People are arguing about when YA became a thing again, so buckle up for a Thread:

As a consumer product, YA as an audience category is intrinsically connected with the concept of the (middle class, white American) teenager, which arose due to the economic boom during and immediately following WWII.

Post-recession, these teens no longer needed jobs to support their families and had spending money! They very much became their own consumer group, and products began to cater to that.

There are three acknowledged start points to YA as a category:
Maureen Daly’s SEVENTEENTH SUMMER, pubbed in 1941

Salinger’s CATCHER IN THE RYE, pubbed in 1951

And SE Hinton’s THE OUTSIDERS, pubbed in 1967.

Note that 2/3 of these authors (Daly and Hinton) we’re teenagers when they wrote these books.

It’s not hard to look at three standalone commercial successes published over almost 30 years and then understand why slow-as-molasses publishing began to make a concerted effort to replicate the teenage voice that was so successful and market to the teenage experience

So, was YA a Thing or a category in 1941 or in 1967? No. But retroactively, these works are YA and sowed the seeds for a category that is both it’s own marketing unit AND a style of book.

As someone who not only works in YA but studied it academically AND came of age during its first full commercial boom in the 90s and early 2000s, I feel like it’s accurate to say that YA is much older than you think,

while also saying that it’s rules re: character age range, style, etc are newer and much more stringent now, and that’s entirely because of publishing’s efforts to separate our age ranges for marketing purposes and not because teens only want to read Very Specific Books

So if you’re looking to YA fantasy written in the 80s (a truly magical time for Magic Horse Girls) you’ll notice the beats are different and the characters might be children or adults for a lot of the book!

These books are still YA, but might be repackaged now to either look Incredibly YA or as a crossover of some sort. Note that how these books are treated does not mean you can ignore the rules of pubbing fresh in this current market

Now, the thing about teens is that they change and age out of the genre fast! This makes it hard to grab a single reader for an entire series, which is where The Money Is At, which is why we have concerted marketing to adults in YA

Adults make up 60% of the YA readership. This does not mean you can write “YA” but secretly make it adult. Just because the book is read by a group doesn’t mean it’s FOR that group. Rules is rules, don’t let the marketing confuse you.

Now, you might ask, if all of this is about money, did New Adult fail?Well, see the previous tweets about teens changing.

Segmenting books meant to appeal to a short developmental period into multiple consumer categories felt like too much of a cash grab and was confusing to consumers given that YA is already marketing and read by tons of adults!

So what we called NA a few years ago is still being pubbed! It’s just being called either adult or YA through *marketing magic*

Alas, it’s not going to be a thing just because you want it to, so still gotta follow the rules

So to sum-up: YA is, more than any other category, tied into consumer habits, and as such has refined itself into a very identifiable, discrete product over time, which means that arguing over when it became a Thing doesn’t much matter, as the rules 15 years ago don’t apply now

Which is why no one will ever be able to write successful YA if they don’t read RECENT YA books.

Also please forgive the autocorrect typos. I did this on my phone and did not proofread.

One can not discuss YA as a category without examining and acknowledging the economic and social reasons it is what it is, and anyone slinging dates as gotchas without this analysis doesn’t know what they’re talking about

And as it becomes more established, these market factors play a bigger and bigger role in the category, not less, so that’s ALSO why no one should comp to a book pubbed in 2004

And in honor of this thread I’m wearing my “Stay gay, Ponyboy” shirt in case we all forgot Hinton is really shitty to her queer readers!