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There's something going on at your local bookstore: Nestled among the 'N Sync quickie bios, frothy teen romances, and Judy Blume stalwarts that populate the young-adult section are starker, edgier tomes with characters who make Sweet Valley High's denizens look like a clump of Pollyannas. Melvin Burgess' Smack (Avon Tempest) centers on a 15-year-old heroin-addicted prostitute. The slacker protagonist of Arthur Nersesian's The F -- -- Up (MTV Books) toils at a porno theater. Francesca Lia Block's Violet & Claire (Joanna Cotler Books) chronicles the fast-paced life of a promiscuous high school student who's also an aspiring screenwriter.
''Teen life has gotten grittier,'' says Nancy Pines of Pocket Pulse, a 19-year veteran of the YA industry. And more lucrative too. Smack, which has shipped 49,000 copies since its release in May '98, is just one of many strong performers that have made publishers look anew at the burgeoning, 30-million-strong youth market. (The most successful teen titles sell from 60,000 to 250,000 copies.)
And they're saying, like, Omigod! ''We see teens as a powerhouse of opinion and culture and spending and fashion,'' says Elise Howard of HarperCollins Children's Books. ''Today's kids are the richest teenagers that ever lived,'' adds Pines. ''They have more personal freedom and make more purchasing decisions than their predecessors.'' So it's no wonder publishers are scurrying to court worldlier adolescent tastes: Several new imprints -- MTV Books' fiction series, Pocket Pulse, and Avon Tempest among them -- have recently been established to provide teen product. The result? Books with arty, adult-looking packaging, darker story lines, and flashy multimedia marketing. THE COVERS Traditional illustrated book jackets are becoming obsolete. ''They're much more inventive -- not just 'moody girl looking out the window,''' says Beverly Horowitz, editor in chief of Random House Children's Books. ''We're using much of the same special effects that adult books use: high-gloss covers, computer collage, film noir style.''
THE PLOTS From Charlie, the LSD-sampling high school freshman in MTV Books' hit The Perks of Being a Wallflower (60,000 copies in print), to Gaia, a 17-year-old martial-arts expert in Pocket Pulse's new series Fearless (acquired for TV by Columbia TriStar), protagonists worry about more than the prom. ''There really is no topic that is taboo, as long as it isn't designed to titillate,'' says Horowitz. ''Kissing Doorknobs is about a girl who has OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder].''
THE MARKETING Publishers are embracing -- not competing with -- other forms of media to grab a teenager's attention by developing tie-ins or literary properties that can be parlayed into television and film projects. Kids ''aren't just reading a book, just watching TV, or just surfing the Internet -- they're everywhere,'' says Pines, whose imprint publishes the tie-ins to The WB's Dawson's Creek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Charmed, and the network's new series Roswell. YA books are advertised in TEEN PEOPLE and Seventeen, chatted up on teen Internet sites like Alloy.com, and now they're even displayed in their own sections in stores, as many aisles away from kiddie books as possible.
