“Our culture is changing, and it’s exciting and fascinating to watch.

In literature, what used to be taboo is now trending. According to Broadly, gay characters are gaining popularity in teen fiction. According to Broadly, it started in 2003 with David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy novel, though in the beginning it was still considered controversial. Now, according to author Simon Curtis:

“[Teenagers] expect [that] the book better be fucking [diverse]. It shouldn’t be just straight white kids like how it has been for the past hundreds of years. They are hungry for other stuff.”

Another new development is how self-published books are getting more mainstream (not too surprising, since there were 727,000 ISBNs were registered for self-published works, according to Publishing Perspectives). Bustle wrote a list of 10 indie YA novels people should read, which includes Ice Massacre by Tiana Warner, a book about a woman warrior fighting mermaids (whose childhood friend is a mermaid), Awoken by Sarah Noffke, a book about time traveling in your sleep, and The Magic Shop by Justin Swapp, a book about a shop that’s a front for a magical community.

There’s also the ‘girl’ trend. FiveThirtyEight explored how the word ‘girl’ keeps appearing in bestseller titles, and about 1 percent of fiction titles will have the word ‘girl’ in the title this year. It’s unclear why, though part of it may be due to the success of a few books with the word ‘girl’ in the title, such as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, and The Girl on the Train.”

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