Children’s or young adult literature is reinventing itself and resisting to appeal to adolescents who are reading fewer and fewer books. When starting secondary school, the attraction to screens and the compulsory reading of books causes a dropout. “We are not demonizing screens: not all teenagers are lost to the cause of reading! But it is up to us, publishing houses, to question ourselves, to reach them, and to find the link with what they experience daily”, believes Héloïse des MMonsters the director of Bayard Jeunesse. Some genres are more resistant than others, such as fantasy, romance o, or documentary. As are certain formats: original universes spread over several volumes and manga.
The manga boom
The CNL study confirms it: to “attract” boys, webtoons (comics to scroll on a smartphone, born in South Korea) and manga are the solution since they represent three-quarters of the books they read between the ages of 13 and 15. “The manga sector is only growing,” confirms Valentin Grot, Manga Nova project manager for Ki-oon Publishing. The French manga publishing house, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, opened a free, ad-free platform in February 2024 to showcase its catalog of old or future works. The principle: the first three chapters of a series pre-published in a periodical in Japan are freely accessible, as are the three most recent chapters, published simultaneously with the Japanese magazine publication for series such as My Hero Academia or Jujutsu Kaisen. Ki-oon also offers its creations by French or Japanese authors.
There is no online payment: you just have to create an account and you earn “novas” by doing actions: logging in once a day, posting a comment, sharing on social networks, answering a quiz, etc. These rewards then allow you to unlock reading chapters. “The goal is to involve users on the platform while entertaining them,” points out Valentin Grot.
This free offer is for Ki-oon a response to align itself with the illegal offers of manga online, which are proliferating while they do not respect copyright, which teenagers are unfortunately very fond of. “We are also banking on the fact that once these young readers have purchasing power, they will want to go to the bookstore to buy their favorite series,” adds the Manga Nova project manager. For the only title prohibited to those under 16, a warning is placed, and “if the user has correctly completed their age in their profile and is under 16, they will not be able to unlock this content,” reassures Valentin Grot. The offer has already attracted more than 10,000 subscribers in a few months.
Beware of new romance and dark romance.
Another genre that appeals to teens is “new romance.” “Women have taken over romance to make it something they like, far from the clichés,” explains Thierry Laroche, publisher at Gallimard Jeunesse, a publishing house whose recent successes include Amber Smith’s The Way I Used to Be (2023) and Ali Hazelwood’s Check and Mate (2024). This is the genre favored by young girls who are avid readers of literary communities such as #Booktok on TikTok or Wattpad (see box).
If romance tells love stories, with more or less explicit sex scenes, dark romance, also very popular with young readers, is not suitable for their age. Romance is then forbidden and depicts relationships condemned by morality or the law, with kidnapping, sequestration, an physical, psychological, or sexual violence…
Stories stuck in patterns of female submission represent a danger because they are a model of toxic relationships that very young readers are not necessarily aware of. We are far from gender equality, consent,o r the right of women to dispose of their bodies. Among the best-known titles: is Captive, reserved according to the publisher for over-18s, but which 12-year-old schoolgirls have read.
