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Another week closer to Christmas… and we have more books for teens!

As I sift through the options, I keep wondering why it can be such a challenge to find great stories by Christian authors for our teens? It seems like it’s a little bit of a vicious cycle. Books stores often don’t carry them–so publishers shy away from publishing them. Because we aren’t looking for them. But we don’t look for them because they can be so stinking hard to find, so publishers shy away from publishing them, thus, there aren’t many available for bookstores to carry.

Does this sound about right?

Speculation, on my part. The finding YA books for my teenagers problem has bothered me for quite a while. As I said in my first post, YA books for Christian teens are out there, and there are some great writers with some fantastic YA reads on the market. They are there, but not in abundance, and they are kind of hard to find. WHY IS THAT? The YA market in general is pretty big. Really, it is. So, is the Christian YA market just too niche to be of any use? Is the problem that people just aren’t buying Christian YA, or is it that the Christian publishing world has given the YA market the cold shoulder?

I really don’t know–and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it!

I hope it’s not the cold shoulder thing, though. That’d be a little bit like the Church’s response to the entertainment industry in the ’80s and early ’90s. Remember that? The it’s all bad, worldly, and self-focused, so we’re not going to engage attitude? (that wasn’t everyone’s approach to it, but it was pretty prevalent). In the meantime, there was this massive platform that like 99% of the country engaged with, and we kind of missed it.

Sad. And, we’re still trying to make up time for that short-sighted snubbing. (I know, I’m full of opinions here…)

There’s this pretty big platform out there right now that engages our culture. Young Adult Lit reaches not only our children and teens, but a huge chunk of New Adults as well as those of us who have been grown up for a while. It’s a market that bleeds through the generations in a way that most niche genres don’t.

I really think we shouldn’t miss this opportunity. That’s all I’m trying to say here.