New Adult & Romance

Note: This post doesn’t feature any scientific information, or anything of the sorts. These are purely opinions of a New Adult author, a new adult reader, and in general, a new adult. 

It was just three weeks ago that I released my book, and I’ve always labeled it as a New Adult Crime story. That worked, until it became time to upload my book to Kindle. On Kindle, you can pick three categories.

New Adult is a strange topic. It’s like Young Adult, where it works as an all-encompassing genre, but it’s really an age demographic.

Kindle seems to agree with me, because you can’t actually label a book as “New Adult.” You can only label it as “Romance > New Adult.”

Which, if you’ve read my book, you’ll probably realize doesn’t have too much romance. This was done on purpose, and while there’s definitely much more romance in the second book, it’s not really appropriate to label The Assassin as romance.

New Adult is a relatively new genre, and I think it was born along with the e-book industry. Of course, like I said, no scientific research to prove my theory, but this just my observations. Along with this, it seems like there’s a lot of New Adult indie books (again, just what I’ve seen).

Because it’s so new, New Adult is still a tricky thing to target. Is it a genre? Demographic? Both?

Either way, most New Adult books are romance.

What does that mean for a girl who wrote a book that doesn’t have a lot of romance? Well, I don’t know. For now, I’m charging ahead, but I’d love to help build that missing gap. There aren’t many New Adult books that aren’t romance, but we have so many other genres that can be built upon. Sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, historical fiction.

I’m not saying there aren’t any books that qualify as New Adult in these genres (though don’t go searching for “New Adult Mystery” on Amazon), but there’s a definite lack thereof.

There’s more than enough romance (don’t get me wrong – I love a good romance story), but why does New Adult have to be specific to romance? And how do we change that? To be honest, I don’t know, but that isn’t going to stop me from making it work.