#catagator

8. TAG 8 PEOPLE If you want to do it, do it!

AHA, I KNEW IT. And I already am loving it, just on the strength of the narrative voice alone.

hey friends if you're interested in YA lit and/or feminism, Kelly is a must-follow in my book. so smart and bold and well-spoken. also: great taste in lip products.

Oh man, I have so many thoughts about "body image" and "real bodies" and feminism etc etc all whirling around in me and I need some of your articulateness to get it all down.. 

All of my lipsticks are called "Man Hater" ;)

This is not, ironically, an unreasonable question to ask. This week's New York Times Best Seller list for YA included only two women (as noted by famous librarian/advocate Kelly Jensen), which was bad enough. But what was even more extraordinary was the fact that (a) John Green held four of the top ten spots, (b) the two women on the list were writers specifically championed by John Green, and (c) Ransom Riggs, John Green's good friend and former college roommate, held two of the remaining spots. That means that 8 of the top 10 spots were held by writers who were directly connected to (or, in fact, were) John Green. I find this all to be rather puzzling in some respects, but strangely inevitable in others. On the puzzling side of the ledger: I am male, and I read a lot of YA (because I write YA myself, and love YA, and I have a teenaged kid who loves YA), and most of the YA I read is written by women. Seventeen (!) of the last 21 YA books I read were by women. The YA chatboards are dominated by women and girls (which is actually a serious concern of mine as boys are often not presumed to be a natural audience by the publishing industry - but that's another post). So why are the YA best-seller lists dominated by men (and specifically by John Green)? As a social media lawyer in my other life, I spend a lot of time thinking about the ways in which new forms of communication technology impact the "real" world of cultural production. And social media (more than almost any other recent form) privileges the first to market. Unlike, say, the traditional media business (where a newcomer like Fox News could become a dominant player within the space of a few years when it did not even exist in 1990), social media gives an outsized voice to the people who were there first. There are a great many technical reasons for that (the nature of how readership is built an maintained - again, another post) but the first people to dominate the space were men, and because of that the people who still dominate the space are men. And social media today is what sells books. John Green (like Matt Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, Josh Marshall, Ezra Klein, John Scalzi...I can go on) was an early adopter of these new tech platforms, and was able to develop a social following totally disproportionate to his "footprint" as an author. That has permitted him to spiral up in popularity way beyond what other people could ever have accomplished - simply by being first. This has given his voice a longer reach than virtually anyone else in the space. The fact that he is a man is also not a coincidence - it gave him credibility with "old media" and somehow gave credibility to a genre that was seen as somehow "less" because it was actually (at most levels) dominated by women. This is not a new phenomenon either - the validation of a genre by someone who is not part of the traditional field is a long-standing tradition. For many decades, for example, science fiction was only acceptable when it was written by someone who was not actually a science fiction writer. Similarly, for many in the wider world, YA is only acceptable when it is not written by women. I happen to love John Green's books, and his videos, and the great charitable things he's done online. But his first-mover advantage is so enormous, and so extraordinary, that it threatens to distort the YA universe. So what is to be done? John Green is a benevolent overlord - his books are great, his video series are awesome, and he champions a lot of books by other people. We can't (and should not) go all Harrison Bergeron on him and try to keep him from succeeding. But what we should do is do more to champion the works of other people who are not John Green in a more concerted way - and that means encouraging major media outlets to cover more and different writers, sure, but also to take advantage of John Green. He's got a movie coming out (you may have heard a few things about that...) and the YA community should realize that this is a huge opportunity. The major media will be focused on YA as never before, and the tastemakers and bloggers and tweeters and authors (and, yes, maybe John Green too) should use this opportunity to trumpet everyone else (Jennifer Lynn Barnes, for example, really needs to get a movie contract, stat). So John Green may control the world, but that doesn't mean that his dominance cannot be used to change the gravity of YA. I suspect John Green, in fact, would approve.