There has been much discussion over the blogosphere about Margo Rabb's NYT essay this weekend, "I'm Y.A., I'm O.K.". What the essay left out was that Margo's first four books were published for middle grade readers so it is not as if she had a bias against writing for kids. I first reviewed Margo when I read those books, the "Missing Persons" series, for a piece I ran at Bookslut in 2005 entitled "The Lost Girl Detectives".

When Margo's recent book came out, Cures for Heartbreak, I was very much looking forward to reading it. I reviewed the book in my column in June 2007 as part of a summer reading list post. But I wrote more personally about the book here at Chasing Ray. Here's a bit of that entry:

In Margo's book the mother dies from melanoma (it happens in the very beginning). I had melanoma when I was 27 years old. I grew up in Florida and was a major body surfer and beach girl - it was a huge part of my life. I grew up in the 1970s and 80s when the sun was not perceived as dangerous so sunburns and suntans were part of my everyday. I know how I got this disease. But reading about melanoma in this book has not been easy. It's a wonderful book (Jen is the latest to love it) but it's so raw, so close to what losing someone can be like, that it fairly hurts you with its own pain. In the story entitled "The Healthy Heart" teenage Mia thinks she sees a difference in a mole on herself - she suspects that it might be cancerous. I tried to get through this on the first try but it was too close. Every day I think I see something that has changed; something that is may not be right. Everyday I panic just a little. Trust me when I say that Margo has perfectly nailed what that kind of worry is like. It's as real as it gets in this book and a couple of times it just got a little too real for me.

Can I give a book any higher recommendation than that? Sometimes it was fiction that was so true it became real. Amazing.

I wanted to explain all of this because I think Margo has been blindsided in a few places over her NYT article. She is a specific writer, with specific writing experiences and dismissing her for one general reason or another is really inappropriate. That is also true for everyone else who is quoted in her essay - they have all had their own experiences publishing YA as opposed to adult and those experiences are part of why they said the things they did. At the end of the day this is supposed to be a piece to make people think and to also reconsider just what all the divisions in marketing, cover image, shelf placement, etc., mean to books and their audiences. The bottom line is how many teens would know where to find Margo's books if they were mixed into the adult section - and how adults would go looking for a book to read in the teen section? We all have our opinions as to the answers to those questions, but the biggest problem is that there is no one answer. It depends on the reader, which means a lot of readers are missing out.

Here are some thoughts Margo shared with me over the weekend - more to follow later this week.

From talking to all those other writers (and your own experience) is there any consistency between publishers deciding if a book is YA or not? Clearly Alexie's book was written by him for teens from the beginning but I remember listening to Jim Lynch who published "Highest Tide" with Bloomsbury tell an audience that first it was out for adults (even with a teen protag) but teen bookclubs picked it up so it was being repackaged (new cover maybe?) to sell to teens in pb. It seems like there are few hard and fast rules for YA vs Adult-with-teen-protagonist books. Did you get any sense that it is ever anything other than some random pr person's decision at a publisher?

I think that many books are clearly YA (and are intentionally written as YA), but for certain books there are no consistent ways to classify them. An executive at Random House told me that the only difference between adult and YA is that YA houses have an obligation not to publish anything that would exploit the reader. And an executive at Little, Brown told me it was a case by case basis. One person told me that defining YA is like the famous quote from the Supreme Court justice about porn--"I know it when I see it." (Apparently though, editors and publishers do make mistakes, such as the editors who rejected Sittenfeld's Prep because they considered it YA.)

Aside from the illusory prestige issue, is there a predictable difference in sales if an author is published one way vs the other? Will YA get you fewer readers or could it get you more - or again, does nobody know?

I think people make educated guesses, but really nobody knows. Some authors and librarians I spoke with have the impression that YA is outselling adult, but I couldn't find any publishing executives who would go on the record with that. Just as in adult literary fiction, many YA books sell very few copies at all, and some books are huge blockbusters. Some authors, like Peter Cameron and Sherman Alexie, sold more copies with their YA books than they did with their adult titles; others sell about the same, and some sell less (look at the James Patterson situation, with B&N switching a YA series to adult due to lower sales.) Publishing as a business is pretty much a crapshoot, from what I gather; it's not a science.

AM Holmes said "“Young people will find an adult book, but it doesn’t work the other way.� Is this the fault of publishers or reviewers or is it just not true? It is not as if many American classics aren't written with teen protagonists (from "Tom Sawyer" to "Member of the Wedding" to "Mockingbird" and on and on) so clearly adults will read a book with a teen protagonist. Are publishers just not even bothering to let them know about YA books that might crossover (like yours)? Are publishers and booksellers (via product placement) making the decision for us?

I asked publishers how many adult readers are reading their YA books, but they weren't able to answer for certain. It seems that most publishers don't have many statistics about things such as who are buying these books (except for in the case of James Patterson, where a market research firm was hired to find out.) So it's only their impression of how many adults vs. teens are buying YA books. They gauge the number of adult readers by how many adults are attending readings and events and registering for contests, but otherwise they don't know for sure.

One publishing executive told me that a handicap of YA and children's publishing is that generally speaking, parents are the ones with the $, so YA and children's publishers are at a disadvantage compared to adult houses, in reaching the reader directly--they need to get past the parents, who are the gatekeepers.