Saturday, December 22, 2012

Retiring Guy's Introduction to "New Adult" Fiction

It was a dark and steamy night  

Cora Carmack Books blog
Beyond Wizards and Vampires, to Sex. (The New York Times, 12/21/2012)

"New Adult" genre
  • Differs from young-adult fiction with
    • Slightly older characters
    • Significantly more sex (explicit)
  • Winkingly describe[d] as Harry Potter meets "50 Shades of Grey"
  • Aimed at 18 to 25 year olds
  • Goal:  to retain young readers who have worked their way through series books

The bottom line:  It's dollar-driven. 

Providing more mature material, publishers reason, is a good way to maintain devotion to books among the teenagers who are scooping up young-adult fiction and making it the most popular category in literature, with a crossover readership that is also attracting millions of adults. All while creating a new source of revenue.

Other information gleaned from the article
  • Bowker study.  Half the buyers of young-adult books were 18 or older and majority purchased books for themselves.
  • Hybrid nature of genre leads to bookstore display dilemma (not to mention, which the article doesn't, where to play these titles on the library shelves)
  • Young authors began forcing the issue by publishing their novels online and gaining an audience (emphasis added; a loaded phrase when the issue is explicit sex)








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