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bookgazing) wrote2010-05-25 05:11 am
bookgazing) wrote2010-05-25 05:11 am
Lacking Bite
As I’ve mentioned before I’m involved with both The Debut Book Battle and the Nerds Heart YA contest. Both contests want to highlight young adult books published in 2009, although they have different focuses that make them two distinct competitions. One difference I’ve really noticed between the two lists of books nominated is that The Debut Book Battle’s list features several paranormal romances, while Nerds Heart YA features just one paranormal romance.
Now there are lots of variables between the two contest that could have caused this. Perhaps all the paranormal romances are too well know to be nominated for NHYA which only looks at under publicised books. Perhaps they all got kicked off NHYA’s long list on the way to the shortlist (except I know they didn’t because I saw the shortlist being created). Or perhaps when a contest that’s actively focusing on promoting diversity*, filters out paranormal romance it’s because the paranormal romance published for young adults, is not a diverse field.
I know it won’t be a huge surprise to most of you that the young adult books that can be easily categorised as purely paranormal romance** do not tend to exhibit much diversity. I can name one paranormal romance series for teens that features a black protagonist and possibly a couple of stand alone books. I have to include Twilight to get any more diverse than that and I really don’t want to include Twilight in anything to do with diversity, ever.
The absence of paranormal romance stories with GLBT protagonists for some reason strikes me as the oddest gap in the young adult market (probably because I would devour these kind of books if I knew where to find them). Although GLBT protagonists don’t make up a majority share of the characters on offer in adult paranormal romance there are still quite a few paranormal books with GLBT main characters to choose from. Anne Rice wrote an entire series with bisexual vampire characters. Snowbooks publishes a series by S Roit called ‘Paris Immortals’ which features bisexual vampires. J Langley has several books out about gay werewolves. That’s to name just a few of the books on offer (and to offer no opinion on how good they might be). Try typing gay paranormal romance into Amazon for a more extensive range. Now try adding ‘young adult’ to that search, or ‘teenage’. Ah.
It seems like there’s a slow growing industry of GLBT speculative fiction, paranormal horror, super hero fiction and fantasy novels for the young adult reader. For great resources on these types of stories visit Lee Wind’s links. As hard as I search I can’t find any sort of comparative number of books that feel like they fit in the pure paranormal romance category and are marketed as young adult fiction. ‘Ash’ by Malinda Lo might fit and there’s a book called ‘The Vampire’s Heart’ by Mark Roeder, who seems to be holding up the GLBT young adult paranormal romance world all by himself. As the publishing world knows they can sell GLBT paranormal romances in the adult industry why are they so reluctant to opening up a new source of revenue in the young adult world?
What do you guys think? Does anyone have any recommendations, or resources to share on this area of reading?
* And this is so not a dig at the diversity of the Debut Book Battle’s list, it’s just meant to remind that NHYA’s theme this year was books that exhibit diversity, so all the books nominated were required to exhibit the diversity of the world in one of the ways we outlined.
** Now for the purpose of this post I’m using paranormal romance to mean that one, or more members of a potential romance must be a paranormal creature. If the book features an action driven plot the romance should feel equally important to the story.
Now there are lots of variables between the two contest that could have caused this. Perhaps all the paranormal romances are too well know to be nominated for NHYA which only looks at under publicised books. Perhaps they all got kicked off NHYA’s long list on the way to the shortlist (except I know they didn’t because I saw the shortlist being created). Or perhaps when a contest that’s actively focusing on promoting diversity*, filters out paranormal romance it’s because the paranormal romance published for young adults, is not a diverse field.
I know it won’t be a huge surprise to most of you that the young adult books that can be easily categorised as purely paranormal romance** do not tend to exhibit much diversity. I can name one paranormal romance series for teens that features a black protagonist and possibly a couple of stand alone books. I have to include Twilight to get any more diverse than that and I really don’t want to include Twilight in anything to do with diversity, ever.
The absence of paranormal romance stories with GLBT protagonists for some reason strikes me as the oddest gap in the young adult market (probably because I would devour these kind of books if I knew where to find them). Although GLBT protagonists don’t make up a majority share of the characters on offer in adult paranormal romance there are still quite a few paranormal books with GLBT main characters to choose from. Anne Rice wrote an entire series with bisexual vampire characters. Snowbooks publishes a series by S Roit called ‘Paris Immortals’ which features bisexual vampires. J Langley has several books out about gay werewolves. That’s to name just a few of the books on offer (and to offer no opinion on how good they might be). Try typing gay paranormal romance into Amazon for a more extensive range. Now try adding ‘young adult’ to that search, or ‘teenage’. Ah.
It seems like there’s a slow growing industry of GLBT speculative fiction, paranormal horror, super hero fiction and fantasy novels for the young adult reader. For great resources on these types of stories visit Lee Wind’s links. As hard as I search I can’t find any sort of comparative number of books that feel like they fit in the pure paranormal romance category and are marketed as young adult fiction. ‘Ash’ by Malinda Lo might fit and there’s a book called ‘The Vampire’s Heart’ by Mark Roeder, who seems to be holding up the GLBT young adult paranormal romance world all by himself. As the publishing world knows they can sell GLBT paranormal romances in the adult industry why are they so reluctant to opening up a new source of revenue in the young adult world?
What do you guys think? Does anyone have any recommendations, or resources to share on this area of reading?
* And this is so not a dig at the diversity of the Debut Book Battle’s list, it’s just meant to remind that NHYA’s theme this year was books that exhibit diversity, so all the books nominated were required to exhibit the diversity of the world in one of the ways we outlined.
** Now for the purpose of this post I’m using paranormal romance to mean that one, or more members of a potential romance must be a paranormal creature. If the book features an action driven plot the romance should feel equally important to the story.