No. 16: The Real Housewives of YA

Commodifying Yourself as a Writer

In the same way that all Indians seem to know each other, all YA authors know each other too.

Years of traveling the book festival circuit, moderating each other’s events, and the fact that writing is a lonely activity means we rely on other YA authors not just for community, but also for the constant reassurance that we are sane for choosing this line of work.

Making true friends isn’t so easy, though. Gossip runs rampant through the community — we are writers, after all, and drama is our lifeblood — and there’s an undercurrent of competition that makes you wary at times, too.

Family, we call ourselves.

But in The Godfather kind of way.

For the ten years of writing SGE, I was very much in all of this, since I was on tour at least 6 weeks a year, and I remember feeling like I was on a perpetual season of Real Housewives of YA, and that cameras should be following us, given all the wild dramas unfolding. Everything from secret ghostwriters to shadow smear campaigns to hotel room trysts to a hidden love child… Plus the weekly Twitter cancellations, public meltdowns, and spurts of bad behavior.

I’ve had my own share of moments. I got my feet wrapped up in microphone cables and fell off the stage at Comic-Con. I forgot to turn my headset microphone off during a school visit to 800 kids in Boston and went to pee. Authors I once found insufferable and railed against became great friends. I actively went to war against an early writer on the School for Good and Evil movie who opened the movie with Sophie and Agatha in modern day and a boy putting his hand down Agatha’s shirt. At a media event, where we had a strict 20-minute limit for me and my co-panelist, the other author insisted on talking first and used 18 of those minutes. (I spent the last 2 minutes talking about the dangers of ego and narcissism and not being self-aware.) In other words — roll cameras.

When a writer friend calls, I usually ask: “Is this about work or is this about drama?”

It’s usually drama.

We can’t help ourselves.

But something’s changing of late. In the same way that Reality TV has had its reckoning, so too is YA facing its own existential threat.

Let’s go back a bit.

My fixation with Bravo reality shows started right as I began the first School for Good and Evil and continued unabated for ten years. Every day at lunch, I’d take a 45-minute break from writing to watch the latest episode of Real Housewives of New York or Beverly Hills or Vanderpump Rules or Below Deck or whatever was next in my queue. There was no real thought behind this: I was hopelessly addicted and to this day, I cannot explain why.

Was it because it was so mindless and low-stakes? Was it because it made me focus on the work of the craft versus the perks of achieving fame or notoriety, seeing how shallow the latter was? Or was it because it reminded me of the dramas of YA and battle-tested me for dealing with them?

Luckily, my best friend in YA was a Bravo obsessive too — the incomparable Victoria Aveyard, author of the RED QUEEN series and the REALMBREAKER series. I’m heading to meet her now, in fact, and writing this while trapped on a delayed flight to Dallas for the North Texas Teen Book Festival, where we’re both appearing. (As usual, this diary was supposed to be about something else. Then I started thinking about Victoria and how jazzed I am for our reunion… and here we are.)

Victoria and I would have been friends, regardless of how we met, but we bonded both over Bravo and the feeling that YA had far more drama than most reality franchises and deserved its own show. Not that we’d make the best cast members for this show — we are better onlookers and commentators on the drama than participants. (V is like 95% Heather Dubrow with 5% Bethenny no-bullshit frankness. I’m like 50% Lisa Rinna and 50% Carlton, the Wiccan witch from that one season of NY, which 100% explains why I wrote the School for Good and Evil.)

But V and I understood the language of Bravo. So much so that when I got to appear as a guest on Watch What Happens Live with Bravo star, Andy Cohen, Victoria no doubt considered it my crowning achievement. (I also almost ended up starring on a season of Netflix’s Indian Matchmaker, but that’s a whole other story.)

Despite our time in the Bravo trenches, though, Victoria and I also have polar-opposite approaches to social media.

@VictoriaAveyard

She is a guru on all things writing lifestyle and career and she is an automatic follow for any author in the industry, looking for things to be demystified and explained. She is a needed truth serum in an industry that can be historically opaque. Yes, she is a writer first — one of the best fantasy writers in the world — but she has become bigger than that. A high-quality YA brand, on and off the page.

I, on the other hand, have no brand because I still don’t know what I am or what I have to offer.

Am I the Mr. Fairy Tales?

Am I the Indian guy?

Am I the gym rat, tennis jock who spends long drives listening to sports podcasts?

Am I the metro, cultured, high-octane Manhattanite that all my old friends know?

Or am I the camo-wearing, hay-baling farmboy that my partner and his family know?

And what do make of this new book I’m writing that is just a straight-up invention of a genre that doesn’t exist?

Maybe this is why V and I get along.

She knows who she is and is in full control of her life’s path.

I’m mystified by who I am and my muses and reinventions and have no idea where my path is going.

Which is why Victoria has a brand… and I have a diary.

And yet, both of us find ourselves at the same crossroads, at the same time, personally and professionally.

She’s married to a tall, athletic, happy-go-lucky doctor. I’m hitched up to a tall, athletic, happy go-lucky farmer. She’s finished with her 8 books of fantasy. I’m finished with my 8 books of fantasy. We’re onto new things at the same time.

And yet… we’re also facing a very different publishing landscape.

Literacy rates are plunging. Children aren’t so easily picking up books like they used to, tempted away by screens and quick fixes, which means a future of reluctant readers at every age. Sure, “romantasy” rules for the moment — YA fantasy/romance that pushes the boundaries on sex and content so damn far, it’s pretty much adult — but how long will that last? If all books for young folk become coded, sex-driven crossover books for adults, you’re abandoning the emotionally-budding readers who will become adults one day and turning books into another fast-fix dopamine hit instead of an honest, sustained pleasure where a young person can see their own reflections. The kind of book that hits home. The kind of book that lasts.

Bigger threats loom too.

Like a world where books generated by AI and tossed up in audio snippets on TikTok compete and win against the hard-won art of actually writing.

All of this has been brewing in my head. Which is maybe why a couple years ago, I paused my writing at lunch as usual, went to turn on a Bravo show… and couldn’t. It was my daily routine, my tried-and-true fix, but this time my brain stopped me. As if my time in soap opera land was done and now I’d been plummeted back to earth, lucid and aware that to keep making the art I love, I had to turn my eyes outward, to the world I lived in, and write a book that could compete with all the forces coming for it.

So maybe that’s my brand for now.

The guy who turned his back on fairy tales and fantasy and social media and promotion and all the things you’re supposed to do if you want to keep making it in YA and instead holed up on a farm far away to write a new kind of novel, a kind I’ve never read before, but one I deeply believe should exist.

Only now, instead of Bravo breaks at lunch, there’s cows getting loose and goats getting heads stuck in fences and my partner telling me to hold the donkey’s balls while he bands them and a Bernese Mountain Dog that’s figured out how to stand up on her toes and open doors.

A friend recently came out to the farm and within ten minutes, exclaimed: “This would make the greatest reality show.”

Until next week…

(Oh and tell me what you think about author personas in the comments below. What matters to you about how they present themselves? Or do you prefer to read a book knowing nothing about the author at all?)