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YA biblio-bullish trends: the sand in the oyster.

Article Excerpt
Returning home with a fresh perspective from a long research trip in Europe, I am interested to see that young adult literature has also been traveling in some healthy new directions. Not only are review copies of hardcover YA fiction arriving at my desk in unprecedented quantities from both established houses and new publishers like Roaring Brook and Bloomsbury, but a number of distinctive paperback imprints further demonstrate that publishers are feeling bullish about the YA market.

Oddly enough, the prototype for these new imprints, HarperTempest, was begun in 1999 for the opposite reason. At that time young adult publishing was in trouble. Avon, in an effort to reach older teens more directly, began to reprint edgier YA novels, like Melvin Burgess's Smack, with strikingly sophisticated covers and marketing, under the Avon Tempest label. "It worked really well," says executive editor Ruth Katcher, and after Avon merged with HarperCollins later that year, HarperTempest published the paperback editions of such choice titles as Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison and Stuck in Neutral by Terry Trueman. In 2002 they expanded into original hardcovers with simultaneous softcovers, beginning with Big Mouth & Ugly Girl by Joyce Carol Oates. Tempest now publishes most of HarperCollins's more literary titles in both hard- and softcover, including Freewill by Chris Lynch, and has revived backlist titles such as The Buffalo Tree by Adam Rapp and much of Chris Crutcher's older work in paperback.

This model--a recognizable imprint in hard/soft, reprint/ original, marketed directly to older teens--has been taken up...

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