You will find plenty of YA authors at Comic-Con this year, either sitting on panels like “What's Hot in Young Adult Fiction” or “Fantastic Women” or greeting their many, many fans in the autograph area. The big names present included Shannon Hale, author of Ever After High, and Margaret Stohl, who wrote Beautiful Creatures.

Young Adult's presence at Comic-Con is self-sustaining – a significant number of this year's authors, like Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, who together wrote Sublime under the name Christina Lauren, met at the convention as aspiring writers and went on to author popular books. The festival is also a place for established authors to pay it forward, as no audience Q&A is complete without the question, usually asked by someone with a notebook and a over-eager smile: "How did you get started in writing?"

I hopped around a few of the YA panels, trying to build a picture of this intriguing genre in which authors, like pop stars, are beloved by teenagers in a way that grown-ups just don't understand. I also spoke to Hobbs and Billings, and the authors Tonya Hurley (Ghost Girl), Marjorie Liu (After the Blood), and Kresley Cole (The Arcana Chronicles), all of whom were coming together in various festival events and have shared tours and panels before.

"YA is a community," said Cole, whose next installment is due out in January from Simon & Schuster. "We're constantly going out on these conferences and these tours, and I am amazed by the camaraderie. Everyone gets on like a house on fire."

That warmth spreads to their dealings with fans. Cole is a No1 New York Times bestselling author, and all the authors mentioned have enjoyed sales that in a different industry would see them surrounded by minders, floating above the nerdy proles. I found them warm and approachable. After all, a lot of them started out as fans, flexing their literary muscles on fan-fiction forums before attempting to break into publishing.

"The number of people who are joining fandoms, like Hunger Games, Harry Potter and the like," said Hobbs, who started writing fan-fiction while recovering from a hysterectomy, "that's bringing more people into the writing world, often through the romance genre, and then that leads on to Young Adult."

With so many people trying to break into the YA world, you have to be bold when choosing your stories, as well as passionate about research. Tonya Hurley's series The Blessed, about a young musician in New York who discovers she is the reincarnation of a saint, came from her years as a music publicist for Morrissey and The Cure, as well as a chance encounter with a man on the subway who believed himself to be Jesus.

"Reading up on the martyr tales was incredibly fun," she says, "They're brutal."

Hurley's lead character is a flawed but authentic young girl who has to fight to survive in a harsh city. Christina Lauren's Sublime depicts a ghost called Lucy who is pursued by a human boy. In a genre in which many lead characters and readers are female, there is a fight to write such complicated, flawed characters, and it's important not to feel that your heroine must be a placeholder to a young girl. ("It's OK not to relate to every female character you read about," said Liu.)

Existing story tropes tire easily. Hobbs and Billings said, of Sublime: "We read a lot of books, and we found there were a lot of instances where a girl would do almost anything to be with a boy, and the focus was to grow to a place where she was ready for a relationship for him.

“In the case of Sublime, we wanted her to be locked so it was the boy who had to figure out how to make her happy."

Young Adult is a genre with clear rewards, for every author agrees that there is no fan on earth like a teenager. Hurley put it best: "Being a teenager is the best of times and the worst of times, finding out how you belong, where you fit in.

“Meeting my teen readers is my favourite part of this whole thing. They tell you the truth.”