I absolutely agree with this. You see it so often that women's books will be automatically designated YA when nothing about the book indicates that it's aimed at a YA audience. I've also noticed books like Dracula being in the YA section and no where else... Like I guess a YA could read and enjoy Dracula but its a Gothic Horror classic intended for adults. At the very least, have a copy in both sections

Even when their books DO have explicit content in them (such as Maas), they're STILL shelved as YA! It's maddening!

What's really disturbing is how the PTBs think that if we are over a certain age, we all want to witness violence and sexually explicit content all the time. Most adult humans actually do not and when we do, we can seek out content with that if we choose. Why must it be in everything and why must it be forced on everyone all the time? So frustrating.

I was in a bookshop where a title was shelved as YA and I nearly had a heart attack. I read it a year before and it has a number of quite adult scenes, a passage where a character describes how they were gang SA, and following that the character dies by s^icide. I told a member of staff and they said, "Oh but the author's other books are like x, y, z". All the other books had children as the main characters where they embark on adventures filled with fairies and magic. This one was semi autobiographical about a woman in her late 40's who attends a spiritualist retreat that is essentially rehab. There's one chapter where she has a hallucination and she sees a being of light that she calls a fairy, so maybe that's why it was put in YA. I didn't tell them to make them move it, it was more an FYI. But yikes!

It's also a problem that if a female author's work _does_ have some of that content that bars it from getting the YA label, it gets crammed into 'Romance' instead. Carrie Vaughn's _Kitty_ series got shelved with romance novels for years.

My local library had the entire 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' series by Douglas Adams in the YA section. It was a hell of a book series for a thirteen year old me to snicker at in study hall!

It is very weird what gets shoehorned into the young adult section nowadays. I just started Mistborn from my library and it was in the young adult section. I have also noticed many classics (Dickins, Shakespere, both Bronte's, Jane Austen-just to name a few) are now in young adult as well. Like????? What is up with the rating system? Also, why not just have a classic section? I have so many questions.

You raise up some interesting points. First of all, I fully agree with you. As a young adult myself who has been reading YA fiction for a long time, I sort of just assumed that Brandon Sanderson was YA. I think you hit the nail on the head of "there's no way to call a book pg13." How could we combat this? I love mature stories that have depth and don't baby me, but I really don't care for sex scenes, graphically described violence, and curse words in every sentence. How can I find the books I want? I've just been reading YA for this very reason, even though sometimes the stories are simpler, the content is closer to what I want. What do you think would be a solution to this problem? I'm also very sorry that women authors have been dealing with this BS, it's so stupid

You just expressed the concern I have about what I'm working on right now. I don't want to write a Young Adult novel (and yes setting is more fantasy) but based on some of the books by female authors I see being paraded as YA, I thought I was just being paranoid.

It might seem unrelated but it isn't totally, I noticed years ago a similar problem with manga written by women. Manga are separated not by genre but by gender (which is ridiculous but that's how it is) : Shonen meaning boy and shojo meaning girl. Shonen manga (like Naruto or OnePiece ) are usually written by men and are stories where the main character is usually a boy and that follows certain editorial rules like must be about certain topics (adventure, sports, fantasy, sci-fi, etc..) and mild swearing is accepted as well as depiction of violence and partial nudity (kinda like in the YA category) Shojo manga (like Fruit Basket or Sailor Moon) on the other hand are usually written by women and usually have a female protagonist but also it follows totally different editorial rules. It's mostly Romance, high-school drama, magical girls, or slice of life,.. and the editorial rules are even more children friendly for example swearing is prohibited by editors, depictions of violence must be justified (like the bullying in high-school drama or the vilains in magical girl series) and toned down and censored or just suggested rather than shown. Many shojo authors had initially complex more serious plots that got babyfied by the editors who wanted their story to stay light and cute because "it sells better". That doesn't mean that Shonen writers aren't also inconvenienced by editors. There are also many cases of Shonen writers who initially wanted to write Seinen manga (adult equivalent of Shonen) but the editor saw their plot, saw an opportunity to make money and goodies for teens, babyfied it to cater to a teen audience instead and said "it will be a Shonen or you won't be published". Like what happened to the author of Seraph of the End who initially had way deeper and darker philosophical and religious themes but wasn't allowed to explore them. Or the author of Yu-Gi-Oh who's initial concept was darker and more adult. But shojo writers are even more restricted and policed based on outdated sexist views. And the problem is that shojo manga are not considered as well as shonen manga and they are much more infantilised by the industry. And that poses a problem because sometimes women authors write Shonen instead of shojo, but just because the author is a woman or their drawing style is recognized as feminine, their books are put by bookshops in the shojo section eventhough they shouldn't be there. So they don't sell as well. Only time when they don't get discriminated is when they had a drawing style that looks like stereotypical male Shonen artists style to the point where many people don't even know the mangaka was a woman like with Fullmetal Alchemist. I don't know if it's just the bookstore in my city but I have seen librarians open boxes of Shonen Manga to put in shelves, that were written by women and drawn in a feminine or "androgynous" art style, and I would see them hesitate as to where they should put them. One time after seeing a Shonen in the shojo section I told them that this one is actually a Shonen because it says so on the official website, and it even has a male protagonist. And the guy was like "yeah but the style looks very shojo so.. it's better to let it on the shojo section so people don't get confused". It's crazy how they decide categories based on art style and name rather than story content. It's also why "yaoi" (gay stories) are usually put next to shojo in the same corner of the store, away from Shonen, even though it's male protagonists, because they think gay = girly. Yuri (lesbian stories) are also put together with shojo. Everything queer and feminine is usually put together which is also an interesting phenomenon to observe. As well as the fact that Shonen take most of the space in Manga shops and get most of the marketing budget. just saying..

I was slightly disturbed when I saw that ACOTAR was in the YA section of my local library. I used to read a lot of fantasy from that same section when I was around ages 11-13. Many people fail to realise that kids who are advanced readers will move on to YA books really early on. YA books tend to be pretty easy to read so of course pre-teens that grow up reading a lot are going to read them. I grew out of the common YA books when I was like 14. Also in my country there’s no such thing as middle grade. In general I think the category of YA is a bit harmful because a 13 year old and a 23 year old probably won’t and shouldn’t read exactly the same kind of books.

Oh I'm a proper little gremlin about this. I sometimes move books to where they should be in the local library 😂 (sorry librarians, but you can't put half of a book series in the kids section and the other half in YA on the other side of the library 🤣😭 pick a lane). I've definitely noticed a difference between how seriously male and female genre writers are taken. I did an entire essay on something very similar during my Masters. Basically about where the line is between children's and adult fiction. Something I've found interesting is the migration of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy in my local bookstore. When I was a child it was in the middle grade section, and it basically stayed there throughout the height of the Harry Potter craze. Then it moved to YA when Book of Dust was released... And by the time that the well respected BBC/HBO TV adaption was in full swing it was 'promoted' to the adult sci-fi/ fantasy section, where it currently resides 🤔 I wonder if female authors are afforded the same level of 'upward mobility'. At one point, Lord of the Rings got promoted from sci-fi/fantasy to the classics section! Meanwhile I found the Earthsea cycle in middle-grade 😒

Really love that closing statement. Yes, things are better now than they have ever been. Doesn't mean we should stop trying to improve I have nothing of worth to add to the specific topic, but feel this in general deserves to be pointed out.

The Queen's Thief is my favorite series EVER!! My grandma found the first book in the kids section of the library and got it for me to read. I was 8 at the time and I absolutely loved it then. I found it again, years later as a 25 year old, and re-read it, realizing then that it was NOT a kids book and i had no business reading it as an 8 year old.

Oh my gosh, YES. No hate to YA authors at all, but I'm 30 and like to read sci-fi and fantasy books that are written for an adult audience, but it's such a minefield finding good books written by women because so many of them get lumped into YA that I have to sort through the YA listings looking for a book that reflects the kind of book I'm in the mood for at that moment.

Goodness!! I was talking to a friend about this last month! Fantasy/Sci-Fi and PG-13-ish books that the kiddos get interested in reading and we both pre-read the books because of this issue.... Particularly when our 11 year olds are wanting a good book to read.... There are some where it is just... I am sure the author, herself, would be like that one author you told where her book was located. It is an insult to the authors, really.

I think books are in a dire need of an equivalent to age-ratings for movies, based on specific lines they cross or don't cross (e.g. complexity of the story, mature themes/topics, explicit content, gore). And "age of protagonist" or "it's a fantasy romance" do not count, they don't automatically make it a book that appeals to a younger audience. Btw I don't mean an equivalent in the sense of "you can only buy this if you're past a certain age" but more as a recommendation who the author intended this book to be for. Just make stamps or sth that you can put on the book covers (and peel off after buying). That way, you could still sort them based on genre.

No matter what is written by women in the majority, it'll always be viewed as less than until it becomes too lucrative to ignore - then it'll be co-opted by male writers and women will be pushed to the periphery. But honesty, I feel like YA is just code for "women are welcome here" and that's why I gravitate toward that section in any library or bookstore I'm in

I've basically been reading straight up porn since I was 10 years old my reading was not monitored at all and what was considered young adult most certainly should not have been

I mean J.K.Rowling (not talking about what she’s on and about now) chose to not have her full name written to hide the fact that she was a female author and it seems that that worked pretty well 🙃

Me: Frustrated that decision-makers think that an adult mind requires SA or other violence to be entertained. I don’t find either appealing in any way.

There is one other factor that might be worth considering, which wasn't mentioned in the video: Word count. Sanderson's _Mistborn_ may get put in YA sections sometimes; I have never seen _The Way of Kings_ get put there, or the LOTR single-volume omnibuses, or any of Martin's "Ice and Fire" books, or the main books of the "Wheel of Time" series. What do these all have in common, besides their authors being men? Word counts close to, and often well over, *300K* per book. The first book of the _Court of Thorns and Roses_ series, on the other hand, clocks in at 130K according to the author's own Twitter feed, and Megan Whalen Turner's _The Thief_ (the first of her series) comes to less than 85K. (Later books in both series get much longer, but the problem there is that once Book 1 is called YA, the rest of the books in a series _have_ to get shelved with it.) By contrast, Samantha Shannon's _The Priory of the Orange Tree_ comes in at 225K, and I've never seen it in any YA section anywhere. In other words, perhaps it's not the readers' emotional or linguistic maturity the booksellers are making assumptions about, it's their _patience_ -- teens are assumed to want a book they can finish quickly; adults are assumed to want books that will give them a good long story for their time and money. So if the goal is to break out of the YA ghetto, this may be a milestone more easily met than arguments about content and reader maturity.

I always sift through the young adult section on searching for good fantasy books for adults because I like those PG-13-ish books and they are so extremely often wrongly categorised. I also look through the fantasy section but i often don't find what i want there. I also once found the stories of 1001 nights at the Children's corner and that literally is about a king killing thousands of women because his wife hooked up with another man behind his back. If there is one book that should not be read by children, at least not the first story of the collection, then its that one. I told the librarian but they insisted that it was a fairy tale so it did not belong with adult literature.

Genuinely never knew this was a thing. Tbh Ive never stopped to think if an author was male/female or indeed neither! I'll pick a book ... read the blurb ... somtimes pick a random page 2/3 in and if I like that page I buy it. Sometimes Ive read entire books and not stopped to one read the authors name.

THE QUEEN'S THIEF is an odd example to use, just in my opinion, because the prose and short length made it the middle-grade-iest book I've ever accidentally read. (I've read kidlit/middle grade on purpose on occasion, but it's usually very clear to me going in.) I remember being utterly frustrated by the ambiguity of the marketing. My examples for something that people are calling YA but is just genre fiction by a woman are probably SIX OF CROWS or CITY OF BRASS.

Note: They started shelving Brando's Misborn as YA after he had announced he was doing a YA series (Starsight) so I think it was "oh he has one YA, clearly that means retroactively his other young fem protag should be YA too!" And like, I'm not actually mad about it, because I think expanding what YA is to include non-coming of age stories is something we can't rail against, it's just where we're at and it's not going back in the box. That said! I agree with you, I think there are plenty of things which could, and probably SHOULD be labeled as Adult Fantasy and Scifi but only aren't because their author is fem (Edit: just to be clear, using Fem intentionally as some of the authors this happens to are non-binary but present in a fem way, and speaking as a femNB myself)

I've never understood the adult/young adult books category and always found it dumb going to libraries. Probably because my high school had everything labeled by alphabet and reading level from 100 to 1600 or something. I've always found the best books around the 800 to 1000 mark with very few in the 1200 to 1400 and nothing interesting after that. I kept mine low for that until I was forced to actually try by the librarian after realizing my score hadn't moved in three years.

In my library, I'm pretty sure that J. R. R. Tolkien's books are in YA, though I'm not sure if it's also in adult. Megan Whaler Turner's book The Thief is in middle grade and the rest of her books are in YA. I am glad though that Jennifer Neilson has my favorite series, which is YA, correctly shelved in the YA section when oftentimes it's put in middle grade. For reference, I work as a shelver in a library.

I saw a comment not very long ago that the fantasy genre is just about sex, that they're smutty romances or whatever, so the reader refuses to take fantasy seriously and stopped reading it. Because a lot of the books that aren't like that are "young adult" and that's where I've been getting lots of my books for years, and yeah, a lot of the are written by women.

Fun story. At my library in the late 90th to early 10th we had a children and teen fantasy/sifi shelf. That shelf had a lot of intresting content for a young and curious girl. If the book was relatively short (and not a classic) that's where it would end up no matter the content. I am actually quite happy that I was able to borrow and read those books with that content as early as I was. I had fun reading them and my reading improved quickly.

Its almost like the people in charge of Putting Books in the correct category dont care... Its very annoying

It always baffles me that Hunger games is a YA series. The topics are heavy, current/important, well developed, the language is sophisticated. It's not about Katniss growing up. But it is a woman author and the protagonist is a woman

You're making me wonder if my list of favorite authors would be different if not for this effect. 'Cuz I've long skewed in favor of YA books, because they don't have what I consider "the crutches" (sex, swearing, gratuitous violence), and thus are forced to actually tell a good story. I'm Neurodivergent enough to feel alienated from "girls my age" since I was little, so I never would have consciously chosen female authors, but at one point I looked at my favorite books and realized that they were nearly all written by women. It's weird because as avid a reader as I was as a kid, I rarely read published fiction now -- I read almost exclusively fanfiction, and nonfiction/study materials. And what I noticed in fanfiction (which is a distinctly female-skewed creative medium) is that there seems to be a split between the fics that are allowed to get intensely dramatic, and those that are sex-free. If I want to avoid sexual content, I need to opt out of most of the truly intense experiences, so at some point I went "ugh fine" and adjusted to reading and enjoying a lot of slash and non-con and such. But eventually I decided to become the supplier for the content I wanted to read (intense drama, deep intimacy (Platonic or siblings), no sex or romance). But it kinda bugs me that it's so rare to find fics that give me a good roller coaster and some deep friendships while steering clear of romance and Ships. I mean, it's not that I can't find some, but trying to stick to Teen & Under or Gen ratings typically leaves me wanting.

So I have noticed this, but I was curious about Tolkien, because my copies of The Hobbit and LOTR, which are Barnes and Noble Exclusive editions, are labeled as Young Adult

Even the books with explicit content in it (Sarah J. Maas, a Throne of Glass series, for example) is something I find on YA shelves in bookstores.... Well, I guess it's on the border, because it actually IS about 1 main character who, in the present day, would be considered a teenager. BUT... everything is essentially adult stuff. In fantasy often characters are regarded as adults earlier then here in our world. So.... I would have categorised her work in New Adult instead. But I think New Adult isn't something you find in bookstores... 🤷‍♀ I completely agree with you that women, especially fantasy authors, still have WAYS to go. It's gonna be a long journey!

The film version of this is any movie with a female protagonist is considered a "romance/romantic comedy" even when romance isn't the central plot.

I know the last book in the Queen's Thief series (One of my favorite book series btw) is in the teen section which seems really interesting that 5/6 of those books are for Young Adult instead of all six being teen. It took me reading this series twice through to notice all of the adult issues that Gen and his crew deal with and to realize how old he and Sophos and Irene actually are.

Straight adult scenes: considered YA Same-sex handholding: "We gotta ban this book! Won't someone think about the children?"

YA as an age demographic has been broadened to 12-25. This has happened, because New Adult, books for people in their twenties, has been written off as smut (because of the themes that it usually tackles) and doesn't sell as well as a result. The publishing industry is also overwhelmingly female and there are plenty of female authors that write Fantasy who are labeled with the adult category such as Fonda Lee. Also, I think this point of view assumes that children's literature, or books that are appropriate for children, are lesser. Which they aren't. I really don't think that sexism is the best explanation for this, but maybe I'm misunderstanding your argument.

Oddly enough I only read the first book in the "Wheel of Time" series and would totally have pegged it as YA. Main character(s) aren't adults - check , a coming of age story - check , the expectation is that everything will be solved by the power of friendship - big check. Sounds like a YA book to me.

I saw Maus, you know the comic that chronicles the author’s father’s time as a Jew in Poland during WWII, the one with a big swastika on the cover and concentration camps in it, placed under “humor”, presumably because comic. I pointed this out to the bookstore twice. The first time nothing happened, the second time they just got rid of Maus totally.

Did the Twilight series dodge the YA bullet? Wikipedia classifies it as _Fantasy Romance_ If it did, how? The slipshod editing was an ongoing source of humor for my writing group, and from that I inferred there were connections in the publishing house that might have kept it being taken seriously. Is it just a matter of knowing someone who knows someone in the publishing house? It may be why we can't have nice things.

Not that it would solve the sexism issue (which women authors have complained about since Jane Austen's day) but we probably need a system where we separate "target age" from "content warnings" - because those are NOT the same thing, even if there is overlap! Yes, we generally don't want to put stuff with a bunch of explicit sex and violence in the kids section (though people seem weirdly more OK with the latter, but that's a whole other conversation). But what makes something a middle grade or YA is more the reading level required to understand it and how kid-relevant the themes are (there's very few 10 year olds that would want to read a book that goes real deep into, like, political philosophy and tariffs, or whatever). Likewise, something doesn't HAVE to have explicit content to be aimed at an adult audience! 'War and Peace' is not a kids' book just because no one bangs on-page. There's still going to be hard-to-classify cases: For instance there's a lot of classic fantasy I read and enjoyed as a child...but understand and love MORE now that I'm an adult. So they aren't "for kids" - because there are themes you probably aren't going to fully understand if you read it when you're 11 - but there's no reason NOT to let a kid read them, you know?

I am personally not a big reader myself but either way, it is kind of hard to argue with what she says when she brings up these various arguments and examples. 😢Indeed sad that there is still such a long way to go for women and their work to get the full respect they deserve. I am with you there.👍🏻

Meanwhile, The Name of the Wind is some of the most immature claptrap ever. Seriously, I looked up the author to see if he was a kid because that book was more juvenile than the Inheritance Cycle which the author started writing as a teenager. It's about a boy, who is marvelous at all the things, has a nemesis with nothing better to do than expend all his time and energy on getting him kicked out of school or dead (Malfoy had more going on), and has ADULT women coming on to him. It's shelved with adult.

People will ban LGBT book for "being explicit" and then do this!!

I think the case of the Queen's Thief series, book 1 could probably pass for YA, but books 2 through 6 deal with heavier themes, even if there's nothing explicit.

Once found a book written by a female author in my school library which should not have been in a school library there was a scene where the main characters mother is revealed to be sleeping with the main characters boyfriend by showing of them sleeping together on the couch. The main character is later assaulted by a character who is meant to be her friend while she’s asleep then they sleep together while using Magic to disguise each other, other people the main character later sleeps with the actual love interest of the book What are the story wasn’t necessarily explicit about facts, you knew what was happening

The AJW books i have are explicit horror with strong language but listed as YA. I know hes a male author but I still think maybe it shouldnt be in that section.

It is so easy to put a Sci-Fi/fantasy book in YA. You don't have to think. If a book creates an alternate reality it must be for kids cuz it is not 'serious'. Especially if it is under a female author's name ( Andre Norton/Andrew North who DID do brilliant YA but still got dismissed. Not real people, y'know) Even publishing as 'male' kept her from acclaim for years because of the genre. Heaven forbid you should write a good, compelling story that could be for any age. Books are only for grown ups if they have a lot of (fantasy) sex or (exaggerated) violence. It also helps if the main characters are profoundly unlikeable and the author has a heavy agenda of some kind. NY Times best seller. Assigned by professors. Read it now- by next year you won't remember which one it is!

I love Megan Whalen Turner. I always get excited when she'd mentioned.

Once I see a woman's name. I'm always skeptical.

I’m an adult and don’t want to read explicit content, but I also don’t want to read exclusively YA.

That totally explains why Sarah J Maas is in YA! Honestly the range in YA totally irritates me, they have moved everything from Ella Enchanted (truely a great book for all ages but aimed at 8ish yr olds) to ACOTAR (100% adult not YA) into the category! Why are elementary and middle grade books now considered young adult?! (In the library not usualy bookstores). And why must all my favorite female authors be subjected to a younger rating?!

I don't see being categorized as YA as a problem, myself. The category isn't wrong; if the book isn't horribly violent or graphic, then yes it's safe to give to younger than average adults without inspiring problematic, deviant curiosities. It's people's idea maturity in taste is necessarily defiantly graphic, or sadistic content-wise, that is the problem. CS Lewis said: "When I became I man, I put away childish things; including a fear of seeming childish, and a desire to be overly grown-up." and I think he's right. Inversely, I don't think there's anything particularly grown-up about graphic sex and violence. There's child soldiers and trafficking, and abuse all around - and none of it is particularly maturing to those unfortunates who participate.

Isn’t Brandon Sanderson work marketed as YA tho?

I see this happen all the time. There are so many books I’ve read that should one hundred percent not be in YA. Take Maas for instance. Yes the beginning of TOG can be argued as Young Adult like I do think Throne Of Glass can be argued as YA but almost every other book she’s written should be in New Adult or older.

I found Nimona in the middle grade section… Nimona! Like huh??? There is no way the themes in that story are made for children… they wouldn’t even understand them

Huh, I never really thought about it like that! Good video!

I have heard frustrations from parents along these lines as well

This half makes me want to write two books, one where I use a pseudonym which would be taken as feminine and the other where I use my name with both close in terms of what short of content should play into rating to see if they get placed in different sections.

I generally prefer to read books that are marketed as "young adult". I don't see that label as degrading, and I think anyone who does see that label as devaluing the author needs to re-sort their priorities. I can't speak to book sales and how the marketing/labeling effects that; but I do think too many people discount YA books as "not real literature". Also, the calculus that goes into where a book is shelved in a bookstore of library varies wildly from location to location. I don't doubt that there are managers who shelve books authored by women in the YA section for sexist reasons, but those who know where to find good literature will find it wherever it is shelved. I recommend you share your favorites with friends/family/acquaintances regardless of what section they're shelved.

It doesn't seem to happen for Military Sci-Fi and a few other genres. No one ever put Elizabeth Moon in YA (at least, I've never seen her there). This is also probably a very publisher side issue, because they're jockeying for shelf space (there's a LOT of wheeling and dealing that happens for for space on the tables, for instance) and have their own... ideas.

I have been confused about the ratings for awhile now. Kuang's 'The Poppy War' series is (thankfully and appropriately) in the fantasy section, but the beginning of the first book could easily make one think it's YA. Jae Waller's 'Call of the Rift' is classed as YA, but it has some heavy themes and there's nothing at all stopping it from being 'adult.' I don't get it 😅

Just a note about Mistborn as a former Barnes & Noble employee, they started doing some cross marketing. There were different edition that were put in YA. After all they are pretty clean, so why not branch out the audience (for a man), plus he has books that are written as YA, so putting them together works well.

Also, just because a book has young protagonists does not mean it's YA. "To Kill a Mockingbird" is not YA. Neither is "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" or "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time". Plus, I'm a firm believer that YA books can be about adults, not just teenagers. It's not just content and it isn't just the age of the protagonist. It's the worldview and the perspective.

After having read some other comment sthe solution is clear: we need a rating system more like that of TV in that we can catagorize reading as "no explicit content" "mild content" and "lots of content" as subcategories. Instead of having "YA & adult" sections for fiction it could also have a range from "coming of age" to "political intreage" A system like this will never exist unfortunately so really people need to actually read the books before catagorizing them 😒

I absolutely know that they're are authors I've never heard of because they've been misfiled EVERYWHERE as YA - though it obviously isn't all women authors. So I have to wonder if it might be a publisher thing? Like, Baen doesn't even HAVE YA, and I don't think Tor does (or it's an imprint with a different name, maybe?) So I think publisher is there first point of issue (though you can't always get the publisher you want, right? Sigh) But a LOT of the publishing world has ALWAYS looked down on every type of speculative fiction, and was even MORE does that *wOmEn* (gasp) could do even that much. So many spec fic writers used to be shoved into romance (sometimes when there wasn't even a romance in the novel!) Just because they were women - now there's more options to, essentially, ghettoize women writers. So old fashioned places (or just workers IN a place) will assume if the writer is s woman, must be romance or YA. Yay for the never ending battle, right? Sigh... (At my local library, a veritable war was waged against a very elder librarian. New books would come in, CLEARLY marked as horror or sci fi or urban fantasy or - TWICE - NON FICTION HISTORICAL/ POLITICAL ANALYSIS - and she'd put it in romance. The other librarians would re-shelvw, she'd go find them and put them back. She ignored the branch manager, the district manager, the acquisitions manager, EVERYONE. They had to finally tell her the next time she deliberately mis-shelved a book she'd be fired to make her stop)

The books moxie and the agggt series are labeled young adult where I live and they say the f word like 30 times throughout the book it dosent sound that bad but they are getting put in the younger section of young adult not the older section

Was expecting more of a game show format

I wrote a YA novel and I’m currently editing it. My dad is the only person apart from myself to have read through the entire story and he said it would fit better as a middle grade novel. Now, I’m especially scared that others will have the same conclusion. My book will have mild profanity, dirty jokes, and a little bit of violence. *It is not for kids.* Furthermore, the protagonist is 16 and the novel focuses on her self-discovery and coming of age, which is without a doubt YA. Hopefully, I can at least dodge the misogyny since I legally changed my name to an androgynous one shortly after I turned 18 as part of my gender transition.

My local library puts all Diana Wynne Jones books in the children’s chapter book section, alongside like Magic Treehouse

How about a bookstore with no "sections!" Books are shelved alphabetically by author's last name. In the case of complications, by the editors last name, including reference books (it's just a book.)

This is me trying to figure out what makes And I Darken a YA, it's super politics heavy. Second mislabel: it's also tagged as fantasy for literally no reason.

To me who was made aware of this problem 3 minutes ago seems that the industry is in sore need of their equivalent of ESRB or MPAA. Any kind of age rating, actually.

when john green's anthropocene reviewed came out, i went to a big chain bookstore to find it. i looked all over non-fiction, autobiographies, and wherever else i could think of, but couldn't find it, until finally i asked an employee and they took me to YA, because "ah yes john green writes romance for teenagers", so that's where the new book goes too. that said, this was just to tell a funny/frustrating somewhat related story. absolutely not to dismiss all the extremely valid and important points made in the video -- i agree with the rant wholeheartedly and am grateful we're having this discussion.

Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson should absolutely be YA.

ACOTAR sales in the YA section in my country....Yep....The horn fairies book...

That's troubling since not all women authors write stuff kids should read yet.

1:34 Yup. That's also why I want to publish under a male name. The book that I'm working on is fantasy, but there isn't romance (I guess a hint that it could be sometning but nothing further than that). I was doing a workshop about mock query letters and then one of my peers looked at the title of my book (A throne of vultures) and immediately went Oh! Is ThErE rOmAnCe because of current trends in romantic fantasy (and I'm guessing because of books like Throne Of Glass they go oh! A throne! Like SJM!) and it just made my eyes roll because IMO if I was a dude, that probably wouldn't have been the first response of me trying to be an ACOTAR cash grab. My main character is an assassin who is trying to navigate fatherhood and when everything goes wrong, he has to decide if he wants to stay, or betray his organization by taking his children and running. (Gods I wish these romantasy trends would go up in flames).

I almost punched someone when they said that Babel is YA

My conception of YA is very different, I once walked into Waterstones and opposite me was a lady my own age (19) we both walked the length of the store when we split in opposite directions I went to fantasy and she to YA, I was very confused and curious by this as I've never been in that corner of the store so after she left I went to see why we split directions and with a brief look at titles and such the only thing I managed to Sus out was YA was heavily focused on the romantic side of the story, while fantasy seemed more heavily focused on the action side (I made the presumption then that both areas were targeted for the same age group: Young adults 16-20 year olds, but at different genders) I'm not saying there isn't a problem, but perhaps this is other people's presumptions also Perhaps also putting it in the YA section drives sales??

I wonder if this was an issue 20-30 years ago. Because 30+ years ago you had female sci-fi/fantasy authors (Le Guin? Anyone?) who were recognized as sci-fi/fantasy authors. Now scifi/fantasy was still looked down upon and YA didn’t really exist until the 00s but I think it’s worth pointing it out. So, I wonder if this is a demand issue or editors being really dim bulbs.

This makes so much sense!! I mainly read YA, just because I’m uncomfortable with the amount of (what I consider) inappropriate stuff in most fantasy settings, and I noticed that most authors I really enjoy are women. The only male authors I mainly read and enjoy are JRR Tolkien, Brian Jacques, and CS Lewis. This is so maddening now that I’m aware of this, why is that the case?

I agree - “better” for women is not good for women. We need to improve to the point where things are even.

And many of the popular “YA” sagas shouldn't be YA imo. As you said, they are politically heavy and deal with topics of violence, torture, dictatorships and even pr0st1tut10n.

Is Brandon Sanderson not YA? I have seen it shelfed like that in my bookstore. I always thought it is because the writing stile is simpler, so it can be enjoyed by less experienced readers. Same with a series like Warrior Cats, which I loved as a kid but got quite hard to get back into as an adult, because of the writing style. Tolkien on the other hand is quite hard to get into (and Book 1 feels kind of boring as a result of that), even though he wrote his books for his kids.

I saw once the entire witcher series shelved as YA. I don't know what is wrong whith this category of books but their is someting somewhere

at this point i‘m basing my system of what age range to classify books as on the age of the protagonist or main cast, unless the themes of the novel need for them to be shelved higher or if the book is advertised by the author to be for younger audiences despite a grown up protagonist. it‘s obviously not a perfect system, seeing as characters can have no specified age or complicated relationships with age. in that case you have to use the much more subjective criteria of are these themes appropriate for these age ranges. or listen to what the author has intended, which seems to be a crazy idea in this day and age.

As someone who holds a degree in creative writing, my professors always told me that for YA the protag had to be 14-18 (though a year or two older could be alright as long as it fits the other criteria, and 14 is pushing it towards middle grade bc kids are most often reading about characters a couple years older than themselves), and it had to deal with some kind of coming of age. I see coming of age as basically things that someone mid-20s or older would more rarely ever have to deal with, just because of their age. It can also deal with more mature topics and political intrigue and whatnot, but at its core it has to be a teenager being very Teenaged. At least, that’s how I’ve always seen it.

I always giggle that I love YA fiction because I’m a woman in her 50’s. After watching I thought of all my favorite YA authors and they’re all female. I feel ridiculous I never realized this about the industry.

I didn't know this was a wider trend. I get so frustrated just *knowing* if I ever get the story I want to write on shelves that it would most likely go to YA, even though it's literally a story written by an adult with the aim of being what *I* would find most relatable and compelling. It feels so reductive to see stories about finding yourself or going through big changes and thinking that's something only teens can relate to. Or worse thinking gratuitous sexual violence is the difference between a book for adults or a book for children. Not every adult is comfortable with that in their reading experiences and it's not an issue of maturity

I've seen JRR Tolkien in the Y/A section lol. It's even been in elementary level reading. I mean those are usually abridged but still. Narnia is definitely put in YA sections. Honestly I kind of like it when stuff for older people is put in the YA section, cuz then I'm more apt to find and read it, since I trust that YA will be more at my comfort level then 'adult'. But if it's still meant for adults, when being in the YA section, I won't find it boring. I hope I explained that right. Also putting adult stuff in the YA section could be on purpose to get a bigger audience interested in those books.

So true..... So glad to be able to be living in this century. I can get a good education, have the option of remaining single without the pressure of having kids without social suicide and able to get employed and being my own badass. (Also, so mnay books!!!!)

YA should strictly be for books where the main protagonists are teens. If people want a content rating like there is for movies, tv, and video games, maybe the publishing industry should think about implementing one. But YA shouldn't be used for that purpose.

I felt like this with six of crows, it felt like a series about people in their 20s aged down because it would be more marketable as a book for teens. I don't know if thats true and I love it and i think its appropriate for teens but the characters feel like they should be 25

Most fantasy and sci-if (regardless of content) gets put in YA until it becomes well known enough to get sorted elsewhere. It isn’t a gender thing, but a popularity of author/series thing.

I understand the reason to separate children's and adult fiction - there are major differences in reading level for much of children's fiction versus adult fiction. There is no reason to take the average 8-year old and try to expose them to, say The Priory of the Orange Tree, because they very likely will get frustrated, quickly. I don't understand why YA and adult books are separated. I read both indiscriminately starting around the age of 10 (a few months after reading YA material), and still do so. I end up having to go to both sections of the library or bookstore to find what I'm interested in reading.

Hmm I wonder how this affects book banning as well - I'm not for censorship but if books are literally being placed where they shouldn't be no wonder they are getting removal requests. I also do think that sometimes things can really straddle the border and we do have to recognize that YA does include 18 yr old seniors in HS and they should be allowed some more adult content in their books WITH the coming of age story and accessable writing. I also know from being friends with a librarian books with lgbtqia+ content tends to be requested to be shelved up if it's even a little risqué

That's the concern I personally have. Even though i'm not a female, but the publisher is convinced in that, because of my still unchanged documents, so they advised me to tone down some scenes in the novel, so it would be more fitting into YA category. The problem is that I don't want to tone down neither the scenes of violence, nor SA scenes. The book's main topics are war and destructive violence, how on Earth am I supposed to tone it down. WHY on Earth am I supposed to be OK with my book being labeled as YA, even though I don't write for younger audience