The Teen Reading Disconnect

I had the phenomenal opportunity to attend MPIBA’s FallCon this week in Denver. For those of you who don’t know, almost every industry has continuing education opportunities, and in the book industry, we like to get together several times a year to brainstorm, learn from each other, lament over the challenges of small business, and share DNA-changing book recommendations.

As you can imagine, I walked away with a million ideas and plans for the store and hyped up for a fantastic fall season.

It’s normally hard to say what the most exciting takeaway was, but this time, one question in particular stuck with me. One of the head honchos at Scholastic (David Levithan, SVP of Editorial) asked us how we can energize young adult readers and bring them into the store. The context here is that for a couple of decades, YA was the darling of the book industry. It was the fastest-growing reading section and sustained many a bookstore. In recent years, this segment has experienced a pretty significant drop in readership, to where some bookstores are reducing or completely getting rid of their YA sections.

As you can imagine, I had some thoughts.

We had just listened to a panel of three authors share their experiences and inspirations, and they helped me really put into words what I’ve been trying to quantify for a while now.

Kendall Annette, author of Tylor Whitlock Just Won’t Die, said that she wanted to see girls like herself in a book, but not just as a sidekick.

Claire Forrest, author of I Gave You My Heart, gave a beautiful example of a fan who told her that in fairy tales, the prince always sweeps back the princess’s hair before they kiss and was worried about what would happen if he knocked out her hearing aid when that happened.

Ryan La Sala, author of Bodies of Water, told us how his story is about more than a zombie plague or a queer character, but draws on the queer community’s understanding of community health.

So when David posed his question, my hand shot in the air. Here’s what I said, and what I hope is the experience you have when you’re at PBB.

“YA lit has changed and grown over the decades. Each generation is learning from the last and has increasing expectations of their literature.

First, we wanted diverse characters.

Next, we wanted better than tokenization.

Now, we want nuanced, layered stories.

We want Black and minority stories that aren’t seated in turmoil and trauma. We want queer characters who have supporting, loving families. We want disabled characters who are included and thrive in love.

Teens today want us to acknowledge that they are capable of reading intense, nuanced stories. They want books with adult-level complexity that are relevant to them.”

Also, it matters that Scholastic was asking the question in the first place. They didn’t tell a room packed with booksellers what teenagers want. They asked us what we see in our own stores and communities.

I think some of the disconnect may actually be a marketing problem. Clearly, these books exist. We had just listened to three authors talk about exactly these kinds of stories. So while some YA books are appropriately geared toward younger teens, others are every bit as complex and nuanced as what we expect from adult literature. YA is a publishing category and marketing term to help us identify target readers, and if the marketing doesn’t match the book, we’re missing a trick. The story itself may be exactly what a teenager wants, while the way we present it tells them it’s for someone younger.

If a grown-up doesn’t want to read a story about a 15-year-old protagonist, then okay, fine. But if they don’t want to read the book because it’s too simple, or the diversity is surface-level only and feels inauthentic, then we need to realize that these young, rising adults are smart and discerning enough to feel that too.

As a purely anecdotal but perfect example, I had a young man come in the store this summer. He had just graduated and was maybe 18 or 19 years old. He was looking for an obscure Dostoevsky story that he hadn’t been able to find anywhere. Surprise, surprise, we didn’t have an incredible array of Russian literature on the shelf, but I found a copy to order for him. He was actually excited that not only could I get this, but it was printed as an anthology with additional Dostoevsky short stories.

Teens requesting Russian lit was not on my summer bingo card. But it should have been. Because these kids… your kids… are incredibly impressive. They are smart, they are thoughtful, and they are ready for so much more than we give them credit for.