[Teresa Edgerton]

I think that some of us here are failing to make the distinction between what some young adults will read some of the time and books whose primary appeal is to younger readers. A publisher is going to try and market a book in such a way that it will reach the largest number of potential readers. Just at the moment, when the YA market is relatively hot, some older books that were originally meant for adult readers are being repackaged as YA. Sometimes they are divided into more volumes to make them shorter, and therefore more appealing to the majority of young readers (Harry Potter aside, and what all of us remember reading as teenagers aside), the vast majority of younger readers are drawn toward shorter books.

But here is the point: a book that has a good chance to sell well to the adult market is going to be postioned as an adult book -- because that market is so much bigger. It's only when a book appears to have its best chance if it is aimed at young teens -- or a book that has already had it's day as a book for adults and may enjoy a new life as a YA book -- that it will be sold as YA.

This is the economic reality, and what you or I read at nine years old is really quite beside the point, because there weren't then and aren't now enough nine year olds making a steady diet of books with adult themes to inspire publishers to fill the YA section with books that have a better chance of making lots of money if marketed to adults.

There is also a distinction between what kids will read and what kids do read -- which is often simply what is available to them -- most of the time. Taking myself as an example, I read plenty of adult books when they were handy and when they looked appealing, but my steady diet of books (being a child who was always reading something) was made up of books that were easy to come by: the books in the school library, the books I could afford to buy (kids' series books like Nancy Drew, $1 in hardcover), books in the class library, books that parents and aunts and uncles bought for me, the books on my friends' bookshelves, the books I could buy (cheap) through the school when the Scholastic newsletter came round. As for my friends, these were the only books they read, and sometimes it was a task for them to get through those.