For those of you that are super unfamiliar with the writing process, let me briefly explain the typical publishing process. After you have deemed your manuscript near perfect, you query agents. This is basically where you ask them to represent your novel. If you are lucky enough to find an agent (not an easy task!!), they will try to find you a publisher. So now back to why I’m posting this: a while ago, when I was just starting to think about querying, I couldn’t figure out whether I should market my novel as young adult (YA) or adult. So I asked the question to my bookish friends and got quite a wide variety of answers. Hopefully they will be of help to you if you have ever wondered the same thing.

I wrote my novel as an adult fantasy. The content, to me, is very much adult. That being said, there are A LOT of YA novels nowadays that have quite graphic content, so it confused me. How does one know if their novel is adult or YA?

What the bookish friends said about querying:

“If the voice of the novel is young, it’s YA or new adult (NA)*… a lot of NA is shelved in the adult romance categories.”
*New adult is not really an official classification, but it’s that in between for adult and YA, and is often romance novels.

“If the narrator of your story is speaking in the present or looking back on the story events still as a teen, it’s probably YA or NA… You sometimes see books about kids as adult fiction, but in those cases most of the time it’s an adult narrator looking [back].”

“From what I’ve read YA has protagonists who are 13-17/18 years of age. And NA… the 18/19- mid 20s age group.”

“I think the genre YA has more to do with who you picture as your primary audience. Keep in mind that YA is targeting an audience up to 25 years old!”

“My understanding is that it’s really the age of the characters more than anything else that dictates [YA versus adult].”

“If your characters are teens and you can see it appealing to both adult and mature teen readers, query both. It’s called ‘crossover appeal’.”

“YA is more of a growing up/defining yourself journey, while adult is more introspective. A lot of it is straight up marketing though.” 

What my takeaway is:

I think that the age of the protagonist and the content helps direct it to YA or adult, but at the end of the day it’s a marketing decision. Publishers don’t care about sex scenes and the fact that 10 year olds may be reading it if they feel like it is going to sell more as a YA book (I mean, we can all think of several YA books that have pretty steamy scenes!).


After reading that mix of opinions, what do you think determines a novel to be YA or adult?