Fifteen years ago, when St. Martin’s Press first coined the term new adult, the young adult (YA) boom was at its peak. Eager to cater to the readers aging out of the Twilight and Hunger Games series, publishers embraced the idea of new adult books, while some expressed skepticism.
Flash forward five years, to 2014, and new adult was deemed a full-on phenomenon by Publishers Weekly. That year alone, over 100 new adult book deals—with authors including Jennifer Armentrout, Colleen Hoover, Christina Lauren, and Rebecca Yarros—were reported to Publishers Marketplace.
But almost as quickly as interest rose, it seemed to decline. In 2015, just 45 deals for new adult fiction were brokered, per Publishers Marketplace deal reports; in 2016, this number dropped to 17; in 2020, it was down to just one. Dedicated new adult imprints launched by publishers were shuttered or merged with other lines. The writing community wondered on social media if the genre still existed.
Since last year, however, new adult has appeared to experience a resurgence, at least in traditional publishing. The ongoing success of Colleen Hoover, whose novels straddle categories including new adult and YA, and the more recent frenzy over Rebecca Yarros, published by new adult imprint Red Tower Books at Entangled Publishing, beg the question: Is new adult making a comeback?
What is new adult in the first place? “A new adult book is an adult book with a YA voice,” says Liz Pelletier, CEO and publisher of Entangled. “It serves a transitioning market that is wanting subject matter more adult but still enjoys reading YA.”
Both Eva Scalzo, an agent with Speilburg Literary Agency, and Lauren Spieller, an agent at Folio Literary Management, defined new adult as an age category that spans a range of genres, much like YA. But while YA characters are in their teens, new adult features characters that are slightly older, roughly 18 to 22 for Spieller, and 18 to 23 for Scalzo.
New adult and YA also differ in terms of “the heart of the journey,” Scalzo says. YA characters “are focused on discovery of the self,” whereas new adult characters “are figuring out where they belong in the world and how they want to tread in their path forward.”
Just as YA characters are leaving their childhoods behind, new adult characters are leaving their teen years behind as they enter a new phase of life. They are “doing ‘adult’ things for the first time,” says Christa Désir, editorial director of Bloom Books, an imprint of Sourcebooks with a business model geared toward entrepreneurial authors. This includes “living on their own, having intimate relationships, [and] legally drinking.”
Molly Waxman, executive director of consumer marketing at Sourcebooks, says both YA and new adult stories offer “compulsive readability, the high drama, and the emotional intensity.” For her, new adult characters are “in their early 20s,” which “signals to the reader that the content is more mature than YA scenarios.”
According to author Deborah Halverson, who writes books and articles about YA and new adult audiences, the main difference is that, while YA characters are preparing to launch, new adult characters have already launched. “Young adults anticipate their future. They yearn to get out there and put their dreams into action,” Halverson explains in her advice column for writers. “But they haven’t done it yet. Socially, young adults still have at least one foot in established peer circles, and family is often still part of their daily lives. A new adult, though, is living the reality in all its complicated glory.”
Why did new adult falter? The short answer: It didn’t. Rather, new adult was “re-categorized into romance, general fiction, etc. when bookstores failed to acknowledge and allow for space for this category,” says Désir. Pelletier also spoke about the lack of dedicated shelf space in bookstores, adding that, if retailers had carved out this space for new adult titles, the category would have grown and evolved. “We didn’t get the runway we needed,” Pelletier says.
“The marketplace was different back then,” says Waxman. “Ultimately, we struggled to sell print books at the same volume as the authors were selling their own ebooks, and the trend went dormant from the mainstream for a while.”
Scalzo agrees that, although interest in new adult stories has remained consistent over the years, for a while it was categorized as “‘spicy YA.’ This to some degree created a stigma around the category, which was further compounded by the fact that there wasn’t usually a new adult section in most bookstores.” New adult books became increasingly difficult to find; they weren’t shelved consistently by stores. “The end result of this is that a lot of new adult writers took to self-publishing, where digital bookshelves do make it easy to find these stories,” Scalzo says.
The upside for the industry is that these authors “never quit,” Waxman says. “Many of those first-wave new adult authors, such as Jennifer Armentrout, Christina Lauren, and Colleen Hoover, are some of the biggest names” in publishing today.
The pandemic may have led to renewed interest in new adult, according to Désir and Waxman. “We didn’t have much to do, but there is always content to read, and people found it. Not only did they find it, but they became obsessed with it,” says Désir. According to Waxman, a cultural shift that likely began in 2019 “built to a measurable level in 2020. It seemed like the TikTok and Amazon algorithms converged onto Gen Z just as they were coming of age and then were told they had to stay locked in their rooms when they would have otherwise been out with their friends and meeting new people.”
Pelletier says new adult books are gaining traction due to population changes, not the pandemic. When new adult originally took off, “It was Millennials buying the books, but there weren’t enough to drive the market,” she says. Pelletier and her team knew that this demographic was underserved, so as Generation Z came of age, they wanted to meet the needs of this growing community that craved “a safe space to explore change. That’s what new adult does,” she says.
“The difference now,” says Désir, is also “a deeper understanding from retail partners about the reader demand” and “quite frankly, the voracious fandom for these titles.” Stores are stocking them well and fans are buying them, says Waxman.
Self-published authors deserve the credit for this booming market. According to Spieller, it’s their books “that are being discovered and shared like wildfire on platforms like TikTok and Kindle Unlimited. This phenomenon has shown traditional publishers that there is absolutely a market for books that sit in that space.”
How are romance, fantasy, and/or “romantasy” relevant to new adult? For Waxman, romance is implied by the term new adult, which “fits squarely with the general romance category.” Désir says, “First ‘real’ love often happens during that time of our lives. Same with first heartbreak.” Spieller agrees. “There’s an implication (expectation?) that a new adult book will be steamy,” and this label is a “useful way of signaling that a book has open-door sex scenes,” she said.
According to Pelletier, however, new adult novels are not necessarily romantic, and neither the romance nor the fantasy elements of Yarros’s Fourth Wing account for the book’s success. “At the end of the day, it’s about a young woman who feels overwhelmed and underqualified” (for the series of challenges she undergoes), and this “is something we have all experienced.”
The characters featured in romantasy novels are often the same age as those in new adult novels, and some new adult authors, including Yarros, are referred to by the media as romantasy authors. On the flip side, although the reigning queen of romantasy, Sarah J. Maas, uses new adult themes in A Court of Thorns and Roses, this series is considered adult.
How should writers position a novel that features an 18-year-old character? For Pelletier, there is no hard and fast rule, and the decision depends entirely on the subject matter, the level of graphic detail, and the story the author is trying to tell. “It’s less to do with the age range of characters than the life choices they’re facing,” Pelletier says. However, aging characters up or down could be in the writer’s best interest. “If the story feels young, call it YA,” she suggests. “If the themes are very adult, you could age the characters up to 20 to hit that new adult sweet spot.”
Waxman agrees. “If the content is more mature, it’s certainly easier if the character is 22,” she says. “Higher heat levels work better if the character has a little more distance from their teen years.” This also facilitates the ability of “the stores themselves to decide where to shelve the books.”
Scalzo says, “An 18-year-old character is very much a YA character, at least in the contemporary space. It’s the 20- to 23-year-olds we really struggle to place.”
Bottom line: Early concerns that new adult was merely “sexed-up YA”, watered-down adult, or a marketing gimmick are long over, and new adult writers are holding sway over both the self-publishing and traditional publishing markets. “We’re at an exciting place in publishing. There’s enough demand for these new adult novels, and we’re getting enough shelf space,” says Pelletier. “If you’re considering publishing or writing new adult, you absolutely should. There’s a huge need, a huge readership.”
However, Pelletier also warns that there will be a “natural waxing and waning” in the new adult category as Generation Z ages up before the Alpha generation is ready for these books. The rise of romantasy titles across age categories, coupled with the prevalence of terms such as crossover, could also complicate how or if traditional publishing uses the new adult moniker down the road.
In the end? “Just be confident in the story you are telling,” Scalzo says. “So much of this business is subjective, and you’ll hear all sorts of opinions about what your book should be. You want whoever you sign with as your agent and publisher to have a vision for the story that you believe in.”
A former acquiring editor of children’s books at Little, Brown and Simon & Schuster, Sangeeta Mehta runs her own editorial services company.
A former acquiring editor of children’s books at Little, Brown and Simon & Schuster, Sangeeta Mehta (@sangeeta_editor) runs her own editorial services company. Find out more at her website.
