THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)

Fun Stuff => ENJOY => Topic started by: scarred on 18 Oct 2010, 12:32

Title: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: scarred on 18 Oct 2010, 12:32
hooray! (http://www.geekologie.com/2010/10/well_folks_its_official_litera.php)
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: Buttfranklin on 18 Oct 2010, 12:35
Let's have a bonfire in celebration!

Anyone have any ideas for tinder?   :evil:
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: Blue Kitty on 18 Oct 2010, 16:26
I thought it was just the young adult section.
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: Nodaisho on 18 Oct 2010, 18:41
We all should see this as inspiration. If you know how to pander to the lowest common denominator, you too can get published. Even if you have jack-all for writing talent.
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: jimbunny on 18 Oct 2010, 19:59
I'm all for this kind of thing. It makes these books so much easier to avoid.

Wait, is this kind of thinking beneficial to modern literary culture? Maybe I'd like a book with a plot like that, and I'm just afraid to admit it. Oh no! Did someone just see me looking in this section? Holy cow, it's like a big sign with an arrow that says "loser" pointing right at me! I'm sorry, Edward...
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: JD on 18 Oct 2010, 21:08
Fantastic, they're clearly labeled and easier to ignore now.
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: KharBevNor on 19 Oct 2010, 11:29
(http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166512753l/12923.jpg)

Now?
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: muffy on 19 Oct 2010, 12:38
One of my close friends is writing a series of books along these lines. She's written most of them at work, whist doing other things (her day job, mainly).

She will probably get published before me.*

*Not that I'm in anyway bitter.
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: Sorflakne on 19 Oct 2010, 18:10
Those of us who were fans of vampires, werewolves and other supernatural lore before 2005 wish Stephenie Meyer would get hit by a bus.
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: Scandanavian War Machine on 19 Oct 2010, 18:42
stephanie meyer truly is the american dream



....

i just hurt my own feelings in so many different ways i can't even begin to tell you guys  :psyduck:
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: Inlander on 19 Oct 2010, 21:06
Admit it, you just posted that so you'd have an excuse to use the new emoticon.
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: Nodaisho on 20 Oct 2010, 00:50
No, that would be more "Imagine when Nintendo cashes in on this with Pokemon  :psyduck:"

I always preferred the psypop myself, most of the times that I find something bizarre enough to be worth psyducking, it is worth psypopping.
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: Inlander on 20 Oct 2010, 01:13
Psywhatnow?
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: Nodaisho on 20 Oct 2010, 01:20
The same thing, but his eyes pop out from the confusion.
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: JD on 20 Oct 2010, 11:42
(http://www.facepunch.com/fp/emoot/psypop.gif)
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: KharBevNor on 20 Oct 2010, 12:38
Those of us who were fans of vampires, werewolves and other supernatural lore before 2005 wish Stephenie Meyer would get hit by a bus.

I made a t-shirt which says "I Wanted to be a Vampire Before it was Cool", with a picture of Count Orlok snarling and saying a speech bubble which has a skull and crossbones in it.
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: Johnny C on 20 Oct 2010, 23:59
(http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166512753l/12923.jpg)

Now?

im reading that book for an 18th century sexualities class and that's like someone talking about sex & the city and me rolling my eyes and pulling out a copy of fanny hill
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: benji on 21 Oct 2010, 09:56
You know, I have trouble getting too worked up about all this. The vampire thing is bad, but I'm not sure it's any worse then the Gossip Girl novels and all of the cheap knockoffs there of that dominated the last several years of adolescent lit. There will always be good novels and bad novels, and often the bad novels will get more attention then the good. The real trouble here is that publishing companies have lost their spines. I'm sure plenty of people are writing books aimed at teenagers in which the characters are not vampires, nor werewolves, nor witches. But the publishers won't buy them because they aren't going to spend any money on anything that doesn't seem fairly certain to turn a profit. And that's the real issue here. It's almost impossible to get attention if you do something different, and if you do, it ends up just feeding the beast.
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: jimbunny on 21 Oct 2010, 11:40
The situation isn't all that dire. YA fiction has rarely been so popular, which means that the market for younger readers has expanded to include more than just the small, "bookworm" niche (i.e. girls) that was reading Judy Blume and Katherine Paterson before Harry Potter hit the scene. It's an oversimplification - sure, the publishing companies are making safer bets, but the book industry is perceived to be in crisis - yet part of this is just the phenomenon of impressionable non-readers discovering books in an atmosphere of desperate, sparkly advertising. It probably won't last forever, but it is exposing a sizable portion of the adolescent population to the written word who would have otherwise avoided it at all costs.
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: nekowafer on 21 Oct 2010, 12:24
Those of us who were fans of vampires, werewolves and other supernatural lore before 2005 wish Stephenie Meyer would get hit by a bus.

It's so, so true. I am SO FREAKING LUCKY I quit Hot Topic before the movies came out. I might have died.
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: muffy on 21 Oct 2010, 14:18
Jimbunny makes a good point. Also, the backlash against the insipid nature of some of those books may act as a trigger for some readers to set their standards a little higher, or at least explore other genres which are less fad-endorsed.

Hell, I was hooked on Nancy Drew and Point Horror books until I learned that there were other sorts of books. Everyone starts somewhere...
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: ummmkay on 22 Oct 2010, 03:51
publishing companies have lost their spines.

heh heh... SPINES! come on!
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: benji on 22 Oct 2010, 06:59
No, it's true. My father is an author and my wife was book seller for years, so I've seen the publishing industry change close to first hand for about 20 years now (before that I was too young to really grasp it). There was a time not long ago when publishers would take a gamble on a new author or a really innovative work, fully expecting that most of the time they'd take a loss on the project, because occasionally they'd get something really good out of it. That, and the publishing world used to more or less be run by people who were enthusiastic about literature, and so would take a gamble just because it was something they liked or felt was important and worthy of publication. More recently, most of the larger publishing companies have been bought out by parent companies, and they do business the same way everyone else does: lowest risk for highest reward.

So if you can publish a book by a new author with a new idea, or one who's written something in a genre that's really hot right now, what are you going to do?

The old publishing world might well publish the author with the new idea because someone really likes the book or thinks it might really get a lot of attention. The current publishing world would tend to choose the hot genre. Both probably have the same potential reward; either could become a mega hit (in all honesty, the new idea might be bigger because people might get sick of the hot genre and want something new), but you know the hot genre is going to, at a minimum, make a return on investment while the new idea is a gamble. You might take a loss.

That being said, Jimbunny is right, this isn't really that big of a deal. Publishing has gone threw similar periods before and there is always some room for the truly innovative books; if nothing else, publishers always keep a few slots open for books that could win literary prizes, and "I'm a vampire in love with a werewolf who's also a witch" isn't going to win the Newberry award these days.

The thing to focus on is that kids are reading, and they're reading things they choose for themselves. I'm willing to say that I think Twilight itself is upsetting because it has some really creepy gender politics and because I'm a little offended that she used the name of a real Native American culture but then steadfastly refused to do any research into that culture. But I'm not sure that's true of everything in this genre.
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: KharBevNor on 22 Oct 2010, 08:19
im reading that book for an 18th century sexualities class and that's like someone talking about sex & the city and me rolling my eyes and pulling out a copy of fanny hill

Yeah it was a joke!

:O

There are penny dreadfuls though that are pretty much identical to Twilight in terms of vampires, teen romance, background christian weirdness and bad writing. Dreadfuls were even basically aimed at a teenage audience, although they didn't have teenagers back then. Mysteries of Udolpho/Castle of Otranto/w/e are like Anne Rice compared to that stuff maybe.
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: Jimor on 23 Oct 2010, 02:21
Somebody I know pointed out that at least it takes these books OUT of the rest of the teen/YA section, making it easier to browse where there's actually a lot of good writing going on these days.
Title: Re: 'teen paranormal romance' is a real genre now!
Post by: jackmort on 25 Oct 2010, 02:43
The idea of paranormal romance fiction is sound, the problem is with the suffix "teen"
not that teenagers are stupid, but people write for teens as if they are
i've never read a "teen" book, 'bit patronising
I went straight from see spot run to see holden have a breakdown