I don't know shit about YA other than most of it is written by women for women, but got curious... Are there YA books that are made by men for men? Not counting real books and its genres, but the CONCEPT of YA for men.
I can understand how it must be rare since the public is geared into other types of entertainment rather than books.
There are about a half dozen men authors I know of who write books in the mainstream YA market with boy main characters instead of girls. I'll try and list the ones that pop to my head:
You're probably familiar with the most famous one: John Green, author of The Fault In Our Stars & Paper Towns. I list those two because they've been turned into movies so you're more likely to be familiar with them, but he's written a bunch of other books. He tends to write teenage angst where the boy is crushing on a manic pixie dream girl.
The next big one on the list is Cory Doctorow. I read his Little Brother book back when I was a teenager. His characters tend to be teenage boys fighting against either the American government or evil corporations. He's a leftist, but a surprisingly large percentage of his fanbase are libertarians.
Another big name in the business is Adam Cesare. Adam Cesare writes horror novels for different age groups, but his most well-known books are the YA Clown In a Cornfield series. Think Scream, but with an even higher death count. The first book is significantly gorier than the sequel, a third one is on the way, and there is going to be a movie adaptation.
Next up we got James Dashner, the author of the Maze Runner trilogy. Definitely YA, and marketed as such. People who like Hunger Games or/and Divergent also tend to like Maze Runner. It's a dystopia world and all three of the original trilogy have been adapted into movies.
Ryan Douglass writes gay YA stories, including The Taking of Jake Livingstone. A horror novel about a boy trying to stop the ghost of a school shooter.
Samuel Miller is another name here. I never read the book of his that got him famous, but I did read his second book, Redemption Prep. It follows an autistic boy named Evans who has a crush on a Christian girl named Rachel. They attend a Christian private school and Rachel goes missing, so Evan teams up with the jock to rescue her. Inspired by Twin Peaks, but it has a very dumb ending.
Note that I didn't mention the even more popular middle-grade authors like Rick Riordan & James Patterson who write with a lot of boy main characters. Brandon Sanderson has also written a few books targeted towards both genders in YA.
EDIT: I completely forgot R.L.Stine, who followed up his middle-grade Goosebumps books with the YA Fear Street series. He's the biggest name on this list hands down.
