparative works should show that there is a market for your book, but you also need to explain how your book will distinguish itself from the crowd. You’ll probably come across some competitive titles in your research, but you can also search for competitive titles on Amazon or Goodreads and at your local library. Once you have found one title, Amazon has a feature that identifies other books similar in topic. This is a great starting point for finding other comparative titles. Be sure to include enough information to identify your competition—author, title, publisher, page count and publication date.

  This may be the most important section of the proposal because it’s how an editor or agent will determine how much your book is worth. Typically, agents or editors will look up the books you’ve listed in Bookscan—a program through the Nielsen company—to see how many units these works have sold. After getting a sense of how well books like yours sell, they will use these figures to help determine how much money they will offer you for your book.

  • Book specifications: How long do you expect your book to be? Do you anticipate any unusual features, like charts, maps, or graphs? How long do you think it will take you to deliver a complete manuscript?

  If your book will feature color photography or a nonstandard printing format, now is the time to let the agent or editor know. When specifying length, don’t get caught up trying to figure out the page count—the approximate word count will suffice.

  The elements above are staples of most proposals, but bear in mind that your proposal must be uniquely customized. Some agents may have their own proposal guidelines, so make sure that you proposal meets their requirements. Remember, your proposal needs to be a window into the personality of your work. Make it engaging, informative, and representative of the voice and tone of your book as a whole.

  NEW ADULT: AN EXCITING NEW MARKET

  For years, when authors would call my office, I’d tell them that the age range for the YA market was fourteen to twenty-four. This isn’t necessarily true anymore. Readers who grew up on YA are now looking for books that have the same dynamic intensity of YA but deal with the realities of making one’s way in the world. To accommodate this new audience, a genre called New Adult is catering to the needs of this market.

  So what exactly is New Adult, and how does it differ from YA? The term was first coined in 2009 by St. Martin’s Press when it held a special call for “fiction similar to YA that can be published and marketed as adult—a sort of an ‘older YA’ or ‘new adult.’” As YA readers aged out of the genre, publishers needed a way to maintain a connection to those readers. So New Adult was created to generate both books for those readers and a space on the bookshelf for those stories.

  Of course, that sounds altruistic, but New Adult is also a marketing tool. It’s a means to market to and retain the reading loyalty of adults of all ages who enjoy the expressive fervor of YA books.

  So, let’s imagine that you’ve got a story to tell, but you aren’t sure whether your audience falls under Young Adult or New Adult. How do you determine your story’s market? According to Jessica Sinsheimer, associate agent at Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency, if your characters are in high school and dealing with high school problems, then your manuscript is YA. If your protagonist is slightly older and trying to transition into adulthood, then you’re writing for the New Adult market. Covers for New Adult books tend to be more sexualized as well—a little less brooding and more explicit than YA covers.

  Genres are always rather elastic, and New Adult needs time to evolve. But what can we say about it in its infancy? Let’s look at some common elements in today’s New Adult market.

  • Remember all the experiences of life after high school? Moving away to college, buying your first car, working your way through school, getting your first job, moving out, office romances, internships, travel abroad, military deployment, and first apartments, among other things? A lot of monumental firsts happen between eighteen and twenty-five—the age of the New Adult reader.

  New Adult books focus on the heady post–high school, pre–late twenties years when young people are establishing their independence and becoming more settled adults. They reflect the challenges of moving out, forging careers, and negotiating education and career choices.

  • Since a lot of the characters in New Adult novels are college age, a lot of New Adult novels involve a college setting. For example, there’s Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, a novel about a woman whose twin sister does not want to share a room at college; Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire, about a woman’s bet wi
th the campus lothario; and Losing It by Cora Carmack, about a college senior who’s determined to lose her virginity before she graduates. If high school is a common element in YA books, college is the corresponding element in New Adult books.

  • There is no doubt that YA has become increasingly edgy, especially regarding sexuality. Like it or not, we live in a hyper-sexualized world. But as the age for New Adult is older than YA, any residual modesty that existed in a YA manuscript is gone in the New Adult marketplace.

  This doesn’t mean you must fill your manuscript with orgies aplenty! After all, New Adult isn’t simply sexed-up YA. However, an increase in reader maturity necessitates an increase in material maturity. You’re going to have to ramp up the raciness. In fact, your readers will expect it—Ericka Clay at tipsylit.com complained that New Adult books didn’t have enough erotic content in them. So be advised—keep it steamy!

  • Since New Adult is a recent publishing development, it’s still grappling with its identity. Instead of being relegated to children’s imprints, adult fiction editors have been publishing New Adult, usually under a romance imprint. Therefore, there’s been a strong bias toward New Adult fiction with a romantic element. One example is Rush Me by Allison Parr, about a young woman’s romance with a professional football player. Another example is Headfirst Falling by Melissa Guinn, about a woman who struggles with her feelings for her brother’s fellow soldier.

  While there’s certainly a lot of overlap between contemporary romance and New Adult, there are important differences between the two genres. Contemporary romance tends to use third-person point of view, while New Adult generally has a first-person narrator, in order to keep the voice and style that it shares with YA. Contemporary romance also tends to deal with major life events, such as marriage and pregnancy. New Adult relationships tend not to have the same sense of gravity. That’s not to say New Adult books that deal with marriage and pregnancy can’t be done, but if you do pursue that path, keep your tone consistent with the New Adult market.

  • New Adult may have originally been published under romance imprints, but it is rapidly coming into its own. Random House has already created its first exclusive New Adult imprint, Flirt, and other imprints are sure to follow. But New Adult books are branching out beyond the romance genre. Romantic suspense titles like Beautiful Player by Christina Lauren and Rebel by Elle Casey are stretching New Adult’s boundaries and giving authors more leeway to experiment. Jamie Maguire’s next book, Red Hill, is a New Adult novel set against a zombie apocalypse. While we haven’t seen New Adult science fiction pop up yet, I’m sure it’s on the horizon.

  So don’t restrict yourself to romantic stories or feel that no editors will want to read a New Adult steampunk novel revolving around a series of gruesome murders. They might! The New Adult market needs pioneers and originality. It’s up to you to start trends and open doors.

  • I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but so far, all of the books I’ve mentioned have female protagonists. That has not been a conscious choice on my part. Most of the literature around New Adult mentions novels with female protagonists. I suppose that’s why New Adult is often misperceived as sexed-up chick lit.

  Making Faces, by Amy Harmon, features both male and female protagonists. But the fact that I could only find one New Adult novel with a male lead character mentioned in all the reading I did points to a serious gender imbalance. It also indicates a critically untapped market. Feel free to push the boundaries of New Adult with daring, challenging male protagonists. You could be the one who opens up a bold new frontier in the New Adult market.

  So should you write for the New Adult market? Absolutely! If you have a story that will appeal to a slightly older market, I encourage you to write it. Don’t let the fact that the genre is new or that your book doesn’t seem to fit exact categories stop you. As I said earlier, the market is expanding and genre is always shifting. Just bear in mind that many of the same rules apply in New Adult books—whatever your market, you need realistic characters, a compelling plot, and vividly drawn settings to successfully find an audience.

  ENVOI

  Medieval poets used to end many of their poems with an envoi, a short stanza at the end of a poem addressed to an imagined or actual person that commented on the preceding poem.

  Consider this my envoi to you, wrapped in good wishes for your writing future. I wish you believable, realistic, energetic characters who take you and your readers to places you never dreamed of going. I hope you craft stories that linger in your readers’ minds long after they’ve finished your book and tightly woven plots that keep them turning the pages. May your settings be places your readers dream about visiting at night, and may your point of view challenge, inspire, and lead them deeper into your novel. I wish you the courage to be a ruthless and unflinching editor of your own work, to work with an agent who is enthusiastic about your manuscript, and to find a publisher who will bring it to as wide an audience as possible.

  And lastly, may you have the joy of seeing your book on the bookshelves—and may I have the pleasure of reading it.

  APPENDIX A

  Feedback Resources

  YA WRITING PROGRAMS

  Hamline University: This is a low-residency program that offers an MFA in writing for children and young adults. It has one-to-one mentoring with the faculty. The program provides semiannual residencies each January and July where faculty and students gather for eleven days of intensive lectures, workshops, seminars, and readings devoted exclusively to writing for children and young adults. More information about the program can be found at www.hamline.edu/mfac/.

  Spalding University: It provides a low-residency program that focuses on writing for children and young adults. Students may customize the location, season, and pace of their studies. You can find more information at spalding.edu/academics/mfa-in-writing/.

  Hollins University: “Hollins offers summer MA and MFA programs exclusively in the study and writing of children’s literature.” See www.hollins.edu/grad/eng_writing/index.shtml.

  Lesley University: It offers a low-residency MFA program in writing for young people. The ten-day residency begins each semester with seminars, workshops, readings, and the chance to design the semester’s program of study. Students work independently during the semester under the guidance of their faculty mentor. The program also offers scholarships. Its web address is www.lesley.edu/gsass/creative_writing.

  Simmons College: This is a full-time MFA program designed for students pursuing the MFA in writing for children. “MFA students take writing courses and work closely with a mentor to produce a manuscript from conception to submission.” See more at www.simmons.edu/gradstudies/liberal-arts/academics/childrens-literature/writing.shtml.

  Vermont College of Fine Arts: It offers a two-year low-residency MFA program in writing for children and young adults. “The program offers individualized education with faculty-guided independent-study projects.” See www.vcfa.edu/wcya.

  Writers Workshop at Chautauqua: This is a conference sponsored by the Highlights Foundation dedicated to children’s and YA books. “It includes seminars, small-group workshops, and one-on-one sessions with prominent authors, illustrators, editors, critics, and publishers in the world of children’s literature.” See www.highlightsfoundation.org/upcoming-workshops/.

  Antioch University: It offers a ten-day residency program with a concentration in writing for young people, featuring collaboration with illustrators, editors, and agents on the faculty. See www.antiochla.edu/academics/mfa-creative-writing/program-features/genres/.

  Seton Hall University: It offers a low-residency program with modules focusing on YA and children’s literature. Emphasis is on writing for the popular market. See www-2011.setonhill.edu/catalog/shucat/displaySection.cfm?&VID=39&SID=293&CID=2.

  University of Nebraska, Omaha: This two-and-a-half-year low-residency program welcomes authors who are interested in YA. Residency is not in Omaha itself, but in nearby Neb
raska City. See www.unomaha.edu/unmfaw/.

  Columbia College: It offers a full-time program with a concentration in writing for young people. Columbia College also offers two campus journals, Hair Trigger and F Magazine, for students to showcase their work. See www.colum.edu/Admissions/Graduate/programs/mfa-creative-writing-fiction-program/index.php.

  Fairfield University: While this two-year low-residency program does not offer a concentration in YA, students are encouraged to write in this genre. See www.fairfield.edu/academics/schoolscollegescenters/collegeofartssciences/graduateprograms/mfaincreativewriting/.

  Pine Manor College: Like Fairfield University, while this low-residency MFA program does not offer a concentration in writing for the YA market, students are encouraged to write in this genre. See www.pmc.edu/mfa.

  Southern New Hampshire University: This university offers a low-residency MFA program with a concentration in writing YA literature and connections with editors, agents, and other publishing insiders. See www.snhu.edu/mfa-creative-writing.asp.

  Whidbey Writers Workshop: This program offers both an MFA low-residency program with a concentration in writing children’s and YA literature and residencies for writers who are not seeking an MFA. See www.nila.edu/mfa/.

  YA BOOK REVIEWS

  School Library Journal is a reviewer of books, multimedia, and technology for children. You can visit it online at www.schoollibraryjournal.com.

  Kirkus Reviews publishes reviews of children’s and young adult books two to three months before the publication date. The reviews are written by specialists selected for their knowledge and expertise in a particular field. Read the reviews at www.kirkusreviews.com.

  Publishers Weekly is an international news website and magazine for book publishing and book selling that includes reviews, bestseller lists, commentary, and information for authors. Find it online at www.publishersweekly.com.

  VOYA Magazine is a bimonthly magazine devoted to those who serve young adults. It includes articles about the informational needs of teenagers that may be helpful in writing and selling your manuscript. The website is www.voyamagazine.com/.