Jason Henderson - The Need to Reach Boys With YA

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The Need to Reach Boys With YA
By Jason Henderson (http://alexvanhelsing.com)

I am the creator of Alex Van Helsing. That’s a series of YA novels published by HarperTeen about a teenage vampire-hunting spy. This is true-blue adventure material, full of close calls and impossible escapes. The trappings are horror, but these are really adventure novels of a very old school—James Bond and Matt Helm meet the Hardy Boys and the Three Investigators. With vampire terrorists.

I feel pretty certain that most of my readers are probably girls because girls tend to read more in general. I’m just guessing, but certainly most of my reviewers are female, and I’m heartened that they tend to be kind. But we describe these books as “boy friendly.” That’s a label that means the books are fast-paced with a male main character. There are other smaller details that I think are important to being boy-friendly, but for now we can keep it simple. Are these books “for boys?” Of course not; they’re for readers.

Is Twilight “for girls?” Is Paranormalcy?

From a marketing perspective: yes.

These are books for readers too. Do boys read these books? Sure. But we can’t honestly say boys are the market any more than we could suggest that Gray’s Anatomy is built to attract males.

Alex Van Helsing books, of course, always have a boy on the cover. Then again so did every issue of Tiger Beat. So I have no idea if that’s boy- or girl-friendly. But we need to worry about this, because in this country, girls read more than boys, and that’s a trend worth evening out.

We market YA books to girls more, with the covers, with web promotions and with myriad other marketing endeavors.

We need to start marketing books to boys. We have to reach them on male-heavy web pages in ads in male-oriented video games. I can hear the crickets chirping on this one, because of the old Catch-22: publishers market to girls because they know more girls read. Publishers are really wary of being left at the altar, of marketing a book to boys and finding no boys buying. A problem with this is that the vacuum left behind will be filled by other products that market to boys, such as games and books aimed at adult readers. If you go into a middle school, boys who love to read will tell you they skipped straight from MG (middle grade) books to adult commercial fare like Dean Koontz and Stephen King, or YA-friendly genre series like The Dresden Files.

But wait, Jason, I hear you say. You just said that the boys who are reading are reading adult books, so at least they’re reading. So what’s the big deal?

The bid deal is don’t kid yourself; only some of them make the switch to adult books, the rest stop reading. While girls are finding new titles every month that speak to them, some boys head for King, the rest leave reading behind. According to the New York Times, “at the end of high school, among white boys who have at least one parent who attended college, 23 percent score “below basic” in reading. Only 7 percent of their female counterparts score that low.” Likewise, boys scored “proficient” on federal writing tests exactly half as much as girls. If boys and girls were reading the same amount, but boys were just lining Stephen King’s pockets more, surely we wouldn’t see this fall-off. No, no. Some are switching. Most are stopping.

And of course they would. Even though a 13-year-old can read Stephen King’s language, those are adult books. The themes are built to resonate with grown-up readers. The visiting young reader might be interested to read about Jack Torrance’s struggle with alcoholism and rage issues, might even take back some observations about his own life, but does he know or care about the frustrations of struggling to make it in a history department? Will he care?

So what is a “boy friendly” book on the inside? Setting marketing aside, this is actually a more challenging question than you would think. Anything I suggest (say, “action”) is something that generally any reader will want. Hey! says the female reader. I like action! Yes, it’s only a matter of degree. The difference is that you will likely put up with more chapters featuring no action than male readers will. Boy-friendly books need more action, meaning they need less chapters in a row where the characters talk about their feelings, unless something is about to explode under them. I tend to prefer to have the characters say things about their feelings while they are busy killing monsters, and usually they don’t get around to finishing what they were going to say, because they forget. Which in my books is fine. See what I mean? It’s fine.

A boy-friendly book should have romance, like all good stories, but could have very little at all and that would be fine. The X-Files, remember, for many years, had zero romance, only chemistry. My books usually have a romance the way James Bond does—the romance is not key to the plot. The romances in Alex Van Helsing are tinged with inchoate longing. Life for this hero is being put off, and romance takes a back seat to the job. For paranormal YA books, romance is often the very center of the plot—if romance takes the back seat, it howls until it is allowed to drive.

What about grossness? Eh. People say boy books need to be more full of gross jokes and that kind of thing, but man cannot live on fart jokes alone. There’s room for a higher-brow entertainment that still appeals to YA boys.

I do think we can forget the importance of finding the right content for the age, too. Just because you can wield a chainsaw in Gears of War doesn’t mean that as a 12-year-old you necessarily even want to experience hard-core violence in your reading. There are levels of physical violence and torture that are appropriate in a Stephen Coontz thriller that don’t need to be in a YA book. (Note: this is a minefield of an issue because some people love their gore and sadism, and to them I say, more power to you.) It’s a sliding scale, anyway. I try to keep the level of violence in Alex Van Helsing at about a PG rating, but some readers have found even these books too intense. That’s okay. My point overall is, we should be plunging into this arena with more choices. We can’t assume boys are served because Stephen King exists.

Boys were half as likely as girls to score proficient on writing tests. Half. We are abandoning them, but there is a market there. It’s time for a new literature and marketing strategy for boys in YA.

AUTHOR BIO

Jason Henderson is the author of Alex Van Helsing: Vampire Rising (HarperTeen, a VOYA Best of 2010 and TXLA Lone Star Selection) and Summer 2011's Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead. You can fiund him online at http://alexvanhelsing.com. He also hosts a regular podcast on horror and vampire movies called the Castle Dracula podcast, found at http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/talkCast.jsp?masterId=99734&cmd=tc.


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