YA is facing a serious image problem. Before you immediately sharpen your knives and proceed to go after the usual anti-YA targets, let me say that I’m not talking about those snooty literary types who will occasionally deign to admit that a YA novel ‘is almost good enough to be shelved with the adult fiction’ – as if to imply that the very best of YA is still not as good as the latest Laurel K. Hamilton train wreck. No, I’m talking about YA’s other image problem, one that is going almost unnoticed in many YA circles and which might just be (whisper it) entirely justified.

Put simply, YA is becoming the laughing stock of the speculative fiction world. I’ve now lost count of the number of times I’ve seen (amateur) reviewers assure their readers that a book is ‘not YA-ish’ despite the presence of a teenage protagonist; or, conversely, they might criticise a book for being ‘embarrassingly YA’. They’re not discussing YA as a publishing category here. It is a matter of objective fact whether a book is published as Young Adult or as something else. No, what’s at stake here is whether a book possesses a certain YA-like quality, one that a good portion of readers seem to intensely dislike.

What exactly are we talking about here? Rather than rehashing what’s wrong with the content of many YA books these days, I’ll just point you to the post I’ve already done on the subject (or if you’re not in the mood for that much long-winded negativity, try The Sparkle Project for something that manages to make many of the same points while also being entertaining). YA, or popular YA at least, is turning into a clearing house for dozens upon dozens of badly-written, amateurish romance stories that – let’s just be honest here –  would probably never pass muster in any other publishing category. But that’s something that only becomes apparent after you’ve read a good deal of YA and kept abreast of the latest trends, and people who are put off by anything with a teenage protagonist are unlikely to put that much effort into following the industry.

So how do they know what YA books are like, if they rarely ever read them? How do they make up their minds about what constitutes ‘embarrassingly YA’? Simple: they walk into a bookstore.

I swear I've seen this model on five or six different books recently.

Rather than harping on about the contents of YA books, today I’m going to focus a little bit on their exteriors; the face that YA shows to the world, to put it in slightly dramatic terms. And Jesus, but that face is getting more worryingly shallow by the day.

I remember when it was fairly common for YA books to have abstract, illustrated or even downright artistic covers. There seemed to be an unspoken rule against showing any of the main characters directly, something that still holds true in a lot of adult genre fiction; now every second book has an adult model acting as an odd stand-in for what I assume is supposed to be a character from the book. I’ve seen these covers described as ‘glossy’, which is the perfect word for them. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were assembled from the same clip art repository used to assemble the back pages of the likes of Vogue.

This is what teenagers look like, right?

Do you know what these remind me of? The vapid, unrealistic images of women that are already clogging up virtually every form of media in existence. The women are thin, blandly attractive and photoshopped so heavily that they look like they’re on loan from Madame Tussauds. The men, when they’re present at all, are either hilariously inappropriate body builders or rejects from the cast of The OC (or whatever godawful imitator has stolen its crown).

Uh-huh.

And you know what? For the most part, those covers aren’t lying. Oh sure, sometimes it’s a case of a publisher slapping a generic photo onto a book that deservers much better (look at this and then this: same book, two different editions), but a lot of the time those glossy, brainless covers are entirely appropriate for the story they’re supposed to be advertising.

Do I need to point out that this isn’t a good thing? Do we really want to get to the point where there is some justification for calling a book ‘embarrassingly YA’?

Oh, and it turns out that it isn’t just book covers that are part of the problem. Thanks to Phoebe, I was recently introduced to the horrifying phenomenon of ‘book trailers’, which I had previously read about but never seen firsthand (I must be some sort of eccentric, because I can’t help but think that a low-budget movie trailer isn’t the best way to advertise a novel).

Here’s a screenshot from the trailer for Torment by Lauren Kate:

Yes, really.

If you’re feeling masochistic, you can watch the whole thing here.

Imagine for a moment that you’re not a ‘YA person’. Maybe you tried a few of the blockbuster titles and were put off when you realised that half of them appear not to have been edited (trust me, that’s a blog post for another day). But surely, you might tell yourself, all YA couldn’t be like that. Then you walk into a bookstore or look at the NYT Children’s list and see nothing but this:

Keep in mind, you don’t know much about YA. (And before you demand that our hypothetical reader become better acquainted with a publishing category before dismissing it, ask yourself how much you really know about epic fantasy or chic-lit or whatever genres you’ve decided you don’t care for.) You don’t know about authors like Justine Larbalestier or Meg Rosoff; there’s a good chance you won’t even realise that contemporary YA still exists, so rapidly has it vanished under a rising tide of badly-written pap.

I certainly wouldn’t blame you for thinking that YA begins and ends with this season’s ‘big name’ paranormal/dystopian romance. Which is exactly why YA has an image problem.

Now, on a more positive note, I’ll give you a few examples of what I think are good covers. If you’ve got some of your own, be sure to mention them in the comments (links probably work better than trying to embed images).

NOTE TO PUBLISHERS: This is how you use stock images in your covers.

I think this might be my favourite book cover ever.

I cannot get a copy of this soon enough.

And finally:

If you haven't read this yet, go buy it.

That’s the old cover. The new one looks like this.

Enjoy your weekend!