I’m looking to discuss the difference between ya and adult books.
First let’s start off with some definitions.
Literature written for young people age eleven to eighteen and books marked as “young adult” by a publisher. Literature including a teenager who is the main character and, as the center of the plot, engages in problems related to and relatable to the lives of teenagers.
New adult (NA) fiction is a developing genre of fiction with protagonists in the 18–29 age bracket.\[1\] St. Martin’s Press first coined the term in 2009, when they held a special call for “fiction similar to young adult fiction (YA) that can be published and marketed as adult—a sort of an ‘older YA’ or ‘new adult'”.\[2\] New adult fiction tends to focus on issues such as leaving home, developing sexuality, and negotiating education and career choices.\[3\] The genre has gained popularity rapidly over the last few years, particularly through books by self-published bestselling authors like Jennifer L. Armentrout, Cora Carmack, Colleen Hoover, Anna Todd, and Jamie McGuire.\[4\]\[5\]
What is meant by adult fiction?
Adult fiction in a nutshell
Adult Fiction should express, through its character’s lives, the richness of experience gained by years of living. That’s what makes us adults. That is what should define Adult Fiction. Adult Fiction: Fiction written by adults, for adults, mostly about adults.
Now that that is out of the way and those are the common definitions, let’s talk about it.
If young adult books are for those specific age brackets, right, but we know those age brackets are having sex,
By age 15, 21% of young females aged 15–24 had ever had sexual intercourse. By age 17, this increased to 53% of young females, and by age 20, 79% of young females had ever had sexual intercourse. By age 15, 20% of young males aged 15–24 had ever had sexual intercourse.
[https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db366.htm#:\~:text=By%20age%2015%2C%2021%25%20of,had%20ever%20had%20sexual%20intercourse](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db366.htm#:~:text=By%20age%2015%2C%2021%25%20of,had%20ever%20had%20sexual%20intercourse).
Why do the ya books have to fade to black sex scenes? Is that required for publishing? Is it something that because of certain laws you cant give those age groups who are having sex access to books about sex, or not even about sex but about sex happening? Now i havent read Ya in a very long time but wouldnt mind reading it as some adult books have more sex than i would want to read. Like in a fantasy book and all the sudden the characters are having sex on every surface when we have a war to fight like, “stop fucking and fight god damn it!” You know? When it doesnt help the story at all and there is random romance. I like romance books but if i wanted sex scenes i would read a romance novel. But adult books have adult themes and i get that. But why is it we are restricting teenagers who are having those experiences from reading about them when they are in every tv show, movie, and music they consume? I feel like maybe it’s time to fully distingish these groups into like pre teen books without sex in any way, teen include some sex but it has the be between teenagers, new adult post teen sex growing into adulthood, and adult fully adult books about adult subjects. This would hugely help me find books in the future.
by Bluesbunny33
3 Comments
This is gross. You’re literally looking for pedo shit.
So to be clear your concern is that there aren’t enough books with explicit sex scenes between teenage characters?
Uhh, yeah officer, right over here…
These designations are very new. Neither YA nor NA existed at all as marketing categories 25 years ago. It was just “juvenile fiction” (what we’d now call midgrade) and adult fiction, which often included teenage characters and dealt with issues of transition into adulthood (The Outsiders, Catcher in the Rye, almost all of the fantasy genre that has a teenage “chosen one” protagonist…)
>Why do the ya books have to fade to black sex scenes? Is that required for publishing?
Nothing is really *required* for publishing, in any genre. It’s more like “This is what the small handful of people currently in charge of publishing believe will make the most money.” That calculation changes all the time, mostly depending on who’s most influential in the publishing world at the moment.
Judy Blume, for example, was writing what we’d now call YA before YA specifically existed as a marketing category. She was just kind of occupying her own niche between juvenile and adult fiction. She went into pretty clear detail about sex (and other teenage issues like menstruation) though the sex wasn’t done in an erotic way, to turn the reader on. It was depicted as a means of understanding the confusion, exhilaration, and experimentation with independence her teen protagonists were going through.