#again i think Macmillan and Sourcebooks have had some of the more... interesting entries in the New Adult category

[sleepinglionhearts]

No no get started on the whole "new adult" thing, I desperately want to hear

Ok, so here's the thing about New Adult:

It's a genre that's been emerging lately in the catalogs I view when doing frontlists (essentially just pre-orders for upcoming titles) for the book store and I'd been wondering what the hell it was. I'd noticed it was especially common in the descriptors for the romance books, but it was often the ones with that sort of sexy-but-not-full-blown-erotica kind of book that also tended to have the sort of description full of fanfic trope terms and "for fans of [usually a Young Adult title]" or "like [popular title] combined with [other popular title]!!" <- and here it's important to note that the popular titles don't always sound like they would mesh well.

And finally, FINALLY, one of these books is highlighted by the sales rep who works with us and she's got a little blurb about it and I get my first useful description of what "New Adult" is:

"Imagine the golden age of YA - The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Mortal Instruments - but aged up and spicy."

S P I C Y

Which would explain why they're not-quite-erotica type books, you see, we're not straight up PORN we're just ✨️spicy✨️

Nevermind that a lot of these books do have sex in them, but whatever, it's SPICY because that's what's popular to say on BookTok!

Oh. Right. Yeah. BookTok also gets mentioned a lot in listings for this sort of title.

And yes, this includes the Court of... books by Sarah J Maas and things like The Infatuated Fae books by Jeaneane O'Riley. In fact, I'm pretty sure O'Riley was described as a "BookTok darling" in the contributor bio part of the listing, but don't quote me on that, I'd have to look at the listing again.

Anyway, these are some of the biggest offenders regarding that whole "we will describe this with fanfic buzz terms and BookTok girlies will eat it up :)" issue.