A few weeks ago, Read Now Sleep Later wrote a post called YA Shame and Stigma. I recommend reading the post and the comments, but the summary of it is that author Isaac Marion freaked out that his adult had crossover appeal. He didn't want the label associated with his books.
I'm not here to talk about Marion specifically; I'm here to talk about the bigger issue at hand: the fact that there is a stigma around the young adult culture.
Now, as everybody who reads this blog knows, young adult literature is great. It has the ability to make us cry, make us laugh, make us feel more emotions than some other literature. It can be beautifully written. It can have amazing and quotable one-liners. It's created some of the most memorable characters in history.
This is common knowledge. It's why The Hunger Games, Harry Potter and John Green's books transcend the genre; they're popular in their own right.
We're told that they're exceptions to the rule.
We know they're not. We know that it's the shittier stuff that is more common; we know that terribly written things sell because they're easy to read and fun, but it doesn't represent the genre. We understand that we need to look past the stigmas of our genre. We don't judge our genre or other genres by their worst, but by their best. We know that there are terrible things in every genre.
And yet it's things like Twilight and published One Direction fanfiction that are associated with the genre. It sells, and it's slowly overwhelming over the good stuff that sells as publishers do what they can to make a dollar.
I'm not mad at the publishers for doing what they have to do to survive. Selling books is harder than ever in this economy and publishers have to cash in somehow.
I am disappointed.
It's one thing to be cashing in on something that's great, has a great following and can be made even greater by your editors and staff. It's another to clean up a real person self-insert fanfiction and publish it, especially when it becomes public knowledge that it's all you've done. It makes the genre seem like something pulled off of the Internet without any consideration of the people it was based off of.* Top it with the fact that what's being chosen is popular, but not well written, and it seems like you're just in it for the money.
Which you are. Which is understandable.
But where did the love of writing go?
We are buying and mass producing anything we think will sell. The genre is oversaturated with paranormal novels perpetrating rape culture because instead of making a trend and making a move, we jump on what's popular because we've lost the ability to do anything else. Instead of taking a new idea and a brilliant new writer and pushing them on the herd, we're spun the same sentences in the same books that are only differentiated by the different dead girls on their different blue covers.
I'm sick of it.
I love this genre more than I love nearly anything. I think it has some of the most original pieces of work I've ever seen, some of the most inventive authors, and without a doubt, some of the best readers. And I'm sick of us being branded by the terrible.
I'm sick of the marketing telling us that THIS is the new PREVIOUSLY BIG TITLE. I'm sick of the perpetration of rape culture on covers with dead women in submissive poses. I'm sick of the whitewashing. I'm sick of the fact that crappy books will get all of the promotion because, let's face it, it'll sell quickly and who wants to promote the good authors anymore?
We find the good authors and they grow big because we love them. I understand that there's a need for the paranormal vampires. But I want to see books being published besides the jumping on the bandwagon. I want to see books being pushed because they're good, not because they're The Next Insert Title Here.
I want to see us starting to challenge the stereotypes of our genre so we can turn around and say, "Hey, you, the YA hater? Shut your damn mouth."
* I love fanfiction, but I certainly have a problem with it being published, and I very much have a problem when people are writing stories about real people. It's gross on so many levels.