Quote:
Originally Posted by LadyKate
I was just looking at a notification of new books out and started to wonder about the young adult and new adult categories. It seems to me that any novel that does not include sexual romantic scenes becomes young adult lol. The level of reading of many of the so called young adult novels are is not greatly different than that of other novels.
What exactly is it that makes a book young adult or new adult? Is it just a way to say less sexual? or what.
How does a book that is young adult and steampunk which SHOULD be a sub category of SciFi get tagged for purposes of statistics. For that matter where does a book like one of Busby's novels get placed? It's SciFi, Space Opera and romance lol.
|
The whole New Adult thing started about the time I worked at the library some 12 or so years ago. It was an attempt to separate Young Adult (12 to 15 or 10 to 16) from 18 to 20 or so. According to experts, 18 to 20s weren't reading because they didn't consider themselves Children and YA was associated as such. So it was a marketing attempt to reach the 18 to 20 or 18 to 24 (college age) crowd.
Now, what the industry did with that is decide that it meant you could have sex scenes that were not found in YA or not appropriate for YA and the definition now, even by some authors is, "I can put as much sex in it as I like."
During my years at the library, YA was moved out of the children's section to attract the older kids. It has its own section to this day. New Adult was supposed to be the answer to helping a certain age group find fiction that appealed to them--originally with college type themes and other concerns of that age group--appropriate jobs, emotional issues of that age group, challenges of that age group.
What it SEEMS to mean now (and I was just informed of such by an author on another forum) is that it must have ROMANCE and SEX.
YMMV. I originally used New Adult for the Dragons of Wendal series because I was using the library training I had received. BUT by the industry use, it ain't gonna have enough sex and romance. I do still occasionally market it as YA.