6 Editors Remember Their First YA Acquisitions
We’re always asking authors about their inspirations, stories of their first disastrous book tours or that time they said something they shouldn’t on Twitter. But as it turns out, there are other people involved in moving a book from a Word document to pile of bound paper in your hands. YA editors play a pivotal role in making manuscripts into amazing books we all get to read, so I decided to ask some of the most interesting, successful people I know (or follow on Twitter) about their memories from their days as baby editors.
What was the first YA book you acquired and edited, and what do you remember about the process?
Andrew Karre, Executive Editor at Dutton Books for Young Readers
My first YA novel (acquired and edited) was Christine Kole MacLean’s How It’s Done (Flux, 2006). I knew next to nothing at all about anything, especially YA, so I was incredibly fortunate to meet Christine, who was smart, experienced, patient, and from near the town I grew up and where the novel was set. We had a wonderful rapport, and a lot of the terror and inadequacy I was feeling at the time faded as we worked. The book itself still pleases me. I’m looking at my signed copy now. It actually has an on-page sex scene that I think holds up to my current values where these things are concerned. It’s also got a fair amount of religion in it, so I guess many of my current YA preoccupations were present from the word “go.”
Nancy Paulsen, President/Publisher of Nancy Paulsen Books at Penguin Young Readers
The first YA book I edited when I started my career at Putnam was Jacqueline Woodson’s If You Come Softly. This was the first book of Jacqueline’s I edited, almost 20 years ago, and it is a love story between a black teen boy and Jewish teen girl who go to a prep school in NYC. I’m giving away the ending here (spoiler alert!) but the boy is shot by police at the end of the book as he is running in Central Park, in a case of mistaken identity. Jacqueline and I were surprised that a critique a few folks had of the book at the time was that they felt something like this couldn’t happen; that it was a forced plot line. And then Amadeus Diallo was shot, and there were a string of other random shootings of unarmed black youths. Sadly, reality quickly proved the plot line to be all too true.
Stacy Whitman, Publisher, Tu Books
[Edited slightly for length] The first YA book I acquired was Tiffany Trent’s Hallowmere series, which is an interesting one because, as a shared-world property (what some publishers call “IP” nowadays), several writers pitched the story to me based on a list of ideas we generated. Tiffany’s was the best story pitch (remember, it hadn’t been written yet), but someone (I can’t remember who now, but someone above me) said that while they loved the proposal and the writing, the black main character she proposed (we said “diverse!”) wasn’t “relatable” to a mainstream/wide audience.
So I had to ask Tiffany to make the cast diverse, but the main character white, at least for the first book. We then plotted out the rest of the 10-book series to star the rest of the girls in the cast, with the black main character getting book 7. But they canceled the series after book 6, and the book about the character who started it all never got her book in print.
Looking back, I didn’t know how to push back against that as a brand-new editor. Nowadays I’d know how to challenge it, but I didn’t have the vocabulary or the knowledge in general to do anything but think that what my superiors said about the market was how it was. I didn’t know I could change it.
It was a great series, and launched the career of an excellent author. But I didn’t know what I didn’t know back then, and if I had it all to do over again, I wouldn’t have shied back from challenging that received wisdom that “black books don’t sell,” because that’s exactly the thinking that made me change the direction of that series.
Kate Sullivan, Senior Editor, Delacorte Press, Random House Children’s Books
My first book that I acquired and edited was Ash, by Malinda Lo, and I don’t really have a funny story to go with! I remember realizing that everyone was just going to let me edit this important book by myself—that none of my managers were going to look over my shoulder—and feeling overawed that anyone could trust me to do it well on my first solo try! I also remember at some point during the edits, I complimented Malinda on some scene that I felt was ripe with symbolism and had ties to an overall theme and later Malinda said to me “Yeah, I didn’t put that in there…you just read it in there. I just wrote it in there because I really like to write about food.” Or something [to that effect], and it was a good reminder that I’ve carried with me: 1) authors rarely consciously write in the deeper meaning that good readers find, but the greatest ones will still have it in there, and 2) editors almost always think their authors are geniuses, way smarter than us, etc., etc. Which, I think, is the way it should be, so that we don’t lose sight of the incredible job we have to do, the responsibility it comes with, and how careful we have to be with it.
Stacey Friedberg, Associate Editor at Dial Books for Young Readers
When I acquired The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly, I was really, really nervous about what our sales and marketing team would think of it. It’s a very dark book: As a result of her disobedience, 17-year-old Minnow has no hands. She escapes from her cult only to find herself in juvenile detention, and the cult she left behind is completely destroyed. And Minnow believes that the only boy she ever loved is dead. Even though the book is filled with hope and punctuated by great moments of humor, I was worried that the team would hear that premise and decide that the book was just totally bleak. When I went to launch the book in-house, I gushed about the beautiful writing and how emotional it was, but also was very upfront about the content and warned everyone that the book might not be for every reader. I was terrified—it was only my second time launching a book and I am pretty sure I was shaking. But to my surprise, some of the sales reps who had read the book in advance spoke up in praise of it—and I will never forget that one of them said: “You know, this book really is not that dark!” I knew what he meant, but I couldn’t help laughing on the inside. I had been so worried—and also, I had never thought a book that depicts a girl getting her hands cut off would ever be described as “not that dark.”
Jordan Brown, Executive Editor at Walden Pond Press & Balzer + Bray
The first YA book I ever acquired and edited was actually the first book I ever acquired and edited overall—it was called Touching Snow, by a writer named M. Sindy Felin. While I don’t have a particularly fun story from the acquisition or the process of working on the book, I do remember vividly the moment I first started reading it. I had printed out the pages the agent had sent along the day they came in—this was in the days when we had to print out submissions, rather than loading them onto an ereader—but I didn’t get a chance to start reading until the next morning, when I was on my way to work. I started reading the first page when I was on the D train outside on the Manhattan Bridge crossing from Brooklyn into Manhattan, and I remember getting to the bottom of the first page, looking up and over the East River, and knowing that this was going to the be the first book I was ever going to acquire. The voice was amazing, it completely hooked me by the end of the first page, and I knew that this was the one. And it was! Touching Snow was Sindy’s debut, so we were both pretty green working on it together. But it was an amazing experience. I don’t think I could have hoped for a better first acquisition.