When it comes to those most solitary of creatures, teenage readers, vampires lead the pack.
“The vampire genre is really doing well, and not just vampires — werewolves, ghosts, angels,” says Colleen Whitfield, the children’s book manager for Exclusive Books.
The teen market reflects the adult market, so chick lit sells well. A big seller is the Gossip Girl series for high school girls.
“Twilight has opened the youth to reading,” says Nicola Almond, the children’s product manager at Pan Macmillan. “In a lot of ways, Twilight is much more of a romance and has made vampires erotic. That’s what the girls are wanting — something they cannot have.”
It’s not only books about the exceptionally sexy “undead” that sell well — it’s anything that combines the paranormal and romance, like the Cassandra Clare novels about a young girl who’s a shadow hunter, keeping vampires and werewolves in line. “Maybe we all like living in a fantasy world,” says Almond.
Empowering books
Even the boys go in for fantasy, but a different kind — spies and action, like the Anthony Horowitz books about 14-year-old Alex Rider, recruited as an MI6 agent. Books like these, she notes, are empowering for young people.
“Young men like adventure and thrillers,” says Whitfield, “and a lot of adult authors are writing for teenagers now, like James Patterson and Chris Ryan.”
Teenage readers will mostly find these novels in bookshops or public libraries. School libraries are somewhat more circumscribed and realism pretty much reigns.
Glynis Lloyd, a former English teacher, is the English literature publisher at Maskew Miller Longman (MML). “Stories are a very powerful tool for learning and personal growth,” she says, and “for most of South Africa’s children, their only experience of reading fiction is in school.”
MML runs an annual literature competition — this year it was for books for younger readers. In the past it has looked for drama, short stories and novels for teenagers. Entries are invited in all official languages.
“Children should be reading much more from South Africa and the African literary tradition. I think teachers and children should be looking for stories that have meaning for them, that speak to their context, that validate their experience and that give them a sense of possibilities.”
Prescribed books
The market for youth literature is schools — and, specifically, prescribed books.
The national department of basic education compiles a catalogue of approved books for grades 10 and 11 and the provinces select setworks from that list. Grade 12 setworks are chosen by the department, because the matric is a nationally set exam. Provinces compile their own list of approved books for the lower grades.
Publishers and teachers would like to see more South African or African books on the lists. Still, both MML and NB publishers (Human & Rousseau, Tafelberg) do very well with books that are prescribed.
Tafelberg has a regular competition, the Sanlam Award contest, now run in all 11 official languages. “It is where our strong youth fiction comes from,” says Aldré Lategan, the publisher — children’s and juvenile books.
What works, she says, is books with a strong story line that cuts deeply into what’s going on in teenagers’ lives. “Most of our stories have a social, moralistic angle or take on life,” she says, although they are not “all gloom and doom”. Aids? Goths? Pregnant schoolgirls? “They do appear now and then. Some of the parents are shocked and some are pleased that we are addressing these matters. The schools have mixed feelings — some of the books are a bit rough for them.”
Lategan is particularly pleased that one of Tafelberg’s isiZulu titles, Kungasa Ngefile, has been prescribed widely for grades 10 and 11.
“Children are losing their mother tongue fast and furiously,” she says, so Tafelberg is doing a range of picture books in African languages for the very young.