Bridging the Generation Gap

Though listed in the winter Dial catalogue as a book for 10- to 14-year-olds, “Ryan White: My Own Story” made a decidely grown-up debut in April with three printings, 140,000 copies in circulation and a new identity as a book for anyone over age 12. This transformation from younger-readers book to more mature-readers book happened quickly, sometime between when the catalogue copy was released late last fall and the book was published April 1.

“We just changed the whole scope of the book,” said Jennifer Pasanen, the publicity director at Dial Books for Young Readers.

The repositioning of this autobiography of the late teen-ager who became famous for his battle against AIDS places the book by White and Ann Marie Cunningham in an evolving new category of books that crossed over from a young-adult (YA) or children’s market to an adult audience. “It’s fascinating, and it does seem to be happening more and more, as writers for children get more and more sophisticated,” Pasanen said.

Picture books have long managed this transition; the illustrated books of Chris van Allsburg or Maurice Sendak, for example, have long occupied comfortable spots on grown-up coffee tables. “The art (in these books) is such that adults find that all their sensibilities kick into gear,” said Steven Roxburgh, vice president and publisher of Books for Young Readers at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. But prose books that made the crossover sometimes have surprised even their own publisher.

At Scholastic, Jennifer Roberts cites “Fallen Angels,” a 1988 novel about African Americans in Vietnam by Walter Dean Myers. “Fallen Angels” sold 28,500 copies in a hardback targeted to young adults. A year later, Scholastic brought out a paperback aimed at adults. That edition sold 250,000 copies.

“Years ago, novels which we would now term ‘young adult’ were published, and quite successfully, as adult novels,” Roberts said. “ ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ ‘A Separate Peace’ and ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ are examples of novels which if published today would appear first as young-adult novels, and then upon achieving the great success which all of them did, would be made available to the adult market. This is what happened with ‘Fallen Angels.’ ”

Myers, the author of “Fallen Angels,” said the book bridged adult and YA markets because “older veterans” were giving it to their children. “These are people who have not discussed the war with their children,” Myers said. “They are looking for ways of explaining the war without going through the trauma.”

“Fade,” a novel from Dell by Robert Cormier, was listed in both adult and YA catalogues. Craig Virden, vice president and associate publisher of Books for Young Readers at Dell Publishing, said that while the dual listing was unusual, “It’s something, frankly, that we’d like to see happen more often. There are a lot of young-adult books that would appeal to adults.”

In keeping with their audience, YA books tend to feature teen-agers on their jackets. “Fade” did so well in its adult incarnation, Virden said, that “we have in fact repackaged all of Cormier’s books in very sophisticated packaging to give them a look that appeals more to adults.”

Writing for Houghton Mifflin, David Macaulay is another author whose books find an adult market. Macaulay’s recent book “How Things Work” has spent weeks on the Publisher’s Weekly children best-seller list, but Peggy Hogan, the marketing manager for children’s books at Houghton, said the book has been bought and read “as much by adults as by children.” With Macaulay, Hogan said, we don’t ever have an intention” about whether his books are geared to reach young adults or older readers. “All of his books have been crossover books.”

Hogan said the increasingly narrow line between some adult and YA books has made Houghton Mifflin reconsider the classification of a book scheduled for the fall. “Year of Impossible Goodbyes” is a faintly fictionalized version of Sook Nyul Choi’s escape from Japanese-occupied Korea that Hogan said was purchased as a YA novel but “riveted” the grown-ups who read it. Now that the book is in hand, Hogan said the publisher is hoping it will not be pigeonholed as “only” a YA title. “The jacket has intentionally been designed to appeal to all ages,” Hogan said.

With the Ryan White autobiography focused so strongly at a joint youth-adult market, Jennifer Pasanen said Dial Books for Young Readers is hoping for a similar kind of cross-marketing for “The Man Behind the Magic,” a biography of Walt Disney by Richard and Elizabeth Greene that comes out in May.

“We’re not breaking any tremendous ground by doing this,” Pasanen said. Rather, she explained, “The whole notion of YA books is changing” to what she terms “family books.”

Pasanen attributed the change to the growing sophistication of young readers. “As our society gets more and more mature at younger and younger ages, the notion of what you read when is changing,” Pasanen said. She added, “I’m not one to speak in terms of trends, but we’re continuing to rethink our notion of what young adults read.”

Craig Virden, at Dell, agreed, mentioning a conversation he had recently with YA author Paula Danziger. “She said the eighth-graders she taught 15 years ago are today’s fifth- and sixth-graders.”

Besides, Hogan said, much of the YA genre “is very high-quality writing. It has often seemed to me that if it were displayed in drugstores with lurid covers” adults would buy them without hesitation. One obstacle to a wider age for distribution for some of the books is “the way things are shelved” in libraries, Hogan said. “Librarians look at the catalogue information for a book and put it according to whatever it says in the catalogue,” she said.

Pasanen said the decision to broaden the scope of the Ryan White autobiography out of the children’s category and into a “family” book “evolved very quickly.” She said Dial began “looking for big numbers even without a complete manuscript in-house.” The subject matter was ideal for this kind of multi-age marketing, Pasanen said. “Ryan White was a true celebrity,” she said. “I think adults are definitely attracted to that.”

But Virden, for one, bristled at the suggestion that a book’s appeal should be “broadened in the first place.” “The thing that irritates me is when somebody comes to me and says, ‘This is too good to be a children’s book,’ ” Virden said. “Mark Twain didn’t sit down and write ‘Tom Sawyer’ or ‘Huckleberry Finn’ just to be children’s books. I think we’re doing a tremendous disservice by saying let’s make it easy for the kids.”

Steven Roxburgh, at Farrar Straus, suggested that “There are children’s books that many adults would benefit from reading every year. He named “Charlotte’s Web” as one example.

Encouraging a book to “crossover from young-adult to adult markets does not necessarily give it some added legitimacy,” Virden said. “It just sells more, that’s all,” he said.

But if directing a book to both young-adult and adult markets brings it to more people, so much the better, said Steven Roxburgh. “Whatever works, that’s what I say,” Roxburgh said. “That’s the trick, getting someone to pick up the book, I don’t care who it is.”