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Monday Apr 02, 2007
Marketing to Teens is Tricky
Which is all well and good, and there certainly is an unfortunate stigma to being published as a young adult writer (even as the market share increases, as does the overall quality) but Doyle's nose-in-the-air attitude about YA fiction grates after a while. "If TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD or THE CATCHER IN THE RYE were published today, they'd almost certainly be young-adult titles," he says. "But then they wouldn't become classics, except in the sense that Judy Blume books are classics." Something tells me this is a case of Doyle speaking without thinking (YA and middle grade classics off the top of my head: THE YEARLING, A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, ANNE OF GREEN GABLES) but then I suspect if a double-blind copy of M.T. Anderson's OCTAVIAN NOTHING was pressed into his hands, he wouldn't recognize it as one of those oh-so-pesky YA books.... UPDATE: Larry Doyle writes in to clarify some of the things in this post, as well as the original article. "I have no disdain for children's literature, or literature read by young adults. I was wary of the prepackaged marketing of same, as a genre with specific conventions, then sold into a narrow channel of readership. That's why I brought up MOCKING BIRD and THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. They are As for why KING DORK was included in the piece, Doyle said he brought the book up "as an example of a book that I thought deserved wider recognition but didn't get it because of the marketing label. The movie will probably change that. I also, for what it's worth, went out of my way to say that I didn't think my book was a classic by any measure. I went with Ecco because of Lee, and because Harper-Collins convinced me I could reach a wider audience (including teenagers) by publishing there." Email This Post |
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