UKYA:a blog is born

It started, as so many things do, with a conversation on Twitter.  A chat about the difference between teen books and Young Adult, which morphed into a wider debate about American and British books, and spawned a hashtag #UKYA.
It crystallised a feeling that quite a few of us had, that American books for teens get a lot more attention than British ones, even in the UK. We go into bookshops and see special displays of imported YA books from the US. We see publicists for UK publishers promoting the latest transatlantic buy-in. And we suspect that YA is almost defined by that Mean Girls/Twilight High School feel, the proms, the basketball games, the road trips, so that reading about British kids doing GCSEs and watching EastEnders somehow feels all wrong.

Now, there's nothing wrong with American YA books, and indeed it is we British teen authors who enthusiastically rush to buy, read and praise writers like John Green. Meg Cabot and Maureen Johnson.

 But then I stumbled across a group on Goodreads where American readers were asking for recommendations of British teen books, and coming up with little more than Harry Potter.  And I kept on reading American YA books set in Britain, which came across as inauthentic as those awful episodes of Friends set in London. Or British characters in American YA books who sounded as British as Dick Van Dyke. And then I saw an internet query from an American family planning to travel to London with a teenager. Which books should they read to get them in the mood? Suggestions ranged from Oliver Twist to Swallows and Amazons. Oh and Harry Potter got a mention.

Well, there is more to UK YA than Harry Potter. To prove the point (and hopefully provide something on the internet for anyone in the world looking for authentically British books) we have set up a new blog, which should be a showcase for the best of British teen fiction. You can find it here  and I hope you'll follow, share and generally shout about it.

When I say we, the very wonderful Keris Stainton and Susie Day have done all the hard work (Hurray!). We'd love to get more blog posts, recommendations and comments. Please do get in touch if you'd like to be involved.

There have been moments when I've worried that our site is a bit Little Englandy -  too parochial, too inwards looking and a bit unfriendly towards foreigners. But that's not the aim. We just want to celebrate the great fiction being written in Britain (not just by Brits either. Some of our best UKYA writers are in fact Americans, but they live here, so that's OK) and redress the balance a bit.

Right now the British children's best-selling lists are dominated by American Wimpy Kids and American dystopians . Sometimes I go into supermarkets or even bookshops and  have to look hard to find an actual British teen book. I'd love to see Waterstones or WH Smith put on a Best of British teen book promotion. In the meantime, use that UKYA hashtag and start telling the world about our blog.

Lia in America

This is the week that Lia’s Guide to Winning the Lottery was unleashed on the unsuspecting American and Canadian market, and my wonderful American publicists (oh how I love those words) have suggested that I wrote a blog post to mark the occasion. So, here we go. Some warnings for American readers.

1) Lia’s Guide is about a 16 year old girl. You may not like her very much. This is because I carried out extensive research into the ways of British girls (including being one myself, between 1976 and 1982) and discovered that they are mostly locked in battle with their mothers from the age of 14-16, they are self-centred, snarky and loudly assured of their own rightness. American girls may well not be like this. Anyway, stick with her, with a lot of money and some interesting experiences, she improves.

2) The book has not been translated into American. Lia walks on pavements, shops at Primark (cheap clothes, long queues), goes to the loo. Draw on your deep knowledge of British slang gained from reading Louise Rennison, Harry Potter and my other books. But don’t worry, Lia does not speak exactly like a London teenage does, because then her slang would date within minutes and no one would be able to understand her. So I have spared you sentences such as ‘That boy is bare butters,’ which means ‘That boy is very ugly’ - or it did last time I asked, anyway.

3) British culture is much more tolerant of drinking than you are in America. Binge-drinking is virtually a national sport.  So it is relatively normal (although not desirable or sensible) for British teenagers to indulge in the sort of behaviour that most Americans don’t get round to until they are at college.

4) However, a British teenager who drives and has their own car is extremely unusual. They don’t start learning to drive until they are at least 17, and the insurance payments for a teen driver are sky high. You’d have to win the lottery…oh, hang on…

5) Lottery winners get the whole lot as a lump sum right away. There’s no question of having it paid out bit by bit as happens in your sensible nation. This system enables people like Michael Carroll to spend his entire £9m jackpot in a matter of years. He provided lots of entertainment for the rest of us, not to mention the chance for eminent writers such as Martin Amis to moralise about how poor people are just too criminal and undeserving to be trusted with large amounts of money, therefore providing a powerful case for the good old British class system, designed to keep money and power in the hands of a privileged few....

6) ..and the class system is alive and well in this book. The way people join the upper classes is by going to Public School, which is not at all the same as a public school in the US. In Britain Public Schools are very very expensive and attended by the aristocracy, the nouveau riche and foreigners.  Be aware that Raf’s poshness makes him exotic and strange in an ordinary London school. Quite apart from all the other things that make him exotic, strange and possibly paranormal.

7) I have adopted a revolutionary approach to sex in YA fiction, by portraying teen sexual encounters that MAY not end in pregnancy or disease. This is because I am fed up with books that suggest that sex is always disasterous/tacky/regrettable or described only in terms of the boy's plumbing. So, add your own health warnings.

8) American librarians, I can happily tell you that there are NO F-BOMBS in Lia's Guide. Not one.

9)  You'll notice that Lia dreams of going to New York or San Francisco. So do I. Buy enough copies and may be I will...

Silver linings

This is a picture taken on my phone at the top of Parliament Hill today -  if you've read Lia's Guide, it's the place where Lia and Raf go to fly her kite.

I've had the sort of week when the grey storm clouds gather overhead, when life seems harsh and unfair, and full of worries.  Even little disappointments sting, let alone the big ones.
But still, good things happened last week. My mum's operation went well. Our car was smashed up -  but no one was hurt.  I had good feedback for new projects, I got a brilliant email from a reader, I visited two lovely schools. I'm  loving the evening class I'm teaching at City University, and it's exciting to see students taking risks with their writing and imagining.
So, this picture seemed to sum up my week. Let the silver linings shine, and the kites fly high. And it didn't rain at all.

Protecting Witnesses

Today the Leveson enquiry into press standards heard that the News of the World  had details of people in witness protection.  Read more about it here.

This month, it was revealed that in 2008, the Metropolitan police paid out £550,000 to a teenage witness whose details were passed by prosecutors to the people he was testifying against. The boy and his family had to flee their home and go into witness protection. Read more about it here.

Earlier this month, a report by the Her Majesty's Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate (HMCPSI) and Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) found that young witnesses were 'left to flounder' in the criminal justice system, with vulnerable young witnesses often denied the opportunity to testify by videolink. Read more about it here.

Changes to the legal aid system means that young witnesses put at risk like the one compensated in 2008, will no longer be funded to sue for compensation. His family say that he no longer trusts the criminal justice system and if he were to witness a crime today (he is now 24) he would not make a statement.

When I wrote When I Was Joe and Almost True, I wondered if I was being unfair to the police in making the witness protection scheme seem, well, not exactly 100% perfect. American readers have expressed their surprise to me that, as one librarian put it, 'the witness protection scheme is so flaky in the UK.' But I'd worked on a newsdesk and I'd talked to lawyers and I knew about shot witnesses, betrayed witnesses, dodgy mobile phone networks and suchlike.

 The hardest question for me to anwer on school visits is the one which goes 'If you witnessed a crime, would you give evidence, even if it put your life at risk?' I know what I should say -  but I don't know what I would do.

If you enjoyed When I Was Joe...

A few weeks ago I wrote a little list of book recommendations for readers who'd enjoyed When I Was Joe and Almost True and wanted something to read during the seven-month (sorry) wait for Another Life.
Here are some more books that might appeal.
If you liked reading about an ordinary boy with big problems - try Fifteen Days without a Head by Dave Cousins. Laurence's mum has a drink problem and has gone missing - but Laurence and his little brother can't tell anyone. Their story is funny, unexpected and heart-breaking -  and really makes you think about what should happen in families where the parents aren't coping. By the end I was all set to call the social workers myself...except that's not the solution that Dave wrote. 

If you're into grappling with thorny moral issues, read Katie Dale's Someone Else's Life (which, by the way has the most gorgeous cover).  Rosie's mum has died of Huntingdon's disease, and she must decide whether to find out if she carries the disease herself -  a devastating diagnosis if positive. But then Rosie discovers long-buried secrets which destroy everything she ever believed to be true. I've rarely read a book which gets you so involved in the lives of the characters -  at times I'd have cheerfully throttled all of them, including Rosie's lovely Gran - or which twists and turns so fast and furiously. The dilemmas faced by Rosie and others -  I don't want to give anything away -  are so huge, that you're left pondering them for ages afterwards.

If you're a fan of psychological thrillers -  and especially if you liked the ghost/hallucination aspect of Almost True, not to mention the unreliable narrator of both Joe books -  then Cat Clarke's Torn is a must-read. It starts off a bit Pretty Little Liars-ish with a motley crew of girls sharing a cabin in the wilderness, then things go seriously wrong when Alice, Cass, Polly and Rae decide to teach popular but bitchy Tara a lesson. Torn is scary, believable and utterly compelling and Cat is completely brilliant at getting inside the head of a teenage girl who lets insecurity and low self esteem lead her to disaster.

New look



Coming your way in September...

  I'm getting a new look! Or at least my books are. To coincide with the release of Another Life, in September, the first two books in the series, When I Was Joe and Almost True are getting new covers to match.


The Egg of Death in Danny's fridge



Ty/Joe's brown/green eyes...

 The new look is bold, bright and eye-catching, the work of designer Arianna Osti, who also designed the cover for Lia's Guide to Winning the Lottery. People have been asking me about the inspiration for the covers, so I put a few questions to Arianna.

  Tell us a bit about yourself and your career.

I was brought up with an artist in the family and a house full of books so it’s not surprising I chose a creative career.

After graduating from Camberwell College of Arts and training in a few design studios I started working at Frances Lincoln Publishers. I have always been interested in print design and I have a passion for typography so publishing feels like the perfect industry for me to be in.

What was the process of planning the new jackets? Did you have a completely free hand, or was there a discussion first about which direction to take? (NB The first I heard of the new covers was when they were all done and finished and my editor said 'I've got a surprise for you!')

In designing book covers there is usually a preliminary meeting with the Sales team to discuss the feel and the audience of a book. This is where we thought that, as we had a third book in the same series as When I Was Joe and Almost True, it would be good to launch the third title, Another Life, with a brand new look, re-jacketing the previous titles to boost the series. After the success of the cover

of Lia’s Guide to Winning the Lottery we thought it would be good to stick to a simple but bold cover style. So the direction to pursue was that of a striking graphic and typographic cover.

Did you come up with other ideas and then reject them?

I did come up with a few different ideas.

Ibarajo Road -  out August 2012
and sounds brilliant

It is quite unusual that the first design idea for a cover ends up being the final cover. It can happen, and it did happen for example with Ibarajo Road. However, generally you tend to come up with a few different ideas and then through discussions and meetings some of the ideas get rejected or approved. Some of the ideas I had seemed to work better on some titles rather than others, so they did get rejected, as the same design had to be applied to all three books in order for them to work as a series.

   How did you pick the colours?

The colours were partly dictated by the plot and by the graphic elements (eye, egg and knife) used on each of the books. The background colour came later, first it was Joe’s brown eyes, then the yellow of the egg yolk and the red of the bloody knife – all significant parts of the books. These were the obvious, realistic colours so for the background colours I had to try a combination that would work for each cover and then as a series of three.

The colours are there to create a mood and to help communicate the feel of the book so muted colours seemed to work best for a dark, edgy thriller series.

Saul Bass design

Someone mentioned the iconic cover for Catch-22 was that an inspiration? Others mentioned 1950s film posters and pulp fiction paperbacks. What were your influences?

I’m not sure the cover for Catch-22 ‘caught’ my eye as much as Saul Bass’ work.

Saul Bass again

I

He was a graphic-designer and filmmaker best know for his title sequences and film posters – so yes, in that respect 1950s film posters and typefaces have been an influence. I was also inspired by Agatha Christie’s paperback covers with hand-lettered type for the author’s name. But Saul Bass’ use of type and his concise, powerful and clever illustrations influenced me to create covers with strong type and

Iconic byline

a simple graphic icon. 

Saul Bass poster -
I love this film

You also designed the cover for Lia’s Guide to Winning the Lottery. What was the thinking behind that one?

It’s a sharp, sassy fiction story that deals with girls and the problems arising after winning the lottery – including the art of shopping. So we wanted something bold and striking, but feminine and sophisticated. While thinking about shopping, The Devil Wears Prada came to mind – that was the starting point. Immediately the red stiletto shoe communicates power, sex and elegance. Then the type says girlie, light-hearted and funny.

Power, sex and elegance!

 How much do you think about the target audience when planning covers?

The target audience is very important while designing covers as you have to communicate to the right people. It’s really the first thing to think about as you have to try and get into the mind of an 8 year-old, a 12 year-old or a 16 year-old.

I’ve been designing books for the adult market as well but the children’s audience is certainly more challenging.

What other covers (by you and other people) are your favourites?

Designed by David Pearson

I am very pleased with the poetry fiction covers I have designed for Janetta Otter-Barry Books such as An Imaginary Menagerie, The Language of Cat, Hey Little Bug and Come Into this Poem.

I am always looking at the competition, at other designer’s work and it’s always good to get inspiration from the masters of the past. My favourite book cover designs are by Gray318 (especially the Jonathan Safran Foer books) and David Pearson.

Designed by Gray318

(You can contact Arianna at ianna84@yahoo.it)

How to respond to bad reviews.

Ignore them. It's as easy as that. But, funnily enough, not everyone does.
Julie Halpern is a writer of YA books. I'd never heard of her before this week, when a blogging, twittering storm blew up because she wrote a foot-stamping, tantrumy, Violet Elizabath Bott of a response to a negative review that she found on the internet.
Ms Halpern has now taken down her post, and the equally cringe-worthy 'poor little me' ones that followed. But you can read the original review here and the responses were all about how the author had poured her heart and sould and time into her work, while the blogger had just dashed off a piece of snark, and the author was in a higher place than the reviewer and no one should write negative reviews at all, because it might but readers off, and authors have feeling too, and google should create a negative review filter (I think she was employing hyperbole at some points, but the general hysterical nature of the thing made it hard to tell).
It's blindingly obvious to most of  us, I hope, that  if an author thinks a review is unfair, offensive, wrong, sloppy or whatever, she should not take it personally, and should absolutely not attack the reviewer in public. Find someone to moan to who knows you are not an egotisical brat -  or who knows that you are an egotisical brat, but loves you anyway.
If you absolutely have to contact the reviewer, be humble. Thank her for spending time reading and reviewing your books, point out nicely that she's got the main character's name wrong, or misunderstood the central metaphor, or given a whacking great spoiler, say how much her good opinion matters to you.  But truly  it's best to maintain a certain authorly distance at these painful moments.
A lot of people have told Ms Halpern this, and maybe she will now spend a lifetime lying awake in darkened rooms asking herself why...why....?
But I have a further criticism of her rant.
The reviewer didn't like her fake kidnap plotline - ('Can I just say – uhhh. The entire Penny debacle was kinda ridiculous.') Ms Halpern was shocked that anyone could doubt the premise because it had actually happened to a friend of hers  ('Ugh! I didn't make it up, beyotch! I had a friend who faked her own kidnapping! Grrrr.').
I've heard this defence before. I asked a writer about the baffling relationship of two people in her otherwise delightful book, and why on earth they didn't divorce -  to be told that they were based on two people she actually knew and were therefore, well, true to life.  I felt short-changed, and was none the wiser. A tiny hint at sexual obsession or financial complexity would have worked far better,
Writers, it is not enough to base your characters and plots on real life and real people. You have to make them plausible to your reader.They are reading a work of fiction, not a memoir or a piece of journalism.
Quite often I've had things happen to me that I regretfully realise would not work in a piece of fiction, because the coincidence is too unlikely or the story is almost too neat. It's fine to use real life events and people as inspiration, but it's not a justification or a defence when people don't believe it.
Early on, I had a review for When I Was Joe which doubted that anything so extreme could happen in the UK ('From the onset it is particularly difficult to accept that the initial event really justifies the extreme of witness protection and this makes the attempt to create a sense of urgency and danger rather tenuous.')  and went on to criticise the characters as obnoxious and unlikeable. For that reader, I'd failed to make the situation feel believable and I hadn't managed to connect wth their emotions either. That was my failing. Their opinion was perfectly valid. Luckily, not many other readers seem to feel the same way, but I try to take the view that I can learn as much, if not more, from negative reviews than from positive ones.
Not that I like them, of course.  Bring on that negative review Google filter.