In the last two years, four of the Big Five publishers have launched imprints wholly devoted to a burgeoning category of fiction readers—“new adults.”
In 2024, St. Martin’s Publishing Group unveiled Saturday Books, a grown-up sibling to its young adult imprint, Wednesday, which since 2017 has pushed the boundaries of publishing’s age categories with such YA/adult crossover authors as Rainbow Rowell and Rebecca Ross.
“For a while, we were one of the only YA [imprints] doing crossover,” said Eileen Rothschild, VP and associate publisher of both Wednesday and Saturday, says of the former imprint. “We were hitting that sweet spot of older teen readers.”
Now, Saturday has ample company in the new adult category, including Berkley XO, jointly launched by Berkley and Penguin Young Readers; Little, Brown Books for Young Readers’ Requited; and Simon & Schuster’s Scarlett Press, all founded last year. (HarperCollins, and particularly its Morrow imprint, has invested in the category, but has yet to launch a dedicated imprint.)
These launches bring shape and structure to a genre that, for the past decade-and-a-half of its existence, has lacked a clear consensus definition.
“A problem that I’ve seen when trying to discuss New Adult is that books don’t have a common definition of what makes New Adult New Adult,” said Irene Vázquez, an editor at Levine Querido, an independent children’s and adult publisher.
“I’m hoping the founding of these explicitly NA imprints will give us a proper frame of reference to understand what is and is not New Adult.”
Broadly, said Jennifer Klonsky, president and publisher of Penguin Young Readers and co-editorial lead of Berkley XO, “the characters are going to be 18-plus, and their concerns will match the concerns of the core 18–24-year-old reader.”
“Late teens to twenties is a unique period in someone’s life, and that hasn’t been fully recognized as its own category,” said Lisa Yoskowitz, VP and executive editorial director of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers and editorial lead of Requited. “This does feel like the moment to be meeting it.”
Many of these imprints’ lists are largely romance-oriented. Berkley XO’s inaugural launch list, set for this fall, features two romantasies and a contemporary romance set in the world of Formula One. Scarlett Press is continuing the “tradition” of New Adult being “primarily composed of romance-led fiction,” said executive editor Kate Prosswimmer, with a list that includes formerly self-published romance and romantasy authors Kayla Edwards and H.M. Wolfe.
“New Adult grew directly out of romance, both in terms of readership and storytelling priorities,” said Liz Pelletier, CEO and publisher of Entangled, one of the first New Adult imprints, whose 2023 romantasy blockbuster Fourth Wing contributed to the genre’s boom.
Still, some publishers emphasized that their vision is to establish New Adult as an expansive label containing multiple types of stories—as YA is today.
“Our vision is for it not to be a genre, but a category,” said Rothschild.
The proliferation of New Adult imprints among the Big Five comes relatively quickly after the term hit the mainstream in the early 2020s, amid the explosion of BookTok.
“We’d been wanting to do something that hit into New Adult for a while,” said Rothschild. But it was only during COVID that “the market started using the term ‘New Adult’” and many YA-appropriate books began “indexing more in the adult market.”
For many millennials, said Prosswimmer, the “YA juggernaut series” of the 2000s and 2010s created “monoculture opportunities” that “allowed readers to connect and form widespread communities.” As these adult readers led YA to “age up,” publishers saw an opportunity to recreate the thrill and immersion of those series, but with adult characters.
“It became clear that a significant portion of readers were aging out of traditional YA without wanting to leave those emotional, immersive stories behind,” said Pelletier.
Now, publishers are placing their bets on the staying power of New Adult—and working to make sure their imprints remain a home for writers and readers for years to come, regardless of social media trends.
“While it’s true that BookTok has been amazing for raising awareness and getting people excited about different titles, word of mouth is a marketing technique that has been essential to the publishing world since its inception,” said Prosswimmer. “We’re always ready to tailor that message to whatever medium is best poised to reach readers.”
While the category continues to evolve as it enters the structure of traditional publishing, one fact was clear to many.
“When I see other imprints pop up, that gets me excited,” said Rothschild. “We’re here to stay.”
