Writer's Block Daily

I think publishers are in an especially hard place with respect to YA's because they are relatively tech savvy and probably more open to independently published stuff. One issue is that I don't think YA doesn't necessarily translate into "new"- there are some classics that teen readers still like, decades after they were published. That's esp. true in Sci-Fi ("Enders Game" comes to mind).

I would be interested in anyone's opinion on how to find new stuff that isn't crap. I'm not as savvy to social media as I probably should be, so if there are places one goes to find stuff people recommend, then I wouldn't necessarily know about it.

I really think that the tech-savvyness of teens is vastly overrated.

My thing is, if you don't like YA, that's fine. But please don't insult the demographic and/or try to make them feel bad for liking / writing it. It's just flat out rude and disrespectful.

^^ Teenagers are overrated in their tech skills.

^ There's one problem with that plea. YA crowds out everything and absorbs all the attention. It's overpraised, overhyped, overdone as if there was no such thing as any other literature genre or demographic.

edited 20th Apr '13 12:43:44 PM by MajorTom

I now have no idea how to respond to you guys...

I'm so sorry.

I've explained it multiple times in the past, and I don't really want to do it again, especially since I don't particularly want to get into an argument. All I'm trying to do is say that while I understand that some people might be offended, this is a genuinely passionate belief of mine extrapolated from my feelings on art as a whole and while I'm not going to go around starting arguments over it (I only got involved in this conversation because I didn't like Night's generalization), I'm not going to try and hide it either.

edited 20th Apr '13 2:31:46 PM by nrjxll

@De Marquis,

What I mean is that while teens might be particularly plugged into the internet compared to many adults a lot of what they do isn't really groundbreaking or difficult, however among teens there is a certain subset of nerds who do do things like that, as there is with any age group. However it seems like a lot of people think that that is the majority of teens now.

I know that among a certain subset of individuals that especially for teenagers writers are competing with free entertainment, especially things like fanfic writers because fanfic will always be free. A lot of times with these sorts of things certain writers will get a lot of attention for being either very good or very bad and make a name for themselves and their popularity will mostly be perpetuated through word of mouth. A lot of the fanfic and webcomics and other free stuff I've read I've gotten through recommendations either here or on places like tumblr.

If you're looking for recommendations on small-press books, I don't think I can help you, and I haven't really seen a lot of them on social networking sites. However I know that there are a lot of websites dedicated to reviews of books, and also channels where you can get small press or self-published books for free (ask chihuahua about Story Cartel, for instance). There are also a ton of writers on twitter who will advertise free or very inexpensive ebooks, but it's very difficult to ascertain the quality of those because people are usually advertising their own books or the books of their writer friends, so they're not very objective.

edited 20th Apr '13 2:23:42 PM by ohsointocats

I think the tech savvy of current teens is being blown out a bit here. The mainstream tech savvy isn't really exclusive to them it's something that started with Gen Y. I'd say members of Gen Y being more tech and social media savvy would be more apt. And yes, there are Gen X-ers like my father, and even Baby Bomber who have an uncharacteristic for their generation amount of tech knowledge but those are rarer.

On YA, I write YA but I do absolutely no targeting to what current teens are into. I write/classify as YA mostly because my characters are teenagers, who are coming to age and discovering themselves and because I find the type of freedom and limitations that that age group has placed on them is best able to hold the kind of narrative I want to tell and allows me more freedom to explore certain themes. Despite being an adult I still greatly relate to a lot of the issues that teenagers and YA fiction deal with.

AS for tech savvy, its all relative. If you're using tumblr or twitter then you're way ahead of me. And most publishers.

"But please don't insult the demographic and/or try to make them feel bad for liking / writing it. It's just flat out rude and disrespectful."

That.

"There's one problem with that plea. YA crowds out everything and absorbs all the attention. It's overpraised, overhyped, overdone as if there was no such thing as any other literature genre or demographic."

Like clothing choices. But that's not the teens fault, that's the publishers.

@Chihuahua: FIGHT! Just kidding. But don't let them intimidate you.

@nrjxl: All you're saying is that it isnt worth your time to explain it to me. Oh well.

@Cats: Thanks.

@Vyctorian: I see what you're saying, but I'm not sure I agree that YA=Young protagonists. Often it does, but not always....

Off topic from the current conversation but I got like 800+ words done in an hour, and I'm pretty proud of those 800 words, some dialogue needs tightening but other than that I like it.

edited 20th Apr '13 6:11:04 PM by Vyctorian

Cool. Why dont you post that in the Constructive Criticism thread?

Care to share what you made? I'd love to read it!

Trying to get the right metaphor for the thought implanted by a Compelling Voice entering the consciousness. Currently, I'm leaning towards something like, "a dozen centipedes crawling into his ear". Any other suggestions?

edited 20th Apr '13 7:16:10 PM by TeraChimera

& Maybe another time.

I actually had to something similar and went with a fire metaphor.

And I finish off my one-page writing session with this line:

I wish I don't have to keep relearning the lesson that the hardest part of writing is actually start writing.

So I'll do it for him, in a slightly less vehement way than he might have.

The idea of creating and enforcing genre distinctions based on marketing demographics is a poisonous one. It changes how people write and how people think about writing, often for the worse; it also changes how publishers take up new material and how they market it, nearly always for the worse. The semantic shift from "children's books" or just "books" to specifically targeted fiction has been nothing but harmful to the industry and to writers, the few perks of specificity being drowned out by the encouragement of hack writing and hack publishing practices.

Then again, I think that preemptive genre prescription is a poison in and of itself outside of conscious tribute and intelligent subversion, so perhaps you might not find me the most agreeable person on this subject.

Sequels are hard.

@JHM: I get it, there is definately two sides to the argument. However, the questions I asked myself as I read your post were "poisonous", "worse", and "harmful" for whom? The only reason publishers use these categories is because they believe it will help them sell books. Apparently, it must serve some function for the readers, or they wouldn't arise in the first place. And speaking from my own personal experience, when I go into a bookstore I don't want to peruse the "book" section. I want to go straight to what interests me, and that requires an organizational structure of some kind. On the other hand, I also know that if I spend too much time in that one section I will eventually get bored with it, so I need the opportunity to browse material I otherwise wouldn't seek out. But on the other hand from that, I also want the ability to avoid those types of works I know I'm not interested in, like poetry. All this would seem to require that works be organized into a structure of some kind. I don't think that I'm the only one who feels this way, and in fact probably a majority of readers want publishers to market works to them that they have reason to be interested in.

Digital is only going to make this worse. E-readers track what you read, and make recommendations to you based on your reading history. That creates an even narrower set of constraints that prevent readers from encountering different types of works.

I do not deny that there are costs to all this. Any structure that the market imposes on works places restrictions on what types of works authors can get published and mass-marketed. And there is a very healthy percentage of readers (probably not a majority, though) who appreciate works which are so unique they literally don't fit in any category. So obviously a balance of some kind has to be reached. I think that the solution, for authors as well as readers, is to make sure that a work is cross-tagged to as many different genres and sub-genres as appropriate. I think that there is still a tendency to believe that a particular work can only belong to one genre (it's either sci-fi or horror)- that hasn't been true for a long time, if it ever really was. A bookstore can put the same title on more than one shelf, thus ensuring that more people will come across it.

Another problem with genres is that people have a tendency to think they are fixed for all time, or at least that they change very slowly. Actually, genres and sub-genres break-up and re-coalesce all the time, just like music. Science Fiction is as dead as Jazz as a category that useful to anyone other than a librarian, and for the same reason- both matured into many niche interests that cater to different audiences. Provided that one remembers that a given work can belong to many genres and sub-genres at one time (hard-science epic-opera eldritch-horror; indie jazz rock) this shouldn't stop anyone from marketing any work.

Just remember that "so unique that it cant be categorized" is itself a specialized niche.

Since it stands to reason that young adult readers (12-18 or so) have unique interests, ones that they do not necessarily share with other populations of readers, it would seem to be of benefit to them to be able to target their search to works that are more likely to satisfy those interests. Hence the genre that arose for them.

Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that publishers will always (or even often) be skillful in applying genres as marketing tools. They have a tendency to reject works that do not clearly correspond to a pre-conceived set of pigeonholes. That's evidence of lazy marketing, not wanting to do the research, and a greedy desire to reduce the R&D budget. I think that eventually they will either stop acting like that, or something is going to come along and put them out of business.

edited 21st Apr '13 11:37:33 AM by DeMarquis

Do you know anyone who takes recommendations from computers? They're absolutely terrible at that. The only time when I've ever bought books that were recommended to me by a computer was when I was going to buy them already (if I'm reading the 2nd book in the series and they recommend the 3rd). I mean even something like Pandora is pretty awful at it and it was specifically developed to do that.

And anyway the reason why music recommendation works is not because it's particularly good at it but because music is low-investment. If you don't like a song that the computer picks for you, you can wait four minutes and it's over, not so much with a novel you spent money on.

I'd say that the average young adult has a better-developed appreciation for literature than the average troper. (I'm double-insulting myself here.)

...Well, no, actually it doesn't stand to reason. Works in the YA "genre" fall equally well into more descriptive genre categories such as fantasy, romance, and so forth. My fundamental objection, in fact, is not about systems of classification in general; it's about the fact that the YA "genre" is a system of classification based purely on marketing purposes. It is, in effect, a prescriptive genre, and it is having a negative effect on the concept of genre as a whole - see also the emergence of the so-called "new adult" classification.

YA tends to deal with certain tones and themes which exists across many genre but are not exclusive to those genres but those tones and themes are pervasive enough to warrant their own classification*

edited 21st Apr '13 3:14:46 PM by Vyctorian

806 words, woo!

Although the prose needs desperate tightening, I figured out a new plausible scene goal that allows me to establish the world more while maintaining conflict and building tension. While it involves throwing out one of my "darlings" (I have a history of killing them when needed), I can at least salvage it—

Darn. Now I want to write it out.

I'll give my laptop a rest and put the reconfigured scene down on loose leaf.

Goodnight, fellow writers!

So tell me, what purpose did always-on DRM serve to the user?

Nothing the publisher does is required to serve a purpose to the reader. It's not even required to serve a valuable function to the publisher. Belief is not reality; and your faith does not make it so.