Current trends in YA fiction

I've been thinking about the general direction fiction, particularly young adult fiction, is moving.  I'm only going to talk about the side of it that has to do with the paranormal/scifi/dystopian side.  I don't really follow the general contemporary side, the real world stuff, lol.  There seems to be a lot of trends that flow through fiction.  Recently there has been the vampire surge.  Everything has been vampires for the last 5 or 7 years.  That seems to be on the way out though, it just seems to be old news.  The new trend I've seen coming up is angels.  I have mixed feelings about this.  When I started writing Branded I couldn't find a single YA fantasy that was based around angels.  Just months after I finished writing it and submitted it to agents 2 new angel books came out and there seems to be another one come out every month since then.  New trend?  Maybe.  What does that mean for me?  I'm not really sure. 

But I wonder what people's thoughts are on a little different side.  YA scifi and dystopians?  It seems to me that this is a genre that there isn't a lot to.  The books that I do know of do REALLY well (The Hunger Games, The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Life as We Knew It...).  But the market doesn't seem nearly as saturated with this kind of fiction like it is with all the contemporary fantasy.  I have to admit, I have high hopes this genre is on the rise considering this is what my new work is.  So what do you think?  What are the trends that you see happening in fiction right now?  What do you hope might become more popular?

And of course I had to throw in my latest swag design for the Fall of Angels series... lol



2 comments:

Jenni Merritt said...

I am more so a fan of scifi and dystopian. Even as a teen thats the genre I was picking up more often. It may not be the kind that is on all the front shelves and getting all the headlines, it does get a VERY loyal following and will always sell. So...go for it!

Kassie said...

OOH! I like the second pic!