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Trends in YA reading, part one

The CBC Arts website features a multifaceted look at marketing adult fiction to teen audiences. Although, through high school English classes and extracurricular reading, young adults have long been reading adult books, the inadvertent youth appeal of novels like Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, and Lori Lansens’ The Girls recently has some publishers repositioning books by marketing them to younger audiences, issuing editions with youth-friendly covers, and adding them to their kids and/or YA catalogues. Even booksellers like the Grant Park location of McNally Robinson in Winnipeg are getting into the act. Showing an understanding of young adult readers, who’d often rather their fellow browsers be adults than the kids who populate more traditional young readers sections, the store offers YA books in two separate sections: one downstairs, near the adult fiction section, and one upstairs.

Related links:
Click here for the piece on the CBC Arts website
Click here for a February 2005 Q&Q feature on adult/YA crossover

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