Dude, I'd never heard about that!

So today I learned that there’s actually a legitimate publishing category called new adult, which describes books primarily market to and with protagonists from the ages of about 18 to 22. And I’m like, holy cow, why did nobody ever tell me about this before?

I’ve been wondering about this ever since I started planning Aurorae. It’s definitely not YA; it’s aimed at people in their early twenties, college students and recent college graduates and the like. The protagonists are all 20-somethings, except for the old lady mentor figure, and I’ve been tossing around a lot of themes that I’ve been thinking about for most of college. (Whereas A House Divided wound up reflecting a lot of things I thought about during my first two semesters or so) Not knowing what New Adult was, I wondered how I was gonna explain the target audience.

This makes things so much easier. Thanks for the info, QueryShark!

Besides all that, it gives an answer that I’d been wondering about. It’s always bugged me that you have all these books written for high schoolers, but as soon as you get into college you’re expected to relate with characters whose personal subplots involve divorce and mid-life crises. I don’t know about other 20-somethings, but I don’t know anything about that sort of thing and I don’t really like to read about it.

I guess the thing to do now is start looking up some New Adult novels. Since there’s no section for it at Barnes & Noble, I guess I better start doing some research. To Google! (At the very least, it’ll help me kill time until Annie’s Halloween party tonight)

In other news, my internet is being finicky and it’s really annoying. Stupid server problems.

NaNoWriMo countdown: 10 hours and counting!