What are publishers looking for in YA?

Kate Stevens is an associate publisher of children's books at Hachette Australia. She publishes a small list of children's and YA titles with a focus on debut authors and artists, that includes Danielle Binks, Jennifer Cossins, Lystra Rose, Karen Comer, Mulga the Artist and Sha'an d'Anthes. 

Zoe Walton is a publisher of books for young readers at Penguin Random House Australia. Zoe edits New York Times bestseller John Flanagan, whose Ranger’s Apprentice and Brotherband series have sold 15 million copies worldwide. She has recently published popular and award-winning Australian YA authors including Tristan Bancks, Ann Liang, Mike Lucas, Tobias Madden, Lynette Noni, Tom Taylor and Jon Sommariva, and Stuart Wilson. 

During her thirty-year career Anna McFarlane has published many bestselling authors and illustrators and worked for several publishing houses. At Allen & Unwin Anna has published picture books for early readers like the CBCA award-winning My Friend Fred by Frances Watts and Anne Yi, middle grade fiction such as A Girl Called Corpse by Reece Carter and Dragon Skin by Karen Foxlee, and a number of bestselling and award-winning young adult fiction. Recent YA successes include the CBCA shortlisted graphic novel The Greatest Thing by Sarah Winifred Searle, NYT bestselling series the Aurora Cycle and the Illuminae Files by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, and The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling by Wai Chim, My Spare Heart by Jared Thomas and Two Can Play that Game by Leanne Yong.

Danielle Binks is a Melbourne-based writer and literary agent with Jacinta di Mase Management. In 2017, she edited and contributed to Begin, End, Begin, an anthology of new Australian young adult writing inspired by the #LoveOzYA movement, which won the ABIA Book of the Year for Older Children (Ages 13+). The Year the Maps Changed, Danielle’s bestselling middle-grade novel, was a 2021 Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Notable Book. And her 2021 YA novel The Monster of Her Age won in the Young Adult category of the 2022 Indie Book Awards. Her new middle grade novel out in 2023 is Six Summers of Tash & Leopold. Danielle is also teaching Fiction & Young Adult Writing in the Associate Degree of Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT University.