Over the past few weeks, I got to spend time with a diverse
group of teenagers from the Leave Out Violence organization and Writopia Lab,
and in doing so I realized how little I interact with teenagers on a regular
basis. Yet, my job and career revolve around making books for them. How can I
possibly be making the best books for today’s teenagers when I don’t even know
them?
Well, this was my chance to get to know them and find out
what they loved, hated, made them passionate, and totally turned them off about
books. And what I learned really surprised me and made me re-think the way I
imagine the readers for my books and YA novels in general.
With both groups, I spread out a whole bunch of YA galleys
to get their takes on covers. The galleys ranged from fantasy to historical to
contemporary, from photographic to iconic to illustrated, from type driven to
image driven. Almost unanimously, no one liked photographic faces on the cover
– they all wanted to picture the characters in their own ways and didn’t want
to be told right from the start what someone looked like. Fantasy fans told me
our fantasy covers looked too much like everything else out there and didn’t
tell them anything about what the story was actually about. Romance readers
were put off by images of single girls in pretty dresses – again, this was
something they’d seen too much already. They were put off by the New York Times bestseller headline
because every book they see has that. If a book was trying too hard to appeal
to a teen girl, they wanted nothing to do with it.
