I think my follow-up thread tonight might help explain? I think there’s a strong market for crossover books at adult SFF publishers, so considering whether a book might fit there instead can be a sound strategic choice
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Replying to @hannahnpbowman
That makes sense to me, but the wording in the first tweet suggests something very different. Also struck me as odd given the knowledge that many YA readers are adults themselves, so the crossover market is already there, just going in the opposite direction.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
Right, and I’m focused on selling to publishers not readers. I advise clients to push crossover titles towards adult pubs because I’ve found it’s harder to sell to YA pubs. But my original tweet was obviously unclear and I’m sorry for that.
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Replying to @hannahnpbowman @fozmeadows
My point was to encourage discernment about whether your book fits better in the YA or adult markets. I see “does this need to be YA?” as one way of asking that question, especially because in my experience YA can be harder to sell.
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Replying to @hannahnpbowman
I think what confused me most about the original tweet is that word, “need.” I can see what you’re saying about the pitching context, but viewed in terms of story content, it almost felt like asking, “Does this story need to be what it is? Why isn’t it something else?”
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Replying to @fozmeadows
That is part of what I’m saying, though: I think it’s useful to interrogate why the story is the thing it is, and to consider if it could be something else. You learn things about the story that way. It helps it find its true form, so to speak.
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Replying to @hannahnpbowman
Granted, yes, but from a writer’s perspective, if this is a first response to *all* YA stories, it comes across less as a reaction to that story’s potential specifically and more as a particular agent’s reluctance to work with that genre/demographic.
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Replying to @fozmeadows @hannahnpbowman
To put it in comparative terms, if a male agent had tweeted that women’s fiction was largely unsaleable and that it was better to look for cross-market appeal by asking if those stories should be more male-centric, I think you’d see the issue with the premise.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
I do, although I don’t think the situations are exactly comparable. But yes, I was giving the kind of advice I would give a client: “this seems to me likely to be harder to sell as YA. Could it be adult which would be easier, or does it ‘need’ to remain YA?”
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Replying to @hannahnpbowman
It’s a point of pragmatism, certainly. But I’ll confess it’s the type of pragmatism I personally cringe at when expressed in those terms. It gives me war flashbacks to my most hated high school English teacher, almost solely because of whom I didn’t do English at uni.
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She had a way of making me feel deindivduated from my own writing: like I wasn’t a person writing for myself, but rather to get better grades so that *she* could get more kudos. How dare I write for myself foremost, and not for her ease?
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