Writing in the new adult category might be a great career move, or it might be risky. Is it right for you?

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Transcript for Writing New Adult Fiction

Hello there. My name is Mary Kole with Good Story Company.

Today, I am talking about the category of new adults. Now, I make a lot of jokes about the new adult category. This is not at all to disparage the publishers that publish new adults, namely St. Martin's Press, which, sort of, originated the trend, or the wonderful writers who write in the new adult category. But it is a little bit of a wild card and I have some reservations about writers who tell me that they are writing in new adult because of marketing elements more than anything else. So, those aspiring writers of new adult are welcome to take this with a grain of salt or take it to heart. I just want to present my thoughts on the category.

So adult is a relatively new category and it grew out of this phenomenon that we saw around the Twilight years of a lot of women in their 20s, or 30s, or 40s and on, reading YA. A lot of readers and customers for YA turned out to be what we usually think of as chick lit or women's fiction readers and that's great. It gave a lot of attention to YA. It gave a lot of money into the industry, a lot more readers in bookstores and out, you know, holding books instead of iPhones, wonderful stuff all around. But out of that, grew this interest in, well, what is between YA and chick lit, right? So we have YA, usually, the characters are 16 to 18 and 18 was always seen as, sort of, a really hard cutoff. And then, chick lit starts up in your 20s and kind of in the dating, marriage, reproductive, career-building years. That's where chick lit is and then, sort of, the second act of the female life cycle when you've been in a marriage for a while, you're dealing with family issues, you're maybe finding yourself again after raising children, or getting a divorce, or whatever, these are very broad strokes but that is the milieu of women's fiction.

So there's kind of a gap though, between 18, the hard cutoff for YA and the beginning of chick lit, which is when you're out in the career force, out in the dating world for a couple of years. You've been kicking around. You're in your, maybe mid-20s. Well, what about 18 to 23, 24. And this is where new adult, sort of, swept in. And I think swept with a little bit of skepticism because I think there was a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of hoopla about the new adult category but my hesitation, this is my main hesitation with it, is that it hasn't necessarily taken off in a way where it's a real robust, moneymaking, just super hugely popular category in and of itself, not like chick lit, not like women's fiction, and not like YA. I think there's merit and value in writing that character, that age group. There are YA stories that would be harmed if we try to shove them down into high school because the stories are bigger than that. They need a little more independence for the character. They need the character to be in college for a variety of reasons. And this is still kind of really, really meaty coming of age territory for storytelling so I do think that there's merit and value in telling the stories of this time period, this really dynamic kind of 18 to 23, 24 period.

That being said, before I would devote years of my writing life to the new adult category, I would really make sure that the sales are there in the category, that the rewards are there, the merits are there, to, sort of, really stake my place in new adults, because any time that somebody tries something new, publishing tries something new, even with a lot of energy and great smart people behind it, we're still creating a new category. It's like trying to create a new sandwich. You have your Philly cheesesteak fans, you have your baloney sandwich fans, and here I come out of nowhere with a Reuben ranch avocado bake and I tried to make it a mainstream sandwich. Now, maybe it can be a great special sandwich at my one cafe and the five people who love it are gonna come to my cafe, and eat this sandwich, and just tell their friends about it. And their friends are gonna be like, "Ewww, that sounds kind of gross." But it's not gonna necessarily be easy to elevate it to the, you know, the hotdog, tuna melt, this kind of like top banners sandwich category, because it takes a lot of great examples, and I'm not saying there aren't great examples. But it takes, like, a lot of volume, it takes a lot of marketing dollars, it takes a lot of bookseller buy-ins for that handselling, where, you know, your chick lit readers are not necessarily gonna know that there's a new category in town. It takes a lot of concerted effort and a lot of time, which, you know, hasn't necessarily passed yet, even though it's been about 10, 15 years since this category started to bubble up. It takes a lot to establish a new category and before a writer devotes himself to a new category, I would really want to make sure that there's a there there.

I advise writers all the time in terms of next career move. What should I do? Which project should I focus on? And when somebody says, "You know, I'm really thinking about trying a new adult because I couldn't quite make this work as a YA, for example, or I couldn't quite make it work as a chick lit." I would say depends on the case, of course, so this is more general advice. But I would say, "If you're absolutely sure that you can't make it work in one of the bigger, more established categories because that's where you're really likely to see more pick up for your manuscript, more pick up for your idea for your career, I'm all about working smarter, not harder, and thinking strategically if at all possible, then you can go for this relatively new category. You can try your hand at new adult." But otherwise, to me, it's not a sure bet. It's not necessarily a safe bet as a result. I'm very risk-averse, especially when it comes to where do I debut? How do I build my career as a writer? I would say make sure that you're choosing the category for your project strategically. For example, right now, we are still very much in the middle of the COVID pandemic and so, I'm hearing a lot of fatigue. This is just an example so if you catch this video later. This harkens back to a certain point in time, but there's a lot of fatigue already with pandemic, virus topics, dystopian. Literary agents and publishers are seeing them in droves and already are sick of them. And so, it's like if you were picking right now between a virus pandemic type of dystopian and something that may be a little bit more hopeful, a little bit more uplifting or anything not to do with the virus, I would probably steer you in the not virus direction because a lot of people are already getting sick of this.

So I would say, new adults, yes, can be great. Is it your next and best move? It depends. It depends on how strategic you're being and it depends on whether this is the only place that the book can go and the idea as concepted can go. Can you change your concept? Can you fit into a different category? Those are questions that I would ask myself if I was considering the new adult category. Nothing wrong with it but I think, kind of, in the bigger broader view, it is still sort of a niche.

So this has been Mary Kole with Good Story Company, and here's to a good story.

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