Harry Potter was a smash hit about a boy discovering he’s a wizard and going to school in a magical world full of wonder and adventure. Twilight didn’t hit quite that high a note, but the story of a teenage girl who learns her classmate is a vampire and falls in love with him did quite well. The Hunger Games popularized the dystopian genre with a bow wielding teenager stepping up to survive death games, have angsty romances, and fight the power.
As far as I can tell, nothing has quite hit that same kind of high since and it may be awhile until the next truly big wave. But if it were up to you, what would the next big thing be about?
They Both Die in the end series is big where I live. I think a second book recently came out
I was always partial to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Three Investigators series of books when I was a kid. I think that would do particularly well.
Mine is about a futuristic amusement park where dinosaurs are brought to life through advanced cloning techniques. I call it “Billy and the Cloneasaurus!”
I know it’s 20 years old but A Princess of Roumania
The book my sister is writing.
YA version of The Expanse. Some kind of realistic in the solar system science fiction with spaceships and colonies and settlers and so on. Like an updated version of the Heinlein’s juvies. We’ve had a lot of YA fantasy recently, I think it’s time for some YA hard science fiction.
I was always sad that Eragon didn’t make it as big as it deserved. It’s like a kids version of LOTR but with more dragons.
Eragon was really successful was it not? I mean I guess it didn’t have the movies and stuff, but its up there in terms of novel series for kids
Sci-fi school.
For YA specifically, I’m still angry that Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein wasn’t a bigger hit-- WW2 epistolary novel about teen girls in the RAF and being captured by Nazis. I sobbed through this book and haven’t stopped talking about it since.
Brandon Sanderson is sitting on a veritable gold mine with his Cosmere, imho.
It’s not YA I suppose, but if someone threw a bit of money at making an animated series I feel like it would be huge.
Maybe that’s just cause I’m such a sucker for it though. Who knows what kids want these days.
Schoolmance series. 1st pretty good. It expands that the school has a will of it’s own, and safety diff. Not guaranteed. After that, not so much, but rewrites could fix that for TV or show adaptation. Red rising also comes to mind.
a secret l33t haxor school where the kids learn to hack realities source code to create all sorts of cool effects like conjuring fire, floating objects, altering someone’s memory, and protecting themselves from others who can do the same.
the main character will be someone born to a prominent(rich) family, but who was orphaned as a child, so they grew up with their aunt and uncle. the aunt and uncle know about this secret haxor school, and the people who can hack reality, but don’t tell the main character anything about it, hoping that they can prevent him from learning anything about it.
the main character finds out anyways, and is shipped off to the school, where he learns he’s actually practically royalty. everyone gives him preferencial treatment, except one teacher and all his favorite students, who do their best to make his life miserable.
Then the main character finds out that his parents, who he’d always been told died in an accident of some sort, were actually murdered by this really evil dude who uses the reality haxoring powers to terrorize the world in secret. then it turns out that this really evil dude has infiltrated the school to try and steal a powerful reality haxoring tool that the head master has hidden in the absolute most obvious place hidden behind riddles and puzzles easy enough for a child to get past them, and the only person who can possibly stop him is the main character.
right at the end, it turns out that the main character actually almost helped the villian succeed. the villian would never have been able to get the tool, and all the main character really had to do to make sure the villian wouldn’t get it was to do nothing not try and stop him in the first place. but it’s ok, for some reason the main character touching the bad guy melts him and he falls apart.
Smartness, and achieving goals that help you do well in life. Popularize Smartness and work ethic. Like Big Bang Theory but more geared towards teenagers, and make the smart people look cool not dorky. Highlight how life turns out when you just keep making stupid decisions, and don’t understand how big of a tool motivation is in life.
Something like The Dispossessed that shows an actual society that rather than just having entire civilisations be dependent on a single ruler. Even in le Guin’s society supposedly run according to a single person’s ideas, you still see that it only exists because of everyone’s willingness to uphold those ideas, and that that’s what maintains the status quo long after that person is gone.
I could never enjoy the “and then the good guys won and everything was perfect cause now the right people are running the dictatorship” or “and then everything was fixed cause the bad guy was killed/defeated” ending, even as a kid, cause they never actually dealt with the real issues, it was always just assigning all the blame of the world’s troubles on a singular person or small group and ignoring how much that kind of power depends on the common person’s cooperation with it.
Tbh just re-release The Dispossessed as a YA novel and call it a day.
I have a book I’ve been working on for 12 years now. I’m now in the midst of editing it. The goal is to start pitching it to literary agents next year. I hope people will take interest.