Navigating Genres: New Adult vs. Young Adult Breakdown
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The latest genre showdown: New Adult vs. Young Adult
Approximately an era after everyone else, I have finally read Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing. Along with other titles, this fantasy series has captured the imagination of a wide audience while also more firmly establishing the category of new adult (NA), at least in its latest iteration. Young adult (YA) has always enjoyed a broad readership from kids to adults of all ages, though in some ways, the market currently seems to be focused on books for the older demographic. The content and themes of YA can tend towards the more mature, which is also reflected in the older ages of the protagonists. This means that there can be quite a bit of overlap between YA and NA books, and naturally, this can lead to some confusion, especially for authors who are trying to determine where their work fits into the marketplace and who their audience really is. Throwing in the buzzy “crossover appeal” descriptor only adds to the muddle! Here, we’ll be discussing three main elements to consider when you’re deciding what genre your manuscript fits into.
But before we dive into the specifics of young adult and new adult as genres, I have an important question to ask you:
Who are you writing for?
In the age of the internet, we easily fall into the idea that our audience is everyone. Social media, blogging sites, and more make much of what we “publish” public, and it’s easy to transfer that feeling, even unconsciously, to the book we’re working on. However, when it comes to books, your audience is much, much narrower. Don’t worry—this is a good thing! Just as you can’t please everyone in life, you can’t please every reader, nor should you try.
For success with publishing, you need to spend some serious time thinking about your primary audience.Your primary audience is the group you believe will receive the greatest enjoyment from your book. There will be others outside this group, of course, who will like it, but your primary audience should be who you are writing to first. You should consider their age, their life experiences, what they’re familiar with and what they don’t know. You should think about what kind of language resonates with them, what they find funny, scary, or sad. You also need to think about why they would pick up your story. What will they be looking for? What will they expect? If you answer these questions well, you’ll be most of the way to knowing where your book fits in the market.
I believe that all writers write for themselves first, but once you make the decision to publish your work for others, you are no longer your primary audience. But you are also not writing to the world. You’re writing for that special group of readers who are eagerly looking for the story in your hands, who will understand it, enjoy it, and resonate with it. Your story will be precisely their cup of tea. Write for them, not for everyone you think may pick up your work.
Now, with that said, we’ll get to the more technical aspects. But as we go, keep thinking about your primary audience.
New Adult vs. Young Adult: Ages
Most frequently, I see character age used as the chief determining factor for the age category of a book, especially when it comes to young adult vs. adult. This isn’t a useful rule of thumb, however, because there are too many exceptions. From more recent pop culture, I’ll give you two examples. Delia Owen’s Where the Crawdads Sing features a young girl as the protagonist. While she does grow up over the course of the novel, she is a child or teen for a significant portion of the story. As another example, Paul Atreides from Frank Herbert’s Dune is fifteen years old. Both of these novels are decidedly adult despite the age of the characters. So how can age be a helpful determining factor for your category?
Think again about your primary audience. How old are they? As a publishing category, YA is usually targeted at readers twelve to eighteen. Keeping in mind that a lot of kids like to read up, especially reading about characters who are a little older than they are, you’ll see YA protagonists between thirteen and nineteen years old. If your primary audience is in that twelve- to eighteen-year-range, then you’re most likely writing YA. Correspondingly, your character’s age should fall within those years. Some writers can get away with a nineteen-year-old protagonist in YA, but just know that’s usually pushing it for this age category.
If, on the other hand, you’ve been imagining your primary audience is eighteen and older, you might still be in YA territory (with a smaller portion of that readership), but you’ll need to consider other factors to determine if you’re really writing for a NA audience instead.
New Adult vs. Young Adult: Exploration of theme
A more useful element to determine your category is theme. Neither YA nor NA have themes that are set in stone, but there are some common threads that arise from the interests and experiences of the readers who gravitate to these books. In both young adult and new adult, you’ll find themes like identity, self-discovery, and the transition to adulthood. The difference lies in how these themes are explored.
In YA, you’ll find a lot of “firsts”—first love, first time on your own, first time traveling, first breakup, first big responsibility, and so on. YA characters are often finding where their place is in the world, a reflection of what the primary audience is experiencing at their current age. I attended a fantastic webinar earlier this year Maggie Steifvater offered that covered elements of writing craft using examples taken from her Raven Cycle series. When discussing worldbuilding, she made an excellent point: for teen readers, even the real world needs worldbuilding. They have very few experiences so far, and on top of that, they are still learning there’s a broader world outside of themselves and that the people around them don’t see the world just as they do.
Shaun Stephen, a masters candidate at the University of Queensland, uses an elegant analogy to describe the difference between these categories: “YA is the depiction of identity as a newly emerged butterfly, emerging from a chrysalis. NA, on the other-hand, follows that same butterfly as it explores life: taking the very first few flights, mating and finding a new home.”[1]
In NA, we find older characters who have moved past some of these firsts. They are often characters who know themselves better; they’ve been around the block a few times, though they can still discover things about themselves. Independence is key—NA characters can be independent of families, teachers, and the communities and friend groups they grew up in. They have much more choice about what they do, where they go, and who they spend time with. NA frequently features college (or a college equivalent) and the beginning of a career. These characters may be finding their place in the world like YA protagonists, but they’re already a part of it in some way.
New Adult vs. Young Adult: Maturity
While NA has the reputation of being YA but with more explicit sexual content, that’s not the only kind of maturity that matters when it comes to figuring out your category. As we just discussed, YA and NA share many of the same themes, and they also address many of the same issues, like social justice, sexuality, and mental health. The maturity with how the content of the book is handled creates a distinct difference between these categories. For example, a fourteen-year-old dealing with their first serious crush and a twenty-year-old on a date will think about love and romance in very different ways. It’s simply a matter of maturity. Their life experiences, their self-knowledge, and their priorities differ in important ways.
NA allows for a more mature or complex approach to the same issues tackled by YA because the protagonists are older, but also because the primary audience is older. NA readers are looking for deeper treatments of the same issues and content they find in YA. This isn’t to say that YA is light, uncomplicated, or artless—not in the least. YA has younger readers (the primary audience, not the adults who also read YA), and so the content and style of a YA story should reflect that reality.
So what do you think? Where does your story fit?
You’ve probably realized that though we’ve been talking about three different aspects of your story to consider, we’ve largely been coming back to one deciding element: your primary audience. That’s because when you’re deciding if your book is young adult or new adult, you really should be considering your readers. What are they thinking about? What are they interested in? How much will you need to explain? When you know who you want to pick up your book, you’ll be better equipped to make revisions and to market your work.
[1] Shaun Stephen, “What Is New Adult?” University of Queensland, accessed April 25, 2024, https://alumni.uq.edu.au/what-new-adult#:~:text=Themes%20such%20as%20the%20coming,in%20YA%20(Kieffer%201).
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