So, first the good news: Interrobang founder Phoebe North now has an agent! Click on through to her blog for the full story.

I haven’t really thought about it much before now, but the formation of the Interrobangs really marks a turning point in my writing career (for lack of a better term). Before that I knew a little bit about how the publishing industry works, but I was pretty clueless as to the specifics. I remember being completely bowled over by how much everybody else knew about specific agencies: who was repping what, who was repping who, which agents they was planning on sending their books to, and so on. Before that, I thought it was enough to ‘just write’ (as they say) – now I know that it really isn’t. If you want to get published, you need to know your stuff.

Obviously, Phoebe knows her stuff. We’ve been chatting online since the group’s inception, so I know how much hard work and dedication it took for her to get to this point. If anybody ever says a particular author ‘had it easy’ in the early days, feel free to slap them for me. I’m convinced that almost nobody has it easy. Phoebe and I have spent an embarrassing amount of time agonising over our writing, about whether it’s good enough or commercial enough, about what we’ll do if the publishing industry completely implodes – that sort of thing. And that’s all on top of actually sitting down and writing an entire book, so…yeah. Writing can be difficult, is what I’m saying.

It’s much, much easier if you have a good group of people to commiserate with. Having other people around who know the industry is invaluable, You can share the anxiety and, sometimes, you get to share the successes. I think it’s safe to say that Phoebe’s agenting (it’s a verb now) counts as the biggest success in the group so far. I guess there’s a strange sense of validation in knowing that one of our members has gotten this far.

For those who aren’t aware of the many hurdles you need to jump to get to publication, I should point out that signing with an agent is the very first…or maybe the second, if you count finishing your book as the first, but even then you’re going to need to seriously edit that same book a few times (at least) until you finally get to see it on shelves. So why do people get so worked up over getting an agent? Simple: it might be the first major hurdle, but so many people never even make it that far. It’s the sad reality of the publishing industry, but even getting to that first stage of official recognition takes a monumental effort. Clearly, Phoebe was up to the task, and I know she’ll keep going in similar style.

It might be tasteless for me to stop here and point out that I totally called it about this manuscript landing her an agent, but I did totally call it. In fact, I’d like the historical record to show that the aforementioned calling took place several months ago. I’m going to take this opportunity to make another sage-like prediction: the rest of the Interrobangs are going to get agents within, oh, let’s say a year. I was right the first time, wasn’t I?

One down, three to go.

My brother recently asked me why all literary novels seem to be about a diverse group of people interacting with a single object/person/place in the past, and are subsequently drawn together when that same object/person/place becomes important to them again. Also, there are usually Nazis involved. I was initially going to tell him that this was an unfair assessment of the rich tapestry that is the ‘literary’ genre, until I remembered that I have personally come across at least a dozen examples of the exact kind of plot he’s talking about. Broadly speaking, then, literary novels are all about a diverse cast of characters interacting with things over several generations plus there are Nazis.

Of course, you could do this kind of thing for all genres. There will always be novels that buck the trend, but in general you can fit any particular book into a neat little genre box based on a few key tropes. I think this is probably more true for some genres or publishing categories than others, though. (This is where people will probably start throwing things at me in the comments.) Fantasy and science fiction are usually pretty rigid about genre tropes in terms of the mainstream stuff, although I think that’s probably been changing lately. Urban fantasy is often derided for being formulaic, in that a lot of UF books tend to sound identical to each other, but I’d say that’s more an example of a genre that’s become highly refined; its fans really know what they want, which means that there’s less room for experimentation. Ditto for crime novels. As for Young Adult…well, that’s where things get a bit difficult.

One of the things that first attracted me to YA was the way it seemed to allow for endless transgression of genre boundaries. When I first started following the YA industry closely (as opposed to just browsing the shelves at my local stores), I was struck by the way nobody seemed to be in any hurry to sort books into discrete boxes – within the loose confines of ‘Young Adult’ as a publishing category, there seemed to be endless room for diversity. Now I’m not so sure. It’s true that a lot of YA authors do things that you couldn’t do in other categories, but whether those things are actually worth doing is another question entirely. There’s also a certain level of rigidity creeping into YA, as anybody who spends too much time on Goodreads could tell you. (Oh look, a booklist called ‘Best YA of 2011′. Can I guess what 90% of the books on it will be about without knowing anything about them? I can? How utterly astonishing.)

I’d like to suggest that a truly genre-free world probably doesn’t exist anywhere in publishing…or at least anywhere in novel publishing. Something approaching such a utopia might just exist in the world of manga, though.

That’s the Japanese cover for the first volume of ‘Planetes’, a manga series about a group of people who collect space debris for a living. They don’t just do that at the beginning of the story, until the ‘real plot’ shows up, nor do they do it as a flimsy pretext for something more exciting; it’s actually about people who collect space debris for a living. And it’s awesome.

But that’s an outlier, right? Well, sort of…

That’s the cover for a volume of Saturn Apartments, a series about space window washers. Which is to say, people who wash windows. In space. Again, it’s awesome. I’m also reading Children of the Sea at the moment, which is kind of like what would happen if somebody got all those crappy YA mermaid books, threw them into a blender and poured in a few bottles of liquid creativity. It’s really not the kind of thing that I could imagine finding a home anywhere else.

My point here isn’t that the Japanese comics industry is absolutely chock full of weird, genre-defying flights of fancy, because it’s not; most Shonen Jump series these days are painfully derivative if you’re familiar with the magazine’s handful of endlessly-recycled clichés. Rather, I find it telling that these things exist at all. There seems to be a staggering amount of diversity in manga, with established genres for everything from ‘manga about businessmen’ to sports manga to cooking manga. (By which I mean manga where the story is focussed around cooking, not non-fiction cooking manuals.)

I don’t really know why this is the case, but it certainly makes for good reading. You can find almost any kind of story represented in manga if you look hard enough, from the most formulaic action/fantasy stuff for kids to off-the-wall, highbrow fare. A lot of this stuff feels like it probably couldn’t be done elsewhere.

This is sort of what I thought YA would be like during my early days following the industry: not that it would be a kaleidoscope of wild experimentation, but that there would be room for at least a few examples of almost anything you could think of. Sadly, that is not the case: Paranormal Romance is still stubbornly entrenched as the big genre of YA, true Science Fiction is still hard to come by and ‘Dystopian’ novels became homogonous faster than I would have thought possible even in my most cynical moments.

I guess what I’m saying is that YA feels like squandered potential. I think teens are a lot more open to stories that don’t fit comfortable into genre boundaries, yet the entire industry seems focussed around love triangles and the next big Paranormal Whatever. Where’s the YA equivalent of Planetes, with some everyday aspect of a teenager’s life realistically transported into a future setting? (And I mean genuinely ordinary, in the same way that Planetes is very literally about a working-class guy’s struggle to achieve a dream that he can never afford on his measly wages.) I know there are things like that in the ‘adult’ SF world, but I have a feeling it could really find a receptive audience in YA. I would love for YA to be known as a place for unusual genre titles – not really crazy stuff, just something a bit further from the norm.

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!