Onward my Manharpoon

The the trustworthy and saint-like lieutenant:

Kafka from Honkai: Star Rail alt. Part of my latest Gumroad pack.

Harry Potter changed all this. The success of the Harry Potter books convinced the publishing industry that selling full length novels to normie children was a business model. The thing about the Harry Potter books, though, is that at least for the early books, the target audience was a bit younger than what we think of as the YA demographic; tweens, rather than teens. Now, the publishing very much wanted to keep all these normie kids buying books into their teens and beyond, but the previous model of treating teens as functionally adults for marketing purposes would not work; there was simply no way that normie parents were going to let their normie kids read fully adult novels where the characters, like, do drugs or have unprotected sex and stuff. So, in order to be allowed to market to the teen demographic, the YA genre was created.

And that single publisher was buying and publishing multiple such books every year… presumably to keep up with its competition.

…So either the “precocious bookworms” market was particularly strong that decade, or else this kind of genre publishing and marketing was, well, normal… and in fact paved the way for the later success of broadly similar genre works. [waves vaguely in the direction of other YA fantasy that would follow a decade and a half later] And yeah, this is a significant oversimplification of the subject, but it’s nearly 2 AM for me and I’m not up for a full essay on it right now. Maybe later.

However, as for the thesis “the YA genre was created post-the 2000s”? …Nah.

(Meanwhile I can’t just leave with nothing but that sad B&W line art sitting there. Here’s the full cover of that hardcover first edition, by Caldecott-winning artist David Wiesner.)