#Ownvoices, Disruptive Platforms, and Reader Reception in Young Adult Publishing

Abstract

The concept of #ownvoices writing has gained traction in contemporary publishing as both a genre of reader interest and a focus for debates about authors’ rights to write cross-culturally. This paper examines tensions the #ownvoices movement reveals between the commissioning, publishing, and critical reception of a book, using debate about Craig Silvey’s Honeybee, an Australian novel focalized through a young trans protagonist but written by a straight male author. Drawing on the theory of recognition, it analyzes author and publisher media interviews, social media, and literary reviews in mainstream publications, which are given context through with selected interviews with Australian publishers. Misrepresentation and appropriation are concerns for many readers, while judgements about aesthetic quality vary. Structures within the book industries limit the economic representation of diverse creators which, in turn, has implications for the diversity of experience represented in young adult fiction and its literary quality.

Of acquisitions and interference: accounting for systemic threats to the freedom to read

“…It obscures, for example, the role comps play as an invisible decision-making convention that maintains (and is maintained by) institutional arrangements over which readers have very little, if any, control. Notably, such arrangements—wherein editors decide what to acquire partly on the basis of “data-informed” predictions about what (some) readers will buy rather than substantive knowledge of their audience’s desires or practices (Rutherford et al ., 2022)—are not actually inconsistent with librarianship’s going account of the freedom to read. But the pervasive absence of agency that Miller describes has substantive implications for what one can access (physically, intellectually and aesthetically), as well as which stories, experiences, perspectives and subjects are rendered intelligible and valuable across a society.…”