YA is a sub-genre of fiction written specifically for (and starring) high school aged teens. If they are out of high school, the book is not a YA. (Note: There is some leeway with freshmen in college and 18-year-old protagonists, but those are on a case-by-case basis, and truthfully, if you want the book to be marketed as YA, you better have a darn good reason for making them that old.)
I wish YA was called something else (Teen Lit, perhaps?). For one, the name implies that the intended audience are adults. They’re not. Teens are what happen before adulthood and after childhood. I mentioned before that the term “teenager” didn’t come into the mainstream lexicon until the 1950s, and it took almost 40 years for YA – as a genre name – to have its own section in a bookstore. That’s a long time to wait for recognition, and as we all know too well, YA – even in its Renaissance Period of today – barely gets the respect it deserves.
Bringing me to “New Adult,” a sub-genre of fiction trying semi-hard to exist in the post-YA, pre-adult marketplace for those between the ages of 18 and 25. I am all for this. The college experience, figuring out grad school, jobs, not living off your parents, etc. are hard to deal with and they are certainly not “adult” concerns. They deserve their own literature. So why hasn’t it caught on yet?
To me, there are two reasons why New Adult isn’t a marketable genre, and why it probably won’t be for at least another ten years.
Theory #1: Before “teenager” came into the lexicon, there wasn’t a need to think of them as something different. Pop culture hadn’t given them a voice yet. They didn’t have rock ‘n roll or heartthrobs or beach movies being marketed directly to them. The concept of marketing to teens separately from adults and children was something that lasted well through the ’80s. But then, the ’90s happened and the “twentysomething” was born. (OK, well technically they were born in the ’70s, but you know what I mean.)
Teens were still being directly marketed to, but now another group of people had their own language and pop culture – Gen X. They read books by Bret Easton Ellis (found in the adult section) and watched movies like Slackers and Dazed and Confused. “Grown-ups” didn’t understand them, and teenagers only looked admiringly at them from afar (like I did).
This idea of an extended adolescence wasn’t something that previous generations had the privilege of experiencing. Gen X was the first generation to come out of the Baby Boomers. Many of them were the first of their families to go to college, have a choice other than marriage or military, and live without mortgages and jobs and car payments just a little bit longer.
When you think of how long it took for YA to become a genre after teenagers were finally given a name, New Adult even being discussed as a possibility feels like progress. Even a “Big 6” publisher has started looking for titles under that heading. Knowing this, I don’t think New Adult will take quite as long as YA to get recognized by the masses. The fact remains, however, that it’s not a sub-genre that exists yet.
When I get queries for New Adult, I’m torn. I can either request it, knowing I’m only going to tell the writer to make it older or younger. Or, I end up rejecting it if I know the story can’t be older or younger. As much as I think New Adult should be a genre, I know there’s nothing I can do about it all by myself. Writers can’t write for a marketplace that doesn’t exist, and agents can’t sell to a publisher if the publishers can’t sell it to a bookstore. So, for now, that 20-year-old protagonist who’s still in college who you think teens should read about is going to get placed in the general adult fiction section of most major bookstores.
For one, maybe there’s just not enough distance between my current age and the New Adult age, so I’ve had less time to feel nostalgic for it. (And egad! Why on earth would anyone want to re-live being 22??) But I don’t read YA because I’m nostalgic for high school. I read YA because of the emotions it evokes, and knowing that the human experience at that age is pretty universal.
It’s true that not everyone goes to the same type of high school, or even goes to high school, but everyone goes through puberty. Everyone feels what it’s like to not understand any of your emotions or why they are suddenly happening all at once or why hugging your parents is much more embarrassing than it was the year before.
With New Adult, there is no universal experience. Within the genre, there are too many niche markets to consider, which makes it that much harder to place. Not everyone goes to college or makes the same choices when entering adulthood. Even within the group who goes to college, the experiences differ in ways that are much more polarizing than going to different high schools. No matter what kind of high school you went to, we were all forced to take the same general courses or participate in the same extracurricular activities.
The Gen X definition of twentysomething created the template for the next generation, but it’s still considered a privilege to go to college, to live off your parents, to have an extension on avoiding adulthood. If you ask the person who opted to get married and have kids right after high school, or even right after college, their experience of being a New Adult will look a lot closer to what those who chose to wait consider Real Adult.
So, then, is New Adult really “College Lit?” That creates an even smaller market. There’s a reason “The College Years” of high school TV shows fail. There’s just not enough people who care. The original teen audience can’t relate, the adults out of college think of it as too young, and the actual target audience is too busy being in college, working, or starting families to watch TV or read for fun.
Sarah LaPolla 
Ah, labels. *sigh*
I love that my publisher, Rhemalda, has “New Adult/Young Adult” on their website. Let's get this New Adult revolution started because 18-22 year old characters have great stories to tell too.
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This topic is still news to me…had not even considered reading/writing in an “NA” genre. I may fit that age bracket, but I'd prefer to read “real adult” books than a hybrid YA. Maybe, it will catch on, but not yet.
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I'll tell you what a 22 year old should be reading – books. How about the entire literary output of the world at their fingertips. Why oh why oh why oh why would any 22 year old want to read a book that is designed for them to read? Do they want to read about 'young adults' Bleugh! Do they want to read simplified books? Yuk. What is it that they could possibly need that a genre needs to be created for them? Let them find what they enjoy from the real literature of the world, don't try and make them read something designed for them. They are adults. Let them be adults and learn about the world from literature. (I'm not even convinced that YA has a reason to exist, my 14 year old son is reading Zadie Smith at the moment. What did we read as teens? The best we could find.)
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I think this would be a perfect genre for self publishing. It's easier and easier to get into self publishing or seek out small and indie presses for things that go outside the norm. There are such varied experiences in these not quite adult but not quite teenager years. I think if more people wrote stories about people in this age group and decide to go an alternate route for publication. This is the time for indie creatives, we might as well take advantage of it.
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Your blog post today got me thinking that perhaps now is the best time ever for the genre of New Adult to come into existence…but it might have to happen first within the self-publishing arena because books published via the traditional route usually take two years to publish. The New Adult generation is experiencing a vastly different world than new adults experienced a few years ago, and the world will most likely be vastly different within the next two years. I recently read that 85% of college graduates are now unable to find a job after college, and many are moving back in with their parents. As a result of their frustration being unable to land jobs while being in debt for large college loans, college graduates (and college students envisioning a similar fate) are taking part in the Occupy Wall Street and other Occupy movements around the world. Although these young people are somewhere in between adolescence and adulthood, they have become leaders of a worldwide movement with labor unions and retired people camping out and protesting alongside them. With their incredible ability to use tech communication, some of these new adults are setting up livestream videos to share protests with the rest of the world. These new adults are not teenagers, and yet many come across as naïve about the world at large. At the same time, other students graduating from college are signing up for military service and, as very young people, suddenly find themselves in serious wartime situations. It really is time for these New Adults to have literature written specifically for them.
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Meg Cabot did fairly well with something close to this wannabe-genre…
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I feel like this post put into words a sort of discontent I've had with a lot of the YA I've read recently. I love YA (fantasy/sci-fi YA particularly), but a lot of the time it's really frustrating to read with a teen narrator. They make bad judgement calls that are realistic to teenagers, but throw me right out of the story because if I (as I am now, at 22) were in that same situation, I've built up enough experience that I wouldn't make that mistake. And a lot of the time, protagonists and narrators over 30 feel unsympathetic to me.
It's not something I've ever been able to pin down before. Thanks for the post, and helping me to realize just why I feel so unsatisfied with a lot of what I read these days.
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Sara, you brought up a awesome point, I never thought about YA that way, yeah its really bizarre its called that, but I think a subgenre of YA could be the “New Adult” I like the name BTW.
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These are all excellent points, but I would like to bring up another. As a New Adult (aged 22) and experiencing college, the majority of my limited income goes to paying for rent and food. Whatever money does not go towards rent and food gets set aside and saved for more food and later rent.
I understand this is potentially a problem only I face, and I do save up to buy books, most notably used books from used book sales that happen around the community. It's where the majority of my library comes from. Money for shiny new books is few and far between (at least twice a year with birthdays and Christmas).
So this is another point to consider – what college student can afford new books at their age?
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This is something that I have been talking about for the past two years. Some of my friends look at me funny and ask what YA is when I tell them that's what I write. My first book was also rejected because it was a college-aged protag. I really wish i could find more books with the college-aged protag, but I guess I'll stick to my Harry Potter and aliens for now.
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This is where digital first publishers are worth their weight in gold–getting “niche” books out to the readers who want them.
The stories that aren't the right length or don't fit the parameters of genre fiction the “Big Six” feel is profitable can still find a home and entertain the readers who want those type stories.
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As someone who writes almost exclusively about twenty-somethings, this might seem weird to say, but I'm not really sure the genre needs to exist. I'm quite happy to lump my books in with the adult fiction. After all, even if I am writing about a college-aged person, and even if that person is indeed attending college at the time, the story is almost never about their actual college education. It's usually about their first very serious relationships, or their changing grown up relationship with their parents, or deciding what they want to do with their life, or how they might juggle their education with work and perhaps even a family.
At the same time, I didn't have a “sheltered” kind of college experience – I was married, working full time, and putting myself through school. So perhaps I wouldn't be able to relate to a “real” new adult anyway. 😉
Like others said, the experience of young twenty-somethings does vary greatly. If “new adult” would include all those varying experiences that young adults can have, then I really don't see why most of it wouldn't just be “adult” fiction. And if “new adult” only meant those privileged and sheltered college students, then I do think the market for that would be very small.
This is a fascinating discussion though, and one that I've been interested in since I first heard of it.
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I'm twenty-two, and I definitely feel the lack. I latch onto books like Rosemary Clemente-Moore's Hell Week, because although I'm in grad school now, I remember my time in early college, going through sorority recruitment (she had it scarily right) and I wish there were more books targeted there.
That said, many new adults in college don't have the time for much outside reading, so that could be an issue too. *eyes old Herodotus texts warily*
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@Kaitlin – AGREE. “New Adult” is sort of terrible. I wish it was Young Adult so YA can become “Teen.” These are changing times, so maybe someday 🙂
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@Josin – Damn, that's the most inspirational thing I've read all week. I think you're right. New adult ebooks (traditional or self-published) may have a great shot at finding an audience.
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Thanks so much for posting this. One of the novels I wrote stars a 20 year old and a 24 year old, and I had no idea how to market it. I was told either to make them older, or make them younger and put them into YA category or adult. As a 23 year old, I wanted to keep them the same age because it was a story for ME.
So, unfortunately I've had to set that book aside and work on my middle grade works. Maybe one day people will be ready for it…and I hope I'm still a 'new adult' when that day comes.
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This is a great post. I hadn't thought about it this way before, but it's really true that no matter what you go through as a teenager, you have more in common with your peers than when you're just slightly older. There's a lot of divergence in your early 20s in maturity, life paths, etc. Also this is irrelevant, but I really am not a fan of the term New Adult and I hope if the genre takes off, it gets called something else.
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The novel I'm writing now is prrrrrobably new adult. But it's fantasy, so, it kind of falls under everything. In fantasy, the age of the characters is of lesser importance than the fantasy itself. At least it can be.
I was homeschooled through high-school, so I identify with the college experience more than the YA one.
Would it be safe to say most readers have attended college? College TV shows fail, but those need huge audiences to succeed. Let's face it, being well read is a privilege in America.
Anyone 18-25 looking for a great new adult fantasy: The Magicians by Lev Grossman.
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@Josin – This is an excellent point, and I think you may be right. But there is “traditional” e-publishing, so a market will still need to exist. I'm interested to see what happens, and how many self-published New Adults we'll see.
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I think “New Adult” will be the first big genre boom that's solidly e-book over print. The people in that age group are the college and grad school kids. This year's university freshmen have never lived without the Internet, so they're used to technology in a way no other incoming class is. Many schools are going to ebooks for classes, so seeking out additional reading material online only makes sense.
With the gap in print publishing for that age,it's created the perfect niche market for ebooks.
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