New Adult: Fixture or Fad?

Genre is marketing. Nothing more. It helps the buyer find stories he or she will be interested in. New adult stories have been around for eons and so are therefore not a fad; F Scott Fitzgerald could even be considered new adult for the 1920s.

Now, calling certain stories "new adult" will stick around as long as calling the stories such results in sales.

Chris P nailed it.

New Adult is still working itself out, and we're all trying to get to grips with it. But it won't go anywhere for a while, so don't worry about it disappearing, and it won't become an unsalable genre. If things do shift dramatically and "new adult" no longer works as a marketing category, then there are genres either side of it like YA and romance or Urban Fantasy which can accommodate NA writers.

If you're writing romance or stories with a very strong romantic thread, embrace New Adult. It's a strong, lucrative romance genre.

If you're writing genre fiction, tread more carefully. NA hasn't quite found its footing yet as a genre market, but keep an eye on developments, because I expect this will change soon.

There's a lot of writers here cautiously examining the NA waters so you're in good company. (Full disclaimer: I'm not a NA writer, I learn towards YA and adult urban fantasy. I'm just an interested party who's enjoying watching a new category find its footing.)

As someone who writes YA/NA/Adult, I'm really hoping it sticks around. I have stories I think would fit much better in such a category than in adult fic, but where aging down the characters is not really an option if I want to keep the current version of the story. NA provides a possible outlet for those stories.

They are literary/spec fic/contemp more than Romance, though, so I am hoping to see some books in those genres published and marketed as NA. I have little interest in reading or writing the sort of genre Romance that is popular in "NA" right now.

Sage said:

Part of the reason NA might be more geared towards romance right now may be that it seems that a lot of NA is coming out as ebooks. The e-market in general does better in romance and erotica. If NA becomes something we start seeing in stores, we'd probably see a wider variety of genres.

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Not to be the killjoy, but aren't things moving away from that overall? I agree with you, NA is a phenomenon that originated in the Romance genre and on the ebook platform. As many people noted (in another thread I'm not going to look for now...) it's not an offshoot of YA. Which is why the more I observe it the more I doubt it will seriously branch out into genre fiction. Paranormal romance, for sure, once someone writes one that will go viral. Maybe other genres, but always with a very strong romantic plotline. I don't see a thing that started out as a romance subgenre evolving into something with no romance in it at all. The romance readers that make up a huge chunk of the readership simply won't go there. At least this is my uneducated theory.

Yes, it's kinda sad because yes, there is so much more going on at that time of life besides romance and sex. But if that's what the majority wants to see... you get the picture.

I really would like to read more NA books where I feel like it's written for New Adults. There are plenty of books out there that feature young adult (as opposed to Young Adult) protagonists but they all seem to be written for actual waist-deep-in-the-business-of-life type adults and so they're marketed for adults. I want simple, well written novels with good plots. Something I can read without it being an event.

Sh0ck Of The F@ll by Nathan Filer was a book that did this quite well recently. It's been marketed as adult but it's about a 19 year old schizophrenic and reads like a YA, covers lots of YA topics, is an easy read but is excellently put together and tugs at the heart strings. I'd like it if books like that were marketed as NA more.

I don't think New Adult is a real consumer category yet. I think it means something to writers, publishers and retailers - we like to be able to put names to things - but maybe not consumers yet?

The last new genre I saw showing up in the consumer world was Dystopian, and that was somewhat less of a thing than Paranormal Romance. I think those properly describe genres rather than demographics, whereas New Adult isn't quite explanatory enough; in most cases we really mean steamy romance that we can feel OK about selling to teenagers because it's not explicit.

I'm not sure there's a way to put that across in a neat label that Waterstones could feel comfortable about sticking on a bookcase. 'New Adult' is neutral enough, but not really meaningful. Until we can come up with a better name, it's not going to break through.

It may have taken off commercially in Romance recently, but I'm not sure it's accurate to say that's where NA originated.


When talk was first going around about it, and even as recently as this summer, the focus was not on it as a Romance genre, but as an age category. At least on the writer/agent side of things.

JustSarah said:

Plus isn't New Adult suppose to be 18-25? How is that selling to teenagers? I'm honestly curious.

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Well, what was the target demographic of Just Seventeen magazine? It wasn't 17-year-olds. The assumption is that teenagers are reading up the age range a bit. We know that a lot of teenage Twilight fans read 50 Shades, for example; the unstated idea behind a lot of NA is, I think, to try to capture that readership in a way that isn't actually marketing adult erotica to kids.

I could be completely wrong about that, but a lot of what I'm seeing labelled NA is the same kind of thing people were briefly calling 'steamy YA romance'.

I wonder how far they read up? (In my New Adult, I tend to work with 24-30 typically speaking.) I'd like New Adult to be the target audience that has more freedom to experiment with genres that don't currently exist.

Maybe I'm just wishing.:/

"New Adult" is a new marketing category. As Chris points out, it's been around for ages.

New Adut: Fixture or Fad?

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I could give you an ell for that. If you like.

ETA: PM me

JustSarah said:

I wonder how far they read up? (In my New Adult, I tend to work with 24-30 typically speaking.) I'd like New Adult to be the target audience that has more freedom to experiment with genres that don't currently exist.

Maybe I'm just wishing.:/

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Had new adult books been a thing when I was a child, I personally would have been reading them starting in 4th or 5th grade (around age 10), because that's when I started reading some of the easier looking adult novels. (And I would have had no problems with most sexual content.) I would have been at the utter bottom end of the age range. I would have stopped reading them when I stopped reading young adult books, which was around age 20. Not at the bottom of the age range there - I know several people who switched to reading exclusively adult novels as young as 16. The upper age range for both categories is probably infinite, I know 50 year olds who read both. In general I don't think age is a good definition for the genre.

YA Highway has a relevant guest post post up today about New Adult that I really enjoyed reading.

YA did something amazing for literature. It made it accessible to all readers. [...] But the thing is, this kind of accessible fiction isn’t just for teen readers. Adult readers found a love for Young Adult as well. And we want more. We want the style of YA to translate over to adult situations. I feel like this is where NA can plant its flag into the ground.

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I love this definition of Young Adult. Though, as always, I have questions about how it overlooks other genres. Urban Fantasy, the previous champion of college-age protagonists and accessible text, seems to be criminally overlooked in discussions of what NA does that other genres don't...

EMaree said:

YA Highway has a relevant guest post post up today about New Adult that I really enjoyed reading.



I love this definition of Young Adult. Though, as always, I have questions about how it overlooks other genres. Urban Fantasy, the previous champion of college-age protagonists and accessible text, seems to be criminally overlooked in discussions of what NA does that other genres don't...

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I'm not sue I'd call UF a "champion" of college-age protags. Most of the stuff I'm familiar with is older than that protag-wise.

Maybe it's just what I've read, then. "Blood and Feathers" definitely has a college-age protagonist, and I think Anita Blake, Kate Daniels series, Mercy Thompson series and Fever series all have college-age (actually in college, or early-twenties) MCs.

One of the confusions I have is, I've often labelled my own YA New Adult because of the content, even though in fact we know edgy YA exists. So where that line is drawn I'm not sure.

Or even what distinguishes edgy YA from edgy NA, if even the edgy NA label would even really need to exist. New Adult is so early, its hard to tell some of the stuff.

Comment deleted by poster.

JustSarah said:

Or even what distinguishes edgy YA from edgy NA, if even the edgy NA label would even really need to exist. New Adult is so early, its hard to tell some of the stuff.

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I'll be very surprised if "edgy NA" ever becomes a thing. The current NA market already very edgy.

I haven't gotten into NA, but based on what I see industry people saying about it...

If it all keeps being basically 50 Shades meets Girls: fad.

If it branches out and starts to be more, you know, a rich, diverse extension of YA for older readers as it was originally intended to be back when people were saying it would never work because 20somethings don't read or nobody wants to read about 20somethings or whatever: fixture.

I've seen agents talk about getting caught in the middle of this. They started acquiring books that fit the second description of NA when things started looking up for it, but publishing's pretty determined to go sexy with it for the moment, so...:/

Emmet Cameron said:

I haven't gotten into NA, but based on what I see industry people saying about it...

If it all keeps being basically 50 Shades meets Girls: fad.

If it branches out and starts to be more, you know, a rich, diverse extension of YA for older readers as it was originally intended to be back when people were saying it would never work because 20somethings don't read or nobody wants to read about 20somethings or whatever: fixture.

I've seen agents talk about getting caught in the middle of this. They started acquiring books that fit the second description of NA when things started looking up for it, but publishing's pretty determined to go sexy with it for the moment, so...:/

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I think the problem is, YA tends to sell around theme, not around demographic. We know that about 55% of readers of YA are adults, for example. They're reading these books not because they are relevant to their age but because of the kind of stories they tell.

In some ways, then, the 'steamy romance for teenagers' categorisation is more apt than talking about 'new adults'. Yer actual new adults will be reading all kinds of things - they won't be a homogenous bunch who just want to read about people like them.

In the end it'll be driven by the market. If there's a smash hit NA book on the scale of Twilight, there will instantly be a swathe of me-too publishing. At this point retailers will start sticking the NA label on bookshelves and grouping it all together, at which point it will become A Thing. Until then, it's all a bit inside-baseball, I think.