Right now I’m wrestling with book categories; where do my books fit in the melee of marketing? Who are they for? The thing is, a book’s category is not the same as genre.
The current breakdown of book categories guides the publishing houses and book retailers in marketing books. Less collaborative, more like grudging collusion, book categories determine how and to whom books are marketed.
Childrens’, Middle Grade, Young Adult, New Adult, Adult (but not ‘adult’); it’s a minefield. And the publishing industry wants you to think it knows the layout. Until readers and retailers decide otherwise. Confused? You, me and half the planet.
How would you categorise Harry Potter? It launched as children’s fiction. Except adults keep reading it. Kidnapped and The Three Musketeers are adult fiction. But they are perennial childrens’s favourites. Treasure Island? Not a children’s book.
Oh, MG; YA, NA and A
We now have terms such as Middle Grade and Young Adult (YA) describing books.
A simplistic view is Middle Grade is for older children; YA is for teenagers. In search of more specific targeting, the publishing industry also invented New Adult. As far as I can tell it’s for young adults who still act like teenagers, but want adult fiction that isn’t middle-aged like Adult fiction.
What qualifies where?
All those dystopian adventures – The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze Runner – those are Young Adult. Except when they’re not. And what is a ‘young adult’ anyway?
YA is the only category known by initials. A few people refer to Middle Grade as MG. Nobody calls adult A. And hardly anyone knows what New Adult is; so perhaps N/A is appropriate?
The Hip Cats
The marketing categories go something like this:
- Children’s books: reading age 0-8 years. Mostly.
- Middle Grade: reading age 8-12, featuring characters in the 8-12 age range; no violence, sex or swearing. Simpler style. light, fast paced. Licenced to include whimsy.
- Young Adult (YA): reading age 12-18 with characters in the same age. There’s some violence, not graphic, some light profanity, fade-to-black sex. Fast and in the moment, YA books are about self-discovery, finding a voice, and coming of age.
- New Adult: reading age 18-25(?) featuring characters of the same age. There seem to be few limitations. Also fast and in the moment, it explores themes of adulthood, going to college, graduating, getting a job, moving out. New Adult delves into the rites of passage of adulthood. Plenty of attitude, sweary, with considerable leeway for smut (or ‘spicy’ as the BookTubers describe it).
- Adult; the new default. Any reading age. Anything goes. You can even use words with more than three syllable and long sentences, that’s how adult it is.
The only trouble is, the categories keep spreading and changing. As the original audience for Middle Grade and YA grew up, those categories expanded. Publishers pushed adult themes and content into YA to sell more books. Now it’s harder to find the boundaries. Harry Potter was Middle Grade, until it finished in YA. Potter grew up with its audience.
Genre Clash
Then we get the multiple pile up of categories and genre. For example, Romantasy is now a distinct genre; you have a choice of fantasy-romance or romance-fantasy, with or without profanity and smut – sorry, ‘spice.’ Romantasy crosses YA and Adult for themes and content, but frequently has prose of Middle Grade or lower. Much lower. And tropes. So many tropes.
The truth is, most readers buy books according to genre or author and not by category. But if you’re trying to SELL books, category matters. It affects your comparable titles (‘comps’) and also-bought recommendations. Reviewers have expectations and will downgrade you for too much smut or characters who act too young/too old/too dumb. Because they bought a genre book.
So I’m wrestling two giant snakes at the same time. Both of them wriggling around, hard to hold onto, and liable to constrict my ability to sell books. Don’t you love a good metaphor? I could be a writer, you know.
My fantasy series contains adult themes and some ‘upsetting scenes.’ There’s a lot of blood and violence (not explicit), domestic abuse, and a tiny bit of fade-to-black ‘spice.’ My protagonist is nineteen going on thirty-seven; adolescent whining combines with middle-aged existential angst. I’m not selling this well, am I?
In genre terms it is High Fantasy without elves or dragons. There’s no ‘quest,’ no McGuffin, no Dark Lord, no Chosen One. It’s not grim enough or dark enough for Grimdark. It’s not epic enough for Epic. There’s hardly any romance. There’s no magic school, academy, or arena. Help me out here.
ProwritingAid tells me my prose is mostly Middle Grade, which is an improvement on gibberish. But Middle Grade it clearly is not.
How do I categorise my fiction? YA? Adult? Three books in, I’m still wrestling with book categories…
There’s no MPAA for books, so what each publisher thinks is too graphic varies, but that’s how most people approach it
The age of the protagonist often plays into it, but as you see, it doesn’t always determine the market. Middle grade is aimed at middle schoolers (11-13).
NA is YA but with sex and older characters that aren’t into adulthood (like 18-20).
NA is 18-25y-o characters. Which legally almost everywhere is an adult. But an 18y-o outlook and interest is very different from a 25y-o. Nope, still makes no sense.
Isn’t it about content for each? PG, PG-13, and R (or even NC-17 for both NA and adult).
A Court Of Mist And Fury by SJM is YA but way explicit in places. SJM openly talks about the amount of sex in her novels like it’s a badge of honor.
NA is a failed marketing experiment. YA made a lot of buzz when it was new but not now so they wanted a new category to generate the same hype. With more smut. Because sex sells. The Fifty Shades Effect.