Відео

good video, from a new subscriber

Those corny ass pastel covers are everywhere

110% agree. I think of it like a movie, most of the time you're able to see if it's explicit or not prior to watching! I'm totally the farthest thing from conservative or a prudey judy, by all means it should exist and be there for when people (and myself) would like to grab one, however it would be helpful to be able to see more explicit books (yes erotica sections exists, but there is absolutely room for more [sub]sections) in stores essentially rated, or moved into a section of its own! Books are not people - they're meant to be labelled, sectioned, etc. !

The covers of books didnt matter to me when i read almost exclusively horror. But romance and erotica novels definitely caught my eye more.

As a librarian i can fully agree. It's very confusing and i usually have to do some research to see if a book is young or new adult. Lately I've seen some books with very graphic r*pe scenes in the YA section and I really don't think that's appropriate

It's really cool that you pointed out how YA has become very catered towards the girl audience; it's a pattern I've also noticed, but I feel like a consequence of this is that publishers in YA have kind of forgotten about their boy audience and haven't really been releasing many stories for them. This is a little disappointing since it seems like other demographic genres like Middle-Grade and Adult seem to have a relatively more even split in its boy and girl audience.

Ive never read this book but yup, I'm living for all the roasts. Especially the great ones that pinpoint all the deficiencies from creators that I like😅

There should be at minimum a 'parental advisory' tag on anything with problematic relationships. At most ban minors from buying these. I actually don't care if teens read smut. It's the problematic stuff that needs parental advisory

Honestly I completely agree: As a teen that reads YA books myself, I can say that I’ve accidentally got adult books without noticing until I read them. For example I absolutely loved The Serpent and the Wings of the Night, but it had multiple mature topics and spice (mostly in the 2nd book). But when I read the synopsis, it sounded similar to many YA books I enjoyed and I had no clue it was NA book. Many YA books also have spice these days. It’s getting to be a big problem and I find myself having to do research on the book to find out if it has spice/mature topics in it, regardless of it saying it’s YA or NA.

For being off the cuff I think you really hit the nail on the head. They should put an explicit content warning sticker on certain books, the same way they do with music albums.

Very lovely, articulate review that explains things in such a way that I exclaimed internally 😊. Thank you ❤

Even if they arent buying the novels at the bookstore, many Teenagers are definitely already reading and writing smutty fanfiction or wattpad stuff for free, when fifty shades became a phenomenon lots of girls in my high school read it and that wasn't YA. Physical book stores seem like they should better optimize how books are categorized, but personally I always look up books that interests me on Good Reads to check out the ratings, tags, reviews etc. before considering reading it. I think whats best is younger people need to do their due diligence in searching up books they are interested in if there are things they want to avoid, the internet is so vast now we can search things up and get answers in minutes compared to growing up in the 90s and early 2000s.

Two things. 1. I prefer to read clean and sweet romance, so I agree with you that it’s very confusing just by looking at the cover or reading the blurb to know how spicy the book is going to be. I wish romance books came with a “pepper scale” on the back cover so I know what I’m getting into. 2. I work for Barnes and Noble and we shelve books where the publisher tells us to shelve them. We can search it on our internal system and that will tell us where to put it, and that designation is determined by the publisher. There are also certain imprints that only publish either YA or adult, etc. so that’s another way to know what the intended audience is. I wish explicit books weren’t so prevalent among young adult novels nowadays though.

The easiest way is to like wrap the smut books with plastic wraps and put labels or warnings on them. In my city Hong Kong, we have laws that restrict kids below 18 to buy 18+ content. Books or anything else unsuitable for a younger audience are simply wrapped with a label that says 18+ only. The cashier has to check the person's ID to confirm they are above 18.

A way to tell a books spice content would also be useful for adults like myself who just don't want to read spice. I've barely touched the adult section of my library (a bookstore is a beast that I fear since they're less cohesively organized) cause I don't want to stumble into a spice scene when I signed up for cute fluff.

I’ve seen a lot of people try and justify smut in YA books because, quote, “it’s young ADULT”, and that rubs me the wrong way. Sure, we can expect that people become more open to darker or more mature subjects as they get older, and that translates into books. But I personally have never, ever seen the “young adult” category itself advertised by any bookstore or bookseller as anything other than “teen” or 12-18 ish. If any of you guys have, then ok, but until I hear from other people’s experiences (and not opinions) I’ll be interpreting those “it’s young ADULT” responses as “I am okay with explicit content being marketed to 12-18 year olds without necessary warning of said content.”

I’ve seen a lot of people try and justify smut in YA books because, quote, “it’s young ADULT”, and that rubs me the wrong way. Sure, we can expect that people become more open to darker or more mature subjects as they get older, and that translates into books. But I personally have never, ever seen the “young adult” category itself advertised by any bookstore or bookseller as anything other than “teen” or 12-18 ish. If any of you guys have, then ok, but until I hear from other people’s experiences (and not opinions) I’ll be interpreting those “it’s young ADULT” responses as “I am okay with explicit content being marketed to 12-18 year olds without necessary warning of said content.”

Omg I love your Zuko figure hehe

I can absolutely see publishers adding *warning explicit content* or age-appropriate ratings on books like they have for movies. Everyone is talking about this on UA-cam, TikTok, instagram- it's really just a matter of time.

The whole blurbs not being there is what is causing the issue.. most books dont have it.. now its mostly the author forwards on the cover instead...

There's also no separation between novels meant for the 11-14 year-olds and the novels meant for the 15-18 year-olds, let alone the 18-21 year-olds. I think we're dealing with those three age groups, and the 21+. Their needs are different, both from in reading level and maturity. The youngest group are just aging out of middle grade books, but they're now shopping in a section where adult smut is being sold. It's like they're no longer welcome in their own section, like the youngest YA readers don't have their own section anymore. Their space has been invaded by adults with no boundaries. I feel sorry for kids these days.

It’s definitely different nowadays from when I was a kid in the 90s. You could clearly tell a romance novel because they were basically all those bodice rippers and they had chiseled looking men on the cover with his arms around a busty woman. The people looked real and weren’t cartoonish. My mom had some of these laying around and it would have been very obvious and very weird to everyone around me if I would have picked one up and started reading it. I’m from the Twilight generation and I think that Twilight in many ways opened the door for the romantasy genre to appeal to a larger audience of women. However the spice in that book pales in comparison to a lot of spice in most YA novels nowadays.

I think a lot of millennials are also afraid of growing up. They hold onto YA for nostalgia but the books they're yearning for are readily in adult. They just don't want to pick them up.

Ready for this new adult trend to end. The books are nothing but YA with slightly older characters (usually 18-19) but lots of explicit sex. And publishing is already ageist and acts like characters above 30 are old. But a lot of these authors writing these books are 30+ and writing sex from the 30+ experience.

The ice skating book cover examples look so alike that I thought they were wrote by the same author but NOPE, they aren’t! I rather write graphic scenes of gore and death with theatre-like drama than smut. I’d cut my hand off, if I was forced to write smut… no offense

Don’t judge a book by its cover. If a book has trigger warnings, read them. Read reviews. If you have a young adolescent stay aware but don’t censor. They’ll just hide it. Young people need the freedom to read. That said there are very dark romances with strong elements of horror that terrify me. These are usually labeled as dark romance and often the mmc is a creep or outright psychopath. These shouldn’t be read by anyone under eighteen.

I agree, but also we need better covers for romance. The traditional ones of a sweaty half naked man were awful and very off putting to me. I wonder if that's why they are "stealing" YA covers?

What I have seen today in the industry is that teen books are not differentiate from young adult books anymore. Teen books have been erased because the New Adult genre was not cultivated by the publishing industry to have books that people growing out of the young adult phase to could fall into before going into regular adult genre books. And the ages for these groups keep changing. I can’t keep up. In the 2000s when I was a teenager, teen books were for 12-17 yr olds, YA was for 18-21ish, and New Adult was for 22-29.

There are two key problems with smut in YA: 1) Ideally, teens shouldn't be reading about or doing anything related to that. Realistically, fifty percent of teens lose it by 7th grade--which is insane!--but that being the culture we've created still doesn't necessarily justify it where it can be controlled. 2) There are NA and adult fiction specifically for the inclusion of smut. If we're gonna dump smut in there regardless, is there really a point to having a distinguishment for YA? I do feel there is space for discussion of sex and sexuality within a certain context, especially if we're talking about upper YA, but if there's no distinction in the steam level overall, it still becomes kind of a moot point.

I have two books that I self published on Amazon in the new adult romance section and both of them have steamy scenes in them. I didn't think that new adult romance was YA romance. I didn't know which category my books fit into, just that they are romances that I wrote after years of reading other such books and that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Gosh,how I loved the Selection I also still remember the frenzy around the fault in our stars when I was in the middle school

I take a few things into account. 1) Some teenagers have sex, and those who don’t have friends who do. If they’re not doing it, they’re at least thinking about it and not because of any media they’re consuming; because hormones exist and make teenagers horny. 2) Teenagers often read adult fiction. I was reading Stephen King in middle school. Adult books often have adult themes and content. Most teenagers can handle it. 3) If teenagers are thinking about sex, discovering their own sexuality in any number of ways (whether by engaging in sex itself of just fantasy), and it’s already a reality of their world… why is it a problem for it to be in the media they consume? The only people who seem to have a problem with it, from what I can tell, are adults who can’t stop condescending to teenagers.

It's a bowl of mac and cheese and the content will sound like it too.

As someone who was not comfortable with sex scenes and especially weird sexual stuff like in Haruki Murakami books, Game of Thrones and other books like that until I was like 17 YA books used to be like a bit of a safe space from these kinds of things. I mean even City of Bones was a bit much for me at 11 and still weirded me out a little at 16. I honestly still try to read stuff with not as much weird sexual things in it because it’s often ultimately something about the author personally I just really did not want to know. And I just don’t care for women to be reduced to sexy lamps in my suspense literature, thank you very much. lmao. I do not really hate including that sort of stuff in a story if it’s done well btw. Like in Siddharta it’s necessary to the story. It’s just kinda weirding me out when it’s so overdone, out of context and unnecessary to the actual story itself. Also marketing books in a way the contents become obvious is really important imo because you should kind of know what you are getting into from the start. Because these kinds of things can be quite traumatising to children especially, even if grown ups would be considering them to be comparatively mild. (Speaking from experience here as a kid and teen, who sought out adult media (like classical literature and so on) and who had a father, who thought anything animated was “a kid’s medium”. (And a mother who thought that critically acclaimed art films were child appropriate but shoujo manga and fantasy books somehow weren’t. TLDR.: I saw some shit and I did not like it.) So, yeah it’s important to label things appropriately because if you are a teen interested in smut you can just seek it out yourself from the adults section, so that if you are a kid interested in something more difficult with a bit more substance you can also safely move over to the teens section without being traumatised. Does it still happen? Yeah, ofc. But in that case you are kinda at fault yourself because you dabbled in things that were not intended for you in the first place and that kinda also gives you some safety to retreat to and feels more like a slightly terrifying adventure to parts unknown and not a flashbang of terrifying stuff in an area that was supposed to be a safe space to retreat to. The impact is different imho.

I feel like we would all benefit from having something like the ao3 rating and tagging system applied to books.

I remember reading so many books, when after I finished I could not believe that they could be classified as YA.. I find this a really interesting topic and I really wonder how this is going to evolve in the future? Sometimes I see young girls in the bookstore with their parents and when I see what kind of books they are buying their child I'm like 👀 Siiiir, I'm not sure you know what you are actually buying there.. 👀😅

Years ago I bought a bough from a supermarket, mostly because it had a £1 sticker on it that caught my eye. Only to realise that it was printed on it. Not an 'as seen on...' sticker, just an obnoxious red circle with the price on it. It was a shame because I did enjoy the book, and I've never seen any other books by that author with the same thing - she has enough name regognition that she doesn't need it.

I work in a bookstore, and I have a really hard time recommending anything in the Romance section for this very reason (the confusing covers). At least in the YA section, I know there's not going to be explicit sex scenes. I don't read these two areas much (if at all) myself, so if a 16yo asks me about a certain Romance book, I'm not always sure it's appropriate for her. I mean, I'm not there to parent her or judge her, but I'm also not there to steer her into adult representations of very toxic (and possible harmful?) relationship dynamics. However, I also remember how everyone passed around Judy Blume's FOREVER in 5th grade and how intrigued we all were by it just because it was considered taboo (at the time). So these cover designers (or, really, publishers) need to help us out a bit.

Good points! I hate the new cover switch thing though...drives me nuts! Also, I dislike the new cartoon covers for romance too....

I agree. I’m an illustrator -not professionally yet - who’d like to possibly go into book cover design so I try to study them. The cartoonish covers are a clear marketing tactic to get younger people interested. A lot of publishers don’t recognize New Adult as a legitimate category, so they will file these books away as YA when they’re not. So then the art director gets it, creates a brief, and finds an artist to make the cover. Usually artists aren’t given the whole book so they don’t really know the full context. The artist follows the brief and whatever the art director tells them and onto the cover it goes once approved. I love the style of these covers, but there’s no way to tell which is truly YA and which are new adult. If you look at older romance novel covers, you get a LOT of Fabio on the cover that basically signaled to readers what the contents were of. TLDR; the covers are a marketing strategy and the publishers know what they’re doing.

Glad some one else noticed this as the Young Adult (YA) age bracket is huge it literally goes from 12 to 35 years old for YA fiction now!

also i want to add, i saw a video of a town hall or school board meeting. a parent stood up and began to read one of the explict sex scenes in one of the books their child accessed at the school library and they were immediately told that what they were reading was too graphic to be read in a public setting and to please sit down. no one saw the irony there

a few months ago, i wanted to read a YA book i'd heard lots of good things about. it was a gay romance and while i am an adult, i do still love YA a lot. the book was presented as a young love story for teens. i don't like a lot of smut or graphic stuff (there's a time and place but sometimes i just want to read something wholesome). anyway about half way through the book, there was a full on graphic, detailed sex scene between the two underaged characters. i immediately stopped reading. i felt gross. it really made me take a look into some of the books parents are questioning in school libraries. again this is a book where the characters were young, like 14 years old max. and it was in the YA section. just very odd to me and very unneccesarry.

I work at a chain bookstore and we have a young adult section, next to the juvenile/kids section, full of books that are in no way appropriate for those ages. We get constantly told by higher ups to put those books there, sometimes as highlights! Hooked was one of such books... It's disturbing to see kids as young as 11 or 12 hover that section. Sometimes parents will actually buy their really young kids such books and the majority doesn't even bother asking us if the book is appropriate or not. I wish I could do more, but at what point is it my place to monitor what other people's kids are reading? If they ask me I'll be honest, but it feels wrong otherwise. Not to mention I haven't read every book or heard about them on booktube so sometimes I also don't know. I really wish publishers would put a little more effort in distinguishing what ages a book is meant for, but some of the blame falls on parents too. Some books literally have a "spice meter" at the very back and people still miss it...

"One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Thank god this is becoming a sane take! Just two years ago I was thrown out of Reddit forums for suggesting that we may need some age-related gate-keeping for books and not just movies to prevent especially young girls from being dragged into - what is essentially- porn. I was compared to book-burning Nazis and called a fascist over my “call for censoring” (to be clear: I suggested a QR-Code system with content warnings or PG-ratings plus an under 18 buy-/lend-ban for books that are rated 18+) which is really funny as I’m a German history teacher. We can’t make publishers change book covers because that goes against creative freedom and they have a right to design covers in a way that supports marketing strategies. However, we do have the obligation to protect the youth. Handing out written porn like candy is not protecting the youth. The perception of love and sexuality can be (negatively) influenced by writing, too. These books explore sexual fantasies. However, these fantasies do not have to overlap with real-life-sexuality much. An adult, sexually experienced person knows that and can enjoy those books regardless but an inexperienced teen may think this is normal or how it’s supposed to be. Tons of girls had their perception of boys and sex warped by smutty fantasy books or those ice hockey romances if not those dark romance novels. That’s not different to all the boys hooked on porn. Both is unfortunate.

I'm not a BookTok/Tube person, but UA-cam recommends me stuff from that corner of the internet for whatever reason, so I stumbled across this. I'm more of a literary fiction reader, so when I saw the title, I was sort of immediately on defense mode, but I see now the issue you're talking about. I do have to wonder if the popularity of fan fiction actually plays into this at all as well. I was reading some crazy porn as a teenager, but it was on FFN and AO3. Given the amount of romance novels targeted at a young adult audience with some explicit sex scenes that were directly pulled from fan fiction (Red, White, and Royal Blue comes to mind)... you have to wonder. I also am very generally against anybody who thinks teens should have no access to content like that, but it's always good, imo at least, for teens to have some kind of trusted adult in their lives who can be an open and safe person to help them process what they're engaging with media-wise so they're able to do things like spot red flags that their relationship is abusive, etc.

I feel that people are confusing talking about mature themes in books with explicitly talking about them when young people have the right to read about violence and sex in an age-appropriate way.

truth invokes

I wish books had a rating system and tw etc. At least an indication of YA vs Adult. It would help everyone even people who are looking for extreme content.