Are we finally coming out of the new adult → YA → adult pipeline?

Here are five things we’ve learned from the mistakes of the past five years.

It is summer, which means I am thinking about characters who spend their time in cold places—anything to escape the Hudson Valley humidity!—which means that I am thinking, somewhat regularly, about Matthias from Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows. I know Bardugo’s fandom adores Kaz and Inej, but I inexplicably imprinted on blond, wolf-loving Matthias. What can I say? I love a man who loves wolves.

Six of Crows takes up an interesting space on young adult shelves: It is a continuation of a young adult narrative established in Shadow and Bone and was released by the same children’s publishing imprint. Reading it was the first time, however, when I felt that a supposedly YA book was meant to be an adult book.

Young adult literature is literature about teen experiences and aimed at a teen readership. The characters in Six of Crows are older teenagers, somewhere between 16 and 19, though they feel far more like adults than teenagers. With Six of Crows, Bardugo's writing had changed and was now focusing more on adult experiences and problems. Even the novel's structure—rotating among multiple third-person perspectives, a technique commonly associated with adult high fantasy, rather than the single first-person narrator commonly associated with YA—was new for Bardugo.

There are reasons Six of Crows was published as a young adult novel. For one thing, Bardugo sold it to a children's imprint, and although there's precedent for children's imprints publishing books categorized as adult, they're rarities. For another, there's the misplaced belief¹ that you cannot publish in the same universe in multiple age categories. The duology’s placement on young adult shelves, however, never felt quite right to me, no matter how much I enjoyed the books.

Then my editor, Steph, texted me: A new edition of Six of Crows would be published with sprayed edges and updated maps. According to both the Edelweiss metadata and the huge advertisement banner, the book would now be classified as an adult title. At $19, this paperback edition will cost one cent more than the original young adult hardcover edition.

Around the same time that this edition of Six of Crows hit Edelweiss, author Claire Legrand announced that her Empirium trilogy would be republished and repackaged with additional material, and that the trilogy would be recategorized as adult books.

This isn't the first time a book has shifted age categories. Before Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses became the darling of TikTok and the bane of my romance section—so many books! too little space!—it endured a strange and fascinating cycle of age-category marketing. The series' first book was originally published in 2015 as “new adult,” which was at the time a supposedly new age category that in reality acted only as a subsidiary of the romance genre. When it became clear that the age category was not going to broadly take off, Bloomsbury, Maas's publisher, shoved it (and all other new adult novels) into the young adult category, calling it “upper YA” with “adult crossover appeal.” In 2020, the series was rebranded, given new covers, and its age category reclassified in metadata: adult fiction.

A Court of Thorns and Roses was never YA.

Furyborn was never YA.

Six of Crows was never YA.

Look, I’ve written a lot about my concerns with the young adult age category. My interest in this is as surprising as a tiger having stripes. My choosing to write about this when I have eight other in-progress essays, and when there is so much else going on in the publishing world—the book bans, the lawsuits, the AI-generated slop—reflects how, at the end of the day, I am a caricature of myself. Same outfits, same aesthetic, same opinions, same drums to drum. But I am not interested, here, in hashing out the history of these trends.

I want to know: What have we learned in the past few years about age categories? About marketing? What can we do with that knowledge—and can it get more books into the hands of readers?

1. “Upper YA” books do not sell as well as adult books despite appealing to the same readership—and young adult’s transformation from an age category to a marketing term is backfiring on the books published as “upper YA.”

The boom in sales for A Court of Thorns and Roses after its shift to adult is a prime example of what independent booksellers have known to be true for years: “Upper YA” books do not sell as well as adult books. This is not because the readerships of these two book categories is different. Although proponents of "upper YA" books asserted that they were always intended for both older teens and adults who like YA's stylistic choices, those proponents did not take into account the fact that readers almost always want to read "up" in age category. Preteens want to read young adult novels; younger teens want to read “upper YA.” The older teens toward whom “upper YA” is marketed are already reading adult books, and many of the adult readers who gravitate toward the fast-paced, trope-driven stylistic choices associated with young adult literature have pivoted to reading adult fantasy and romance. The adult readers who remain want to read authentic young adult novels, not the weird in-between that “upper YA” creates.

In treating young adult as a marketing term rather than an age category, publishers inadvertently limited the intended readership of YA books, which resulted in lower sales and fewer readers. This was demonstrated when well-established, commercially successful authors Beth Revis and Sara Raasch promoted their “upper YA” novel Night of the Witch with sexy art cards, they unintentionally caused an uproar. Booksellers, after all, cannot promote art prints depicting sexualized characters as an incentive for teens to buy a young adult novel. And while the book sold well, it did not do the numbers it would have on adult shelves, which is clear when you compare its sales figures to adult books with similar premises published at the same time, such as Abigail Owen's The Games Gods Play. Sloan Harlow's new novel, All We Lost Was Everything, published by Putnam—which was brazenly labeled “sexy” in an advertisement that ran in Shelf Awareness on February 12—did not gain much traction despite its appeal to the “dark romantic thriller”-loving BookTok crowd and sold fewer than 3,000 copies in its opening weeks. (The book has now sold over 10,000 copies since its May publication–very good for a YA book, but only 10% of the sales of Harlow’s viral debut, according to BookScan.) The pattern keeps repeating: Because teens who want adult books want to read adult books, and because only a small percentage of adult readers will pick up a book categorized as YA, books designated “upper YA” suffer in their marketing and their sales. Access to intended readership (and the sales associated with that intended readership) could easily be remedied by placing these books in the correct age category and marketing them to an adult audience. The teens who want to read them will still find them.

2. Sex can be present in both young adult and adult books, but it plays a different role in each.

There is an exchange on social media that I think about often. A reader says, “YA also does not need smut! A grown ass person writing a sex scene for underage people feels sooooo gross to me!” An author responds with a long paragraph that begins, “Takes like this are why book bans are running rampant. This hyper conservative puritan mindset is going to throw us back in the dark ages.”

They are both correct.

Books positioned as “upper YA” are often challenged as not confining to the norms of young adult literature because of their sexual content—but the absence of sex is not what differentiates young adult literature from adult literature. How sex is used and presented in a narrative is what separates the two categories. Teens, after all, have sex. In young adult literature aimed at teen readers, sex is one of the many tools in an author’s toolbox for advancing emotional plots or or modeling behaviors like seeking consent, practicing safe sex, or being a considerate partner; its purpose is not to titillate. In adult romance novels, sex serves to convey emotional information and titillate the reader. This differentiation succeeds because of the ages of the intended readerships and because of the expectations of the age categories—and breaking those expectations can be incredibly jarring for even the most open-minded readers.

There is nothing wrong with teens wanting to read about sex as part of an emotional arc or as a way to get their rocks off, despite what many conservative politicians and their supporters would like us to think. I started reading adult romance novels when I was eight or nine; I have no qualms with teenagers who shop the adult romance section now. But teenagers deserve the right to choose whether to engage with the kind of sexual content found in adult novels. Sexual scenes meant to titillate don’t have a place in young adult literature, even in “upper YA”—but interested and curious teenagers do have a place among readers of adult romance books.

3. If you can make a YA book into an adult book without changing the story, it was never truly a YA book to begin with—and readers know it.

If publishers tried to take John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, or Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give—all massive, money-making YA books—and release “adult” editions of them, it would be viewed as utterly preposterous. The teenage experience is so essential to these books that it would be impossible to age them up without taking away core elements of their stories. The same can be said about blockbuster middle grade novels such as Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series. This aspect of these books is a feature, not a bug. It is part of the reasons they have found success. When you can take a character’s specified age out of a YA book and/or add more sexual scenes, branding it as adult with few other changes, it is obvious that the book was never meant to be a YA book. Readers, especially teen readers, can smell when something isn’t meant for them. Publishers need to start treating age categories and the readers of those age categories with respect.

4. Publishers are leaving money on the table by focusing on adult readers—and teens are growing hungry for YA books that actually speak to teen experiences.

There is still much, much work to do in terms of reclaiming the young adult category as a space for teens about the teen experience, but there are many reasons to do it. Teens are desperate for young adult novels that encompass teen experiences, and the original crossover audience of adults will read—and have always read!-—such authentically young adult books. Because the bulk of young adult novels currently being published don’t fit in that category, publishers are leaving money on the table, and readers are drifting away from young adult literature because of it. (For what it’s worth, “upper middle grade” doesn’t solve this problem for the same reason “upper YA” doesn't reach teen readers: Teenagers who want to be reading older books want to read up, not stay in the same space.) But that problem could easily be solved by publishing more true young adult books.

Berkley and Penguin Young Readers announcing a new “crossover” imprint in what seems to be an attempt to rebrand “new adult” or “upper YA” without actually addressing teen readers in the announcement? Doesn’t solve the problem.

Teens can be avid readers. Adults can read young adult books. But readers need young adult books as they should be—focused on teen experiences, aimed at a teen audience—in order to enjoy that reading experience.

We especially need more trope-driven YA books, more short YA books, more funny YA books, more YA books without romance, more YA books about boys—but that’s a topic for another day.

5. Authors need to stand by the assertion that their books are works of art created with an intended audience.

The publishing industry is notoriously slow to change, no matter how many booksellers explain which simple changes could easily make them more money. (Ask me how I know!) But you know who knows their own books better than publishers ever could? The authors who write them.

In an era where everything is called "content," it can be difficult to remember that written works are art. Authors and artists deserve to make money, but they also can and should honor the vision of their work. If we’ve learned anything from the attempts at “crossover YA,” it’s that compromising the intended age category of an author’s work in a misguided attempt to sell more books backfires on both the integrity of the work and on its sales. Publishing, in its never-ceasing hunger for a quick buck, will need some time to internalize that lesson, but authors can learn from its mistakes right now. Authors, trust your instincts and respect your intended audience.

1. Both Terry Pratchett (Discworld) and my beloved Anne McCaffrey (Dragonriders of Pern) wrote books across age categories in the same universes. Publishers today do not like doing this for reasons I understand yet find cowardly. Be inventive, losers.