How to Land a Major Deal for Your YA Novel

How Reddit and YouTube can help writers, how to get agents on the phone and what to ask, and what sorts of discipline it takes to write novels

Mariam Chagelishvili

Writer Roadmaps: “How To” Guides For Launching A Writing Career (Part 4 of 8) 

You don’t need friends with regrettable Harry Potter tattoos to know that YA is a juggernaut. There’s The Hunger Games. Divergent. Those kids running in a maze. And ever heard of something called The Twilight Saga?

YA books move units and penetrate the culture, so film and TV rights can actually sell—more easily at least than rights for some autofiction thing about remembering stuff and being sad and sending emails or whatever. The bottom line: there are big book deals in YA. And plenty to go around.

So…how do we land one?

In July, I emailed poet and author Jihyun Yun to discuss all that and the path to publication for her forthcoming gothic YA novel And the River Drags Her Down. 

Together today, we’ll be touching on:

• How Reddit and YouTube can help writers

• Why we should be writing Sailor Moon fanfiction

• Which classes and workshops help writers finish AND sell books

• What sorts of discipline it takes to write novels

• How to get agents on the phone and what to ask

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Introducing your guide, Jihyun. Jihyun Yun is a Korean American writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. A winner of the Prairie Schooner Prize, her poetry collection SOME ARE ALWAYS HUNGRY was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2020. A recipient of various grants and fellowships, her work has been broadly published in journals and anthologies such as Best New Poets, Narrative Magazine, Ninth Letter and elsewhere. Her debut young adult novel AND THE RIVER DRAGS HER DOWN will be published in the fall of 2025 by Knopf BFYR (US) and Rock The Boat (UK)