YA books and LGBT themes

[la_marquise]

For those of you following the story about Sherwood Smith and Rachle Manija Brown's yaoung adutl novel with a gay viewpoint character, which an agent which to censor, here at two interesting links. Firstly, The Guardian has picked up the story
And Malinda Lo, author of the LGBT -themed Ash, has some very interesting statistics here.

Comments

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Interesting figures. Though the writer seems not to have realised that the likely reason that there are more YA novels about gays than lesbians is simply because a lot of girls like reading m/m slash.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I suspect it's more down to marketing and the common social belief that stuff about boys is more saleable.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I suspect that they're selling better and the publisher is responding to that. Remember, they know their readers are more female than male, so you wouldn't automatically expect them to go for male gays.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Perhaps, but for the age-range in question, most of the book-buying is done by adults - who tend to see male issues as the more important. (This particularly affects schools, who tend to focus most of the effort on getting boys to read. The assumption is that girls will read boys' books but boys must be catered to directly.) I'm also not sure how many middle-grade girls would like slash -- we're talking 10-13 here -- they might well want loving friendships and romance, rather than most of what the internet offers -- think the very sentimental end of shonen-ai manga (things like 'From Eroica With Love').