W7A2 - 2 articles

I choose the two most recent articles, one published in the New York Times and one in the Publisher Weekly.

A Not-so-Young Audience for Young Adult books by Meg Wolitzer starts with an observation. While teenagers are not interested by middle-aged problems and books, more and more adults read Young Adult literature. She refers to an article by critic Ruth Graham that states that young adult books are too simple for adults. They are written for teenagers, and adults should concentrate their little time on reading grown-up books. Wolitzer does not want to convict Graham, but she wants to explain why she disagreed with her. Firstly, Y.A. is so vast, it is almost impossible to dismiss, or to settle, the whole genre all together. What draw Wolitzer to Y.A. books, and even to a Y.A. book club for adults, is the quest for a particular feeling. Of course, nostalgia is part of it, but also the feeling of a respectful and authentic youth experience.

As a grown-up, she read Y.A. to reconnect to her teenager self, but always viewed from her present and mature self. Adults remind adults even when they read Y.A. It is not a quest for lost youth, but to be immersed in the good and not so good experiences of young characters. Just like any other books, the goal is to forget everything else in our life and to focus on one thing only: a fascinating story, Y.A. or not.

New Adult: Needless Marketing-Speak or Valued Subgenre? by Rachel Deahl has to do with a new genre publishers started to use: New Adult. Created in 2009 by the employees of St. Martin’s Press, New Adult is mostly a marketing tool. After the success of Y.A. books the last decade, publishers did not want to lose their young readers once they became adult. Young Adult is an intermediate category about adulthood. Nobody reinvented the wheel, those books about the beginning of adulthood always existed; they are just put into a new category for marketing purposes. The millions of teens who bought Hunger Games and Twilight and Harry Potter often discovered reading with those popular series. Editors want to keep offering books they will like, but as the readers grow up the books need to be a little bit more mature.

The only problem is while editors and publishers use this new category, it did not catch on with the retailers. Bookstores are reticent to use it, and are basically waiting to see if the category name will spread around. The tool can be useful among the industry people, but it does not yet mean anything for regular folks. More and more books are crossing the genres and the group ages, maybe New Adult is just the beginning of new hybrid genres.