Author James Frey’s New Target is Teens

Appar­ently, author, James Frey, is still sell­ing well after he pub­licly admit­ted that his mem­oir, “A Mil­lion Lit­tle Pieces” was actu­ally in part, fabricated.

Accord­ing to this arti­cle, Frey and his col­lab­o­ra­tor, Jobie Hughes, new YA series was being pimped anony­mously until their cov­ers were blown by the media last week. Frey is look­ing to sell books to young adults now. Also, the film rights for the first book, “I Am Num­ber Four” has already been sold to Dream­works. Talk about fast.

This is sup­pose to be a six book series, too. Plot sounds com­pletely uno­rig­i­nal to me. It’s about some alien kids hid­ing out on Earth after their home planet gets invaded. This book must be super spe­cial. Harper­Collins stated that they paid “less than seven fig­ures for the four books.” Is it me or does that fig­ure sound like too much?

Also read author, Alafair Burke’s take on Mr. Frey’s foray into the lucra­tive YA mar­ket. She is annoyed which is under­stand­able. I mean Frey was allegedly outed as a fraud yet he is for­given and rewarded with a nice advance for his sec­ond book, Bright Shiny Morn­ing, that landed on the NYT bestseller’s list. Ah, such is life.

It doesn’t bother me that Frey wants to write YA fic­tion. I just won’t be buy­ing it. I remem­ber being this­close to buy­ing his mem­oir when it was sit­ting pretty on the best­sellers lists. Read­ing the first page decided me against buy­ing it, how­ever. I thought it was too graphic but what do I know?

YA mar­ket must be a lucra­tive busi­ness. So many best­selling authors are writ­ing fic­tion in this area. All I need is to see Nora Roberts writ­ing under a dif­fer­ent pen name and then I will have seen it all. Who’s writ­ing YA fic­tion these days? Kim Har­ri­son, Robert S. Parker, James Pat­ter­son and Kel­ley Arm­strong nam­ing right off the top. And now you can add James Frey to the list.

I love YA fic­tion. I just read Trisha’s review of Kim Wilkins new YA novel, Unclaimed Heart, that I have put on my cal­en­dar to remind me to check for an ebook ver­sion of the book when the paper­back is released. I sin­cerely hope to see a dig­i­tal ver­sion on release day. I see a Kin­dle ver­sion is already avail­able for pre-order. But I typ­i­cally ignore the Kin­dle for­mat. It’s not even an option. Get­ting back to Wilkins, I’ve enjoyed her fan­tasy work and so I am look­ing for­ward to her his­tor­i­cal romance.