Question Answers!

bedlamsbard asked I'm on a Raksura reread (which I do at least twice a year!), and one thing I've been wondering is if queens mate with Arbora? I know we mostly get Moon's POV on consorts and Arbora (and producing mentors and warriors), but is it equally common for queens and Arbora, or is that something much rarer?

It's not common, but it would happen, if the Arbora ended up with a bloodline that needed to be combined back into the royal Aeriat bloodline. And a queen mating with a mentor would probably be more likely to produce queens or consorts than a queen mating with a regular Arbora.


nenya_kanadka asked Was there anything that struck you as different about the process of writing and/or publishing YA vs adult SFF?

I think YA is a lot bigger and produces a lot more income for publishers than people outside publishing realize. I still have people telling me confidently "kids don't read anymore" when anybody who's seen a library (or been to the ALA) knows this absolutely is not true. School and public libraries buy tons of books, and if I'm remembering right, YA and other books for younger readers tend to sell more in hardcover than ebook and audio. (Audio is much bigger than it used to be, now that you can get audiobooks on your phone or MP3 player, but it trends more for adults who can now listen to books while doing other things.) Libraries tend to buy truckloads of YA, sometimes 3-5 copies of a book per library. (Not for the whole library system, but for each individual library.)

With adult books, you can have any age range of character from babies to ancient, but in YA publishers usually want a character who's an older teenager. Also some publishers really want you to hit a particular tone: not too young (which puts the book back a few years into middle grade) and not too old (which might put it forward into adult). But you do see a lot of YA books that have crossover with middle grade and vice verse, and a lot of adult and YA crossover. (There's an attempt to categorize the last one by calling it New Adult, but it doesn't take in the number of books with older characters that are still popular in the YA market.)

I think the interesting thing about YA is a lot of it is hard to characterize, which goes back to its origin of librarians pulling adult books for readers who had aged out of the children's section. It can be any genre, literary, romance, SF/F, mystery, or combination of genre. It's very unique in commercial publishing and I think that's why there's so many attempts to categorize it very specifically, and then YA books that don't fit those specific characterizations will pop up and become bestsellers.

This is very rambly, but basically YA can be more difficult to succeed in than adult books, not because the audience is difficult, but because publishers often have very different ideas of what YA is and what YA needs to be popular.



***

If you have any questions, general questions about publishing (how it works, agents, etc), or a writing advice question, or a question about my writing, or my books, or cats, or anything else I've been doing, ask in this post and I'll try to answer it.

comments