Did Twitter break YA? (Misshelved #6)

I began this essay because I wanted to explore how and why the young adult book publishing industry in the United States now seems to be primarily targeting adult readers, rather than teens. I wanted to examine what that shift means for actual teenagers—how the segment of the publishing industry created to meet their needs and tell their stories had begun to fail them.

But as I began to research and draft it and continued to think about the shift and its ramifications, the more I kept circling around the reasons behind the shift, how we got here and why. And at some point, I realized I wasn’t writing an essay about the shift at all. I was writing about the young adult publishing industry and the communities that have formed around it: how we have conversations, and how we understand young adult books and who they’re for, and who we invite into various spaces, and how we treat them while they’re there and, above all, how the world in which this industry and its communities exist has been radically altered over the past two decades.

This essay is long. You might not agree with it. As fandom used to say: Your mileage may vary.

Thank you, in advance, for reading.
 

***

Let’s start at the beginning.

Although the concepts of the teenager and of books produced for teen readers existed in America prior to World War II, young adult literature was published for a small and primarily institutional market (school and public libraries) until the late 1990s. As the kidlit boom created by the Harry Potter phenomenon opened new opportunities, the boy wizard’s rising tide lifted boats up and down children’s publishing lists, including in YA. Many YA authors still popular today sold their first books and began to build readerships—for instance, Sarah Dessen’s That Summer was published in 1996, and she was awarded the Margaret A. Edwards Award for her “significant and lasting contribution” to YA in 2017—but YA was still a relatively small category in terms of retail/consumer sales. YA sections in bookstores were small, and mainstream awareness of YA titles and authors was generally low.

Then came Twilight, which shifted young adult literature into a phenomenon of its own. Though a few individual titles like The Princess Diaries and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants found commercial success before Twilight, its publication marked the turning point when both teenagers and adults began to read YA books. YA publishing expanded to accommodate the growing readership. It began to publish more broadly across a range of genres while also leaning hard into paranormal romance knockoffs that readers ate up. For the first time, YA publishers offered huge book deals, which marked it as a profitable age category for writers, and the general public understood the category on a mass scale. YA became associated with big, buzzy books.

Crucially, however, Twilight was published in October 2005.

In March of 2006, Twitter launched.
 

***

In his 2018 comedy special, Kid Gorgeous, John Mulaney makes a joke about how, despite the amount of money and time invested in it, he isn’t sure what college is for. “I think we should stop going until we figure it out!”

These days, I feel much the same way about Twitter.

If you somehow don’t know what Twitter is, please know that I am envious of you. Twitter is a self-proclaimed “microblogging and social networking service” that has changed wildly over its 15-year history. Posts, or tweets, began as 140-character messages that were displayed in chronological order. There was no way to reshare other people’s tweets unless you manually copied and pasted them into your own tweet. Individual tweets also could not be natively linked together.

Nowadays, tweets are 240-character posts that can be read in chronological order, but which Twitter instead displays, by default, according to the order of its algorithm—what that algorithm thinks Twitter users are most interested in seeing. Users can now reshare the tweets of others alongside their own 240-character commentaries, and users with a lot to say can link their tweets in long, linked chains of tweets called threads.

You may be wondering why I am bothering to explain what posts on Twitter look like and how they’ve changed.

Since its launch, Twitter has been integral to the YA publishing industry in the U.S. It wasn’t long before forward-thinking publicists were utilizing the new platform to connect directly with hungry new YA readers. Those who loved YA quickly found Twitter to be an easy space on which to meet each other and share that love. Authors used it to interact with librarians and booksellers and bloggers and readers.

So many bloggers. So many readers.

Including me.

In 2008, at the suggestion of a professional-writer mother who was tired of hearing her 13-year-old daughter endlessly talk about Edward Cullen, I launched a blog about young adult literature. WORD for Teens changed my life. What started as a place for me to ramble about the books I loved so that my mother wouldn’t have to deal with my monologues over the dinner table became a place where I reviewed books sent to me by publishers, advocated against the “not like other girls” trope, and covered news of upcoming YA releases.

I was a teenager writing for other teenagers, but my audience and network consisted mostly of adults, especially after I joined Twitter. There, I interacted with librarians who ran award-winning websites, authors who loved seeing an actual teenager fangirl over their stories, publicists eager to use the platform I had built to help promote their books, and many other (adult) bloggers who also loved YA literature.

I was desperate to be seen as professional. I attended my first book publishing conference with a press badge when I was 15. I covered what was then BookExpo America not only as a blogger but also as a teen journalist for my local newspaper. I took the advanced reading copies I was receiving seriously, tracking release dates so I could publish my review in accordance with when the publicity teams thought it would create the most buzz. Publishers invited me to sit on panels and speak as both the intended audience—an actual teenager!—and as somebody who understood the industry. Later, I launched YA Interrobang, a website that was less a blog and more a digital magazine. I ran a team of writers who covered everything in the young adult publishing space, from book tour announcements to weekly releases to magazine-style features with authors.

(To this day, my sister says I made a mistake by not calling it The Teen Spleen.)

Between promoting both of my websites, my deep desire to become involved in the publishing industry, and the simple nature of growing up in the internet era, I spent over a decade on Twitter.

Twitter is often called the “water cooler” of the book publishing industry. Editors use it to keep an eye on their authors. Marketers use it to advertise their books. Authors talk directly to their readers, actual and potential, and readers share their excitement about books they loved.

As YA experienced drastic change as a category and Twilight pushed it to soaring new heights, Twitter became fundamental to the rapidly expanding community forming around it—a community that included teen and adult readers, as well as bloggers, authors, agents, librarians, booksellers and publishing professionals such as editors, publicists, sales reps, and marketers. While other book communities, like romance and science fiction/fantasy, also utilized Twitter, YA publishing did two things very differently.

First, the YA publishing industry made its target audience—its readers, its bloggers, its BookTubers and Bookstagrammers—part of its professional network. Although genres like romance had long-standing industry associations such as the Romance Writers of America to highlight and promote the genre, and speculative fiction had strong websites and fan awards that fans could rely on for industry news, YA had no such thing. In lieu of trade organizations and long-established magazines, publicists began to use Twitter to reach out to YA’s target audience directly—to everyone from experienced bloggers with established readerships to brand-new sites with only a few posts and regular readers. In doing so, they invited readers into industry conversations as equals, despite how little these readers actually knew about the inner workings of publishing.

Second, the YA publishing industry decided that Twitter was an essential platform for YA writers. Put simply, YA authors needed to be active on Twitter. Publicists did not have the budget to market most YA books on a huge scale, so instead, they marketed access to YA authors: Meet your favorite YA authors at a convention! Meet them at a book festival! But most importantly, follow them on Twitter, where you can read everything about their new book and everything they’ve ever thought and buy buy buy buy buy.

These were supposed to be good things.
 

***

The term “parasocial relationship” gets thrown around a lot lately.

First coined in 1956 by sociologists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl, Oxford Reference’s Dictionary of Media and Communication defines a parasocial interaction as “a kind of psychological relationship experienced by members of an audience in their mediated encounters with certain performers in the mass media.”

These days, as social media has become so prevalent, the definition of parasocial relationships has expanded—and so do the number of figures it applies to. As Sadhbh O'Sullivan writes:

“The potential to form parasocial relationships is in the DNA of sites like Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. You become a ‘follower’ or a ‘subscriber’ of someone who then shares their thoughts and talks apparently directly to you as an individual ("hey guys!"). You can even reply, with the possibility of your reply being reciprocated (though it likely won’t be). You are given access to people like never before and the number of personalities you can look up to and engage with is endless. In fact, everyone who uses social media is somewhat encouraged to behave as a public figure. Unless you limit your followers, you present yourself and speak to an invisible audience, who you won’t always know or engage with directly.”

Because social media inherently supports the development of parasocial relationships, it’s not surprising that Twitter users often find themselves navigating them. Within the publishing industry, the “performer” with whom the average reader interacts is usually an author, editor or literary agent.

Unlike in the 1950s, when parasocial relationships were first defined, the average audience member now has regular access to the performers—and unlike in the early days of the internet, their interactions do not take place in closed forums. Twitter is not a small community with well-established social rules, whether explicitly stated or implicitly understood. It “has morphed into not only one of the largest social media platforms, but an outlet for bots, cyber abuse [and] breaking news” to which anybody and everybody has access—and where everything feels personal.

This leads to frequent context collapse, an idea first introduced in Michael Wesch’s An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube. Context collapse is what happens when the scale of interaction shifts to “the infinite audience possible online as opposed to the limited groups a person normally interacts with face to face. In a limited group, a person is constantly adjusting their tone and presentation of self to fit into the social context. In a situation of context collapse, this becomes impossible.”

Individual users cannot be responsible for predicting how every single person will react to, interpret and interact with their social media posts. They cannot telepathically know what is unfolding at all times. They can only do their best, within the limits of human capability. But because of the scale of social media, and because of context collapse, tweets often reach people who do not understand their social presentation—no matter how well-intentioned.

This isn’t to say that involving readers in professional industry conversations doesn’t lead to positive outcomes and social good, nor is it to say that Twitter hasn’t been the catalyst to some of publishing’s most revolutionary moves. We Need Diverse Books, for instance, began on Twitter in 2014 as a push for more inclusive representation in children’s and YA literature. Since then, it has become a grassroots movement and a nonprofit organization that funds grants for marginalized writers, publishing internships and literary awards.

But Twitter’s algorithm does not reward the good—at least, not anymore. It does not boost nuance. Twitter taps into our natural reward-based learning process by elevating topics that receive the most retweets and responses … and the algorithm values posts that generate that response the fastest. As Matthew Shaer put it, “Joy moves faster than sadness or disgust, but nothing is speedier than rage.”
 

***

What does bookish rage look like?

Culturally, we hold books in a separate, almost sacred space, apart from other forms of mass media. We believe that reading is good for us: It builds empathy, helps us overcome “compassion fatigue” and positively rewires the brain. Beyond that, people elevate books, viewing them as something to honor, something to value. The bookselling industry believes this so intensely that it undervalues its workers. Librarians suffer the same fate. Bloggers and Bookstagrammers and BookTubers are treated like they’re doing something noble in their attempts to highlight the works of literature they feel most passionate about—or, at least, that’s how it feels.

Parasocial relationships combined with the above ideology mean that every interaction on Twitter can feel personal, to the extent that any discomfort or disagreement feels like an attack on the recipient.

Now add in the permanent-record status of the internet. Once you say something online—no matter what it is—it exists forever. Even if you have made a mistake and apologized for it. Even if your opinion has changed. Even if you have learned better.

The internet, in its current form, does not let you change and grow.

The end result of all this is that YA publishing professionals must enact performances of perfection online: They must be constantly accessible (as demanded by the needs of their own marketing), while responding to everything that is happening all of the time (as demanded by their audience).

At first, the algorithm and community interaction feels good. Users rally around stories and get excited for new ideas. Books that editors and authors worked hard on sometimes get buzzed about in a way that feels immediately validating—hey, maybe this is why marketing expects them to be on Twitter! Public performances of allyship receive warm responses.

But it’s not teenagers, the target demographic of young adult literature, that authors and editors hear from on Twitter. There are very few teens involved in these conversations. It is adults. It is booksellers trying to keep up with their favorite authors, and librarians coming up with storytime ideas, and adult readers who understand the boundaries of social media and just want to make sure they don’t miss a new release from their favorite writers.

They're also hearing from the reader who plucks single lines out of context and declares that they're offensive, then demands that the author agree that they're offensive, then further demands that they be changed in future printings, even if the point of the line in context is that a character is saying something the reader is supposed to disagree with. They’re hearing from  the person who reviews 50 books a year on Goodreads and has some strong opinions on how most bisexual representation is problematic if the couple isn’t in a sapphic or gay relationship. From the blogger whose website is only a few months old and who, despite being a person of color themselves, dimisses authors of color because they write for white people, not “authentically.”

This scrutiny and demand for perfection is infinitely higher for marginalized authors, who are often the target of the most critical segments of their own reader communities. Black authors must be perfect representations of Blackness despite the wide range of Black experiences. Queer authors must be out of the closet, in a neatly labeled box, for their queer representation to even be considered acceptable.

There is no greater example of this than the story of the #ownvoices hashtag, which was originally created by author Corinne Duyvis to allow readers to know whether a writer from a marginalized background was writing something that reflected their own experiences. The term had to be officially abandoned by We Need Diverse Books five years after its creation because of how intensely the notion of perfect representation had been weaponized—both by readers who didn’t consider representations authentic enough to earn the label, and by readers who dismissed as problematic any representation that wasn’t explicitly labeled ownvoices by its author.

Relying on Twitter to shape a culture like YA publishing inevitably leads to a moment where the most vulnerable participants in that industry will break. Either they become part of the rage machine, or the rage machine turns on them.
 

***

So what happens to publishing professionals when readers are invited to shape their industry as if they know everything happening behind the scenes? What happens when access to editors or authors is marketed alongside the books they work on? What happens when access to these people occurs on a platform that rewards rage?

They break.

Within the YA community online, what unfolds is intensified by the nature of the virtual space that community carved out for itself, a space where parasocial relationships are treated with respect, where adult readers are invited into professional spaces, and where authors and other industry professionals must interact with those readers as mandated by the expectations of the age category.

There is the minor impact, which affects what books we see: Since Twitter is the water cooler of the publishing industry, the adults who converse there affect what gets published just as much as actual sales figures do. The illusion of buzz sinks into the minds of editors and marketers, which is part of why YA books are now so heavily marketed to adults, because adults are the ones creating the buzz. Adults are who editors see tweet about the books they most want to read or see published. The zeitgeist of YA is shaped not by the teenagers it is intended for, but the adults who claim it for themselves.

Then there is the major impact, which heavily affects the minds of those working in YA publishing. Because non-professional adult readers have been invited into the space, within the YA conversation, all opinions hold equal weight. All criticism is valid. All accusations are held to be factual. No matter what they are.

Author Kacen Callender wrote a brilliant examination of the dehumanization of authors on social media as part of their decision to step back from the more public elements of their role. I recommend reading the whole piece. In it, they observe that “there’s an idea that authors and novelists have power and platforms, but there’s a key narrative being overlooked in the relationship between novelist and reader: authors depend on readers to buy our books for our livelihoods. There’s immediately a power dynamic placed between author and reader where we depend on pleasing the reader, many times to the point of our dehumanization.”

This power dynamic isn’t inherent to the digital space. It depends on the popularity of the author, and the readers they interact with, and the communities through which they interact.

Within the space of the YA community, however, it is almost certainly present.

Momentary scandals that other segments of publishing would dismiss—if they even registered on their radars at all!—are taken seriously by YA professionals. There are a thousand varying examples of this. The two most popular, however, seem to be the “out-of-context quotation” and the “guilt by association.”

In the first example, a line from a book is posted out of context and shared as a flattened reflection of a book’s worth or an author’s personal beliefs. The community expects that the line must be owned and apologized for, behaviors that validate the initial criticism of the book. Authors who don’t do this are accused of not caring or of not being involved in the conversation—even when, if read within context, the same line would firmly put the author on the same side as the readership in terms of what they believe is good.

In the second example, somebody is criticized for problematic representation in their book. The conversation around it may start as fair and earnest, but it expands quickly, swallowing up everybody who has ever interacted with that author or that book. Other authors must have known and secretly approved of the representation, goes the logic in this example, and other editors who followed the offending author on Twitter must have seen the flaws in their work. Soon, demands for the associated figures to cut ties with the original author immediately and apologize themselves explode. If they don’t, the figures risk being cancelled themselves.

Books are the sum of their parts, and characters are not necessarily reflections of the author. We know that it’s not logical to judge a book or an author by a single sentence, and we know that even books with dark or “problematic” undertones can contain valuable commentaries on society. As author Ottessa Moshfegh observes:

“Art is not media. … A novel is not BuzzFeed or NPR or Instagram or even Hollywood. Let’s get clear about that. A novel is a literary work of art meant to expand consciousness. We need novels that live in an amoral universe, past the political agenda described on social media. We have imaginations for a reason. Novels like American Psycho and Lolita did not poison culture. Murderous corporations and exploitive industries did. We need characters in novels to be free to range into the dark and wrong. How else will we understand ourselves?”

But digital purity culture combined with the ideologies around YA books leave no room for nuance. Teenagers, after all, must be taught. Any action that is less than perfect must be labeled as a bad idea, or else you’re encouraging teens to mimic that behavior. It’s so prevalent an idea that tweets in which someone, for example, advocates that Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho should have included chapter-by-chapter disclaimers of its protagonist’s behavior can be interpreted both satirically and in earnest.

The same purity argument has been directed at video games for decades. Showing violence to kids makes them more violent, right? Except, of course, that myth was debunked.

That doesn’t stop the morally motivated networked harassment from occurring. Morally motivated networked harassment is a new sociological theory that describes and seeks to explain the social media dogpiling that unfolds when someone’s personal moral outrage is matched on a community scale. As communications studies scholar Alice Marwick explains, “It makes people feel good, strengthens their own sense of morality, and makes them feel like part of a like-minded group of people.”

It’s no surprise that morally motivated networked harassment occurs on such a broad scale on Twitter more often these days than it did in the early years of the platform. After all, Twitter’s timeline algorithm was introduced in 2016—and only 2% of users opted out of it. That means tweets, particularly ones the algorithm likes, such as those that induce rage, spread further and wider than they would have previously.

Morally motivated networked harassment also hits the dopamine drive in our brains. It doesn’t matter that the behavior is often performative allyship: Our brains reward us for the likes and retweets with sweet, sweet dopamine. Why should we stop when it feels so good?

The answer, of course, is because that performative allyship hurts actual allyship. More often than not, it is marginalized people who are the ones attacked, not privileged people in actual positions of power. But our brains and the Twitter algorithm both want the rage-induced power trip, forgoing the work of real activism in favor of quick out-of-context takedowns.

Because YA publishing has made Twitter the water cooler to which adult readers are invited, YA authors, editors and other professionals can’t escape the harassment. And unlike in other segments of the publishing industry, acts of performative allyship are supported within YA publishing. It’s a similar situation to journalism, where “news organizations often address bad faith attacks on reporters by repeating the language of the attackers, in part, because they’re worried about looking ‘impartial.’”

After all, access to authors is the real product—and if an author missteps, they’re just a failed product. There are always more authors to fill that spot on the shelf.

As Tumblr user turing-tested put it, “the Internet no longer feels like a Wild Wild West and has been massively gentrified for quick access to anything you could ever want or need and that next hit of dopamine. There is a difference between 'social media bad’ and 'our experiences online are increasingly manufactured by algorithms looking to make money from scraping metrics of data about who we are to either sell us stuff or sell who we are to people who will sell us stuff.’”

In other words, the Twitter algorithm doesn’t care who it hurts. Twitter is a business. Twitter just wants you to keep clicking—and so does the publishing industry. If accomplishing that goal means ruining communities that have supported it since its founding, so be it.
 

***

I’m currently listening to the audiobook of The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. Yes, that John Green: YA writer, YouTuber, Liverpool fan, and neurodiverse person who has used his platform to do a truly extraordinary amount of charity work. Green has been on the receiving end of a tremendous amount of hate over his two decades on the internet, in part because he is a mortal man who occasionally makes mistakes, and in part because the very nature of social media demands that he be perfect.

The Anthropocene Reviewed is an essay collection in which Green reviews things such as Canadian geese and Diet Dr. Pepper, sharing fascinating histories of niche subjects while exploring his own life. At the end of each essay, he rates his subject on a 5-star scale, a cheeky nod to the flattening algorithmic life that everything in the world is experiencing. If you can’t fit your review into a 240-character limit and a 5-star scale, is it really a review?

In his essay about sunsets, Green remembers a day that his dog frolicked around in the front yard at dusk, then ran up to Green and rolled over to show his belly. Astonished by his dog’s bravery and frustrated by humanity’s own fragility, Green writes,

“It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us. But mostly, I think I’m just scared that if I show the world my belly, it will devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism and hide behind the great walls of irony and only glimpse beauty with my back turned to it.“

Green rates sunsets five stars.

I quit Twitter in March last year. As one of my author friends put it, there was never joy when I logged onto the site. At best, I had a neutral experience. At worst, the interactions triggered my anxiety disorder so badly that I could barely function for the rest of the day.

Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed isn’t my normal sort of read. Outside of Zadie Smith’s incredible Intimations, I haven’t read an essay collection in a few years. But when two separate friends told me they were reading it and that it made them cry, I knew I needed to pick it up. It is an ode to the best of humanity: our creativity, and our stubbornness, and our affection.

It is also a celebration of the world around us—the real world, not the digital one. In one essay, Green writes at length about how his young son could see beauty in a brown leaf and the work that awe requires. In another, he remarks on how he now only feels grounded when he is outside, preferably sitting by the river that runs close to his home.

This was supposed to be an essay about how the young adult publishing industry has failed its teenage audience. It was going to start with an anecdote, which I find both funny and horrifying, about how I recently picked up a middle grade fantasy novel being released by a major publisher later this year and discovered that it opens with its 14-year-old protagonist being offered male potency pills. It would have lamented about how books for younger teenagers have vanished amid a slew of offerings of college-aged protagonists, and how publishing knows that it’s aiming at adults because the price points for hardcover YA books almost match those of adult hardcovers now. It would have ended with a story about how one of my bookseller friends was invited to a marketing meeting with another major publisher, in which three upper-level professionals kept asking about YA “as a genre.”

“I feel,” my friend said to me, “like they are so lost.”

That’s because they are.

To become involved in the YA publishing industry is to end up a digital ouroboros. There is no winning. No other industry expects its employees to spend all day at the water cooler, listening and responding to every single critique of their work, their colleagues’ works, the overall industry, and the world as a whole. In other industries, you are expected to actually do the work—not just respond to it.

But unless a mass exodus from Twitter by the authors forced to engage with it occurs—and given how little publishing invests in its midlist, and reports that literary agents are having to fight off clauses that make a regular social media presence a material part of publishing contracts, it seems unlikely that publishers would allow such a thing—there may not be a chance for the YA community to change.

The nature of the rage-loving algorithm of Twitter isn’t going to change.

YA publishing isn’t going to change.

Even if it has broken authors.

Even if it has lost its intended audience.

Even if, at the end of the day, the water cooler that the industry is forced to gather around no longer brings anybody joy. No longer quenches anyone’s thirst.

I don’t want to end this article with rage and despair at a cycle that is unlikely to change. The Twitter algorithms would like that far too much for me to think it a good idea.

But I do not want to wear the armor of cynicism. I do not want to be trapped in the ouroboros of perfection just because the community I interact with demands it.

So here is what I will say to you, dear reader: You do not have to participate in this cycle.

The system is broken, but the system can be abandoned.

As Kacen Callender writes, “I don’t feel like applauding anyone for giving me permission to not be on social media as an author. This should be the baseline expectation for everyone: that no author should ever have to commodify themselves and their energy and their time for the sake of publishing and for the sake of capitalism.”

We don’t have to give in to the rage the algorithm demands of us. We don’t have to refuse to engage with nuance and thoughtfulness because of the expectations of an industry that wants us constantly engaged on the terms it sets for us. We don’t have to speak up or speak out just because people we don’t actually know demand that we do—and we don’t have to demand that people we don’t know speak out just because we feel they should.

The reason so many readers of all ages flocked to Twilight when it was first published in 2005 wasn’t just that it was fun. The reason so many readers continue to fall in love with YA books isn’t just because they’re fast-paced and easy to read.

Readers love young adult literature because we see in its young heroes the chance to succeed and triumph in ways we cannot. In them, we see the decisions we could have made and the people we could become. They make us feel smarter, stronger, braver.

But we still can be smarter and stronger and braver. We can still be the people we wanted our teenage selves to see or to become, and we can be people who the protagonists in the young adult novels we read would be proud of.

We cannot reshape the entire YA community. We certainly cannot fix Twitter.

But we can choose to walk away from rage. We can choose to give the grace to our communities that we want for ourselves: to learn, and to grow, and to be approached with nuance. We can take a breath before we interact with strangers online. We can remember that social media is not our job.

We can, if we choose, break the cycle.

These days, it’s okay to not be sure what Twitter is for. We can stop going there until we figure it out.
 

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Nicole Brinkley has short hair and loves dragons. The rest changes without notice. She is the manager of Oblong Books. Her opinions are her own. If you like this newsletter, consider supporting her on Patreon.

This essay was edited by Stephanie Appell. Read more of Stephanie's work at bookpage.com, where she is the children's and YA editor, or say hi on Twitter @noseinabookgirl. Her opinions are also her own.