Nicola Morgan’s book on the teenage brain, Blame My Brain – The Amazing Teenage Brain Revealed, has been popular and praised ever since first publication in 2005. It’s been translated into several languages and reprinted many times. Now there’s a revised edition, updated with new research and with a new cover. Nicola is an award-winning teenage novelist as well as a non-fiction writer for all ages and here she is to talk about that elusive category that is YA non-fiction.
The challenge of writing non-fiction for teenagers isn’t writing it but selling it. After all, when did you see a section in a bookshop called “YA non-fiction”? So, when the first edition of Blame My Brain was published in 2005, one of two things happened.
Either, booksellers put it amongst the children’s non-fiction. The trouble with this is that children’s non-fiction books are usually HUUUGE – sometimes thick, but almost always TALL and WIDE and BRIGHT and often SPARKLY. So my sensible paperback was invisible – despite the unsubtle first cover.
Or, booksellers put it somewhere else. Parenting, for example. Or Psychology. Or Science. Or Self-help. Or – trust me, this happened – Sport.
I learnt to play “Where’s My Book?” each time I went into a shop. And booksellers’ eyes would light up and they’d say, “Ooh, Blame My Brain, yes - we’ve definitely got it somewhere…
