I think your assertion that, “getting a YA novel published, especially a sci-fi/fantasy YA novel, one needs to write something in the style of Potter,” is mercifully wrong. One of the wonderfully peculiar qualities of the YA explosion we’re currently enjoying is the sheer multi-facetedness of it. As a first-hand example, I recently sold a YA SF novel about a cycling hermaphrodite that I’m pretty sure fits neither Rowling’s mold nor anyone else’s. And there was a bidding war for it. YA is wide open, like the teen minds it seeks to fertilize.

“It’s an odd review — I think that rule number one for book reviewers should probably be Don’t Spend The First Paragraph Slagging Off The Genre. Just don’t. Don’t start a review of romance books by saying that all romance books are rubbish but these are good (or just as bad as the rest). Don’t start a review of SF by saying that you hate all off-planet tales or things set in the future and you don’t like way SF writers do characters. Don’t start a review of a University Adultery novel by explaining that mostly books about English professors having panicky academic sex bore you to tears but. Just don’t. Any more than a restaurant reviewer would spend a paragraph explaining that she didn’t like Chinese food, or French, or barbeque normally… It just makes people think you’re not a very good reviewer.

One can assume that if a reviewer is reviewing a book then it’s interesting enough to be reviewed. If you as a reviewer, begin by explaining why you don’t like a genre, then you put up the backs of everyone who does, and is interested, and probably would be reading your review in the first place. And you lay yourself open to the cardinal sin of dim reviewers, which is excusing something from a genre because it’s good.

Just assume that horror, or YA, or whatever it is, deserves the attention you’re giving it, and then review it as best you can.”

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/02/102-pages-so-far.html

“What seems most remarkable in this Woodward book is exactly what seemed remarkable in the previous Woodward books, each of which was presented as the insiders’ story and each of which went on to become a number-one bestseller: these are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”

So that’s one way to go after it. The other way is to metaphorically go into a New York bar, Hunter Thompson style, and throw a bag of metaphorical lye into the faces of the punters – just to see what happens. You decide which approach is more entertaining, more effective.

So, if he was being literal, he’s wrong, and if he was being figurative, he’s also wrong. In both cases, his wrongness clearly stems from his ignorance of the things he’s writing about — and that’s why so many people are so regularly annoyed at Itzkoff: he does his job very badly.

I’ve been a Giants fan since the 1980s, pal. Nearly got my ass kicked in a Boston bar as a teen when I wore an Oakland A’s tee and craned into watch the playoff game. I drink pipsqueaks like you under the table. Just because I don’t write about sports all that often, that doesn’t mean I ain’t a sports fan. And as far as the Giants are concerned, I did indeed watch MORE than the Super Bowl this year.

Because you’re such a coward and lack the cojones to sign your name, congratulations. You’ve just been banned. Don’t show your yellow face on my site until you’ve gone through rehab, Kerry Collins style, you pusillanimous sock puppet.

Hmm. Well I have to point out Scott Westerfield and Justine Larblestier, both of whom have forged new ground in YA spec fiction (and not at all the same territory even though they are married). There’s also Christopher Barzak’s very emotional ghost story, One for the Sorrow and the Spiderwick series of books from Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi (about to be launched on the big screen) and all the work Charles de Lint has been doing in the urban fantasy realm for ages and on and on.

It’s possible that Rowling has changed the model for future YA SFF publishing – in the minds of the “gatekeepers” like agents and publishers. There might very well be a Harry Potter type backlash where we see more books like hers than unlike them in the next few years. But I don’t think that will last long if it does happen and with authors like Westerfield remaining extremely popular and so different from Rowling, I think the genre will continue to grow and expand in ways that do not relate to Harry Potter mainia.

What frustrates me about his article is that he is supporting a self-fulfilling prophecy with this – suggesting that you must be like Rowling to get published in the field today and thus ignoring all those who are not like her – and giving them the sort of publicity that frankly, Meiville and Gaiman don’t need (those guys do just fine as I’m sure you know). A better use of space would have been to acknowledge Rowling’s impact on the genre and then explore authors who are outside the Harry Potter box – showing that the genre is far bigger than one boy wizard.

I apologize. I’m doing a terrible job with my point. (Which begs whether I actually have a point — more than likely I don’t; however, don’t tell me just yet. It will only break my heart.)

The point that I’m making with Rowling — and the point that I think Itzkoff is making with Rowling — is that getting a YA novel published, especially a sci-fi/fantasy YA novel, one needs to write something in the style of Potter. Whether its the publishers or the readers, there seems to be little interest in anything innovative in YA publishing.

All the children’s fantasy you all have mentioned — I love all of that, too. Alice in Wonderland is one of my absolute favorites. But none of it has ever, as you’ve pointed out, had the same kinds of success that Rowling’s stuff has. And as much as we might want to say, “Rowling’s an anomaly — she doesn’t count,” her success is going to be tough to overcome. She could become her own special chapter in Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence.

And, again, that’s what I think Itzkoff is trying to say in that opening. Getting a break in children’s publishing without writing some coming-of-age novel about a special child and his special destiny is going to be a challenge. And then he goes on to show a couple that might be trying for that.

(Oh, yes, and what about “The Hobbit”, forgot to mention that.)

It’s saddening that I can go to the NYTBR with the reasonable expectation that the reviewer for the latest Coetzee is familiar with his backlist, his non-fiction and can perhaps spot a Nabokov reference here and there, but the writer in the SF/F column can only rustle up a reference to Harry Potter and the Evil Dead.

And then there’s CS Lewis and that little Narnia series.

JK Rowling blew the doors off of children’s publishing, period. She blew the doors off of publishing, period. To make a comparison in adult publishing, it would be like suggesting that prior to John Grisham no one had success writing adult thrillers or prior to Stephen King, no one had success writing adult horror. (Or Danielle Steele and romance, etc.) There are several authors who gained unprecedented success but they did not invent the genre they published in nor are they necessarily the best writers in those genres. They wrote good books, captured the public eye and ran with that popularity to great fame and fortune.

As to what kind of success YA fantasy authors other than Rowling have enjoyed, consider that Pullman, Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, L’Engle and so many others were able (and in many cases still are) to publish over long successful careers. JK Rowling has written one amazing series and made a ton of money (and good for her, I say). But whether or not she has more than the Harry Potter story in her remains to be seen. Sometimes money is not the only measurement of success. (If we only looked at dollars, Danielle Steele would be one of the greatest authors in American history.)

JK Rowling did a great thing for kids with the Harry Potter saga but she is not where YA fantasy begins, nor – I’m sure – will she be where it ends.

But children’s/YA fantasy wasn’t successful, really, was it? Before Rowling? That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t good fantasy out there for the YA set (and, for the record, I don’t think Rowling’s ouevre counts as “good fantasy”) — but it’s my not-very-sophisticated understanding that Rowling’s Harry Potter novels were some sort of YA juggernaut.

And this is an honest question: Have any of the other authors you’ve mentioned — Diana Wynne Jones, Susan Cooper, and Philip Pullman — had anywhere near the publishing success that J.K. Rowling has had? A follow-up question I would be interested in having answered is what the sales of non-Rowling authors were before Rowling and then after.

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a letter to his publisher in the wake of the unprecendented success Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was having, both in America and abroad: “What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of The Lamplighter, and other books neither better nor worse? Worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the hundred thousand.”

Well, then, it’s still a stupid question because it assumes that children’s/YA fantasy did not exist or was not successful until Rowling came along. Hello. Diana Wynne Jones? Susan Cooper? Philip Pullman? What is the “Rowling model” anyway? All the comparisons to “traditional” fantasy in the review pre-date Rowling.

I also like the implication that Rowling’s sole satisfaction in writing the Potter series was derived in licensing sales. Gosh, that whole first paragraph was just riddled with shallow journalistic thinking.

(Also, “otiose oaf” seems tautological simply to show off that one has received a Word-of-the-Day calendar in order to appear smarter than one’s subject.)

I think you’ve also mischaracterized the reviewer’s argument. When Itzkoff writes, “I sometimes wonder how any self-respecting author of speculative fiction can find fulfillment in writing novels for young readers,” what I think he’s asking is a better, and more interesting question: What are the risks in writing original sci-fi/fantasy for young readers that doesn’t follow the Rowling model?

But you appear to not want to be bothered with that. It ruins your thesis ad hominem attack. I can also assume that there must be some deep-seated pleasure for you in your Hatchet Jobs-style one-man arguments against writers you don’t particularly like. And yet, it’s these hatchet jobs that make you as unreliable as the reviewers you are railing against.

One would want to suggest that the emperor here has no clothes; yet, one also realizes that the Emperor has no time to hear this, since he is too busy writing nasty things about one’s pants.