prettybooks:

I attended London Book Fair this month and I was intrigued by one seminar in particular: New Adult. It’s a term we’ve all been hearing about for the past year, some of us attempting to read absolutely everything given the label, and some of us avoiding it at all costs. But what is it? Where does it fit? And is it a necessary category? I’ve attempted to type up my notes from the seminar – forgive me for talking about the panel as a collective – and I’ve added in my own thoughts at the end.

offonatangent:

On Twitter yesterday I went on about how New Adult is a bona fide category now — so much so that there’s a way to report them specifically at Publishers Marketplace — but that it won’t be “real” to me unless literary novels by men that qualify actually get classified that way. And since everyone…

I’m so excited that New Adult is actually a genre now; I’ve had it in my mind that it was New Adult more than YA, but I didn’t want to wreck my chances with a literary agent who might have liked it but scoffed at my categorization in New Adult. 

This post, short and sweet, does bring up a lot of questions about gender bias in the literary community. While Chick Lit is, I would contend, a category for rompy feminine-focused fun books, the male equivalent has always fallen under the umbrella of fiction or literary fiction. It will be interesting to see if this prediction of the same Chick Lit-esque gender binary will come to true. Infuriating if it does, of course, but interesting from a social and publishing industry/marketing standpoint as well.

Women’s fashions inspired by book covers. It’s practically porn.