When you walk into a bookstore, you see shelves for fiction and for young adults. But these days, there’s a new genre developing that fits on both shelves: new adult.
As it turns out, sexier young adult fiction is experiencing a spike in sales right now. Thanks to popular young adult books that adults are now reading, like The Hunger Games and Twilight, and sexy books that teens want to read, like Fifty Shades of Grey, young adult fiction is starting to grow up a bit. According to The New York Times, publishers have labeled the steamier, sexy young adult novels as “new adult.”
It’s the fiction geared to an 18-to-25 age bracket, for those who like the emotional intensity of young adult fiction, but also want the sex of adult novels. Some authors have re-released their YA books, with new sexually explicit scenes included. Others are just starting to include sex in their stories from the beginning — unlike Twilight for instance, which moves past the big Bella-Edward sex scene and doesn’t include any details about it.
Publishers are eating it up. Labeling the books “new fiction” has made it easier to market, and they’re continuing to see sales rise, as Leslie Kaufman explains.
The goal is to retain young readers who have loyally worked their way through series like Harry Potter, “The Hunger Games” and “Twilight,” all of which tread lightly, or not at all, when it comes to sexual encounters…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.
Others say it’s just the publishers trying to find a way to make money.
What say you?
Lara's Book Club 