Guest Post: Liesel Hill

New Adult (NA) Verses Young Adult (YA)

My debut novel, Persistence of Vision, is a New Adult novel. I get asked a lot what made me choose new adult and how it’s different from YA.

For me it wasn’t a conscious choice. I envisioned my story, and this is how old the characters were. It wasn’t until I started categorizing my story and I realized it was a new adult.

 

So what is New Adult? It can be explained in various ways. It’s like YA, but the characters are a few years older (early twenties). It’s geared toward adults, rather than young adults, but doesn’t have the adult content. In other words, clean (PG-13 or lower) reads about adults.

However you categorize it, new adult is just half-way between YA and adult. The question is not why I chose NA, but why other aspiring writers might want to?

   1. While NA is still a relatively new classification (many people have never heard of it) it’s growing in popularity. Mediabistro.com put out an article this last December about new adult fiction readership exploding on Goodreads. The trend is on the upswing.
    2.    The market is saturated with YA books. Choosing NA will set your book apart more than YA will.

      3.It can help expand your story’s scope. While there are many YAs that are well written and include complex problems (Hunger Games, anyone?) there are some problems that are considered too adult for YA readership. Personally, I like stories about slightly older characters, dealing with real world problems that would probably be a bit too heavy for teenagers. This is a matter of author preference, but with all the YA on the market, consider deepening the scope of your problem by using slightly older characters to cope with them.

So, why would YOU choose YA?

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Synopsis of Liesel Hill's new book Persistence of Vision:
A flash of purple light. A rock formation. Brown boots walking across a room at eye level. Two large hands covering hers. A hand with an ugly black burn on the back. A woman standing in front of a broken lighthouse. Blood on her hands. A whisper of a voice.These are the images that haunt Maggie. One afternoon a year ago, Maggie blacked out inexplicably. Now a man with a spider’s web tattooed on his eye has attacked her in her home. Things only get more confusing when Marcus, a man she vaguely remembers from her black out, shows up to take her away. Marcus is from the future and is a member of the Brain Chemistry Optimists (BCO). And so is Maggie. Her black out was actually a year’s worth of time she spent in the future, fighting against collectives—people who have linked their minds together and given up all individuality. The collectives are working to bring down the few individuals left, and Maggie learns that she is supposed to play a crucial role in these efforts. The members of the BCO explain that in battle, her brain was attacked, and she lost all her memories of her time in the future. All she has left are flashes, afterimages, Persistence of Vision. Now she must relearn everything about this different world, harness mental powers beyond anyone’s imagining, and navigate what was once a romance with Marcus. On top of all of that, she begins unraveling the mystery of her lost memory. However, for every answer she finds, it seems that another, more complicated question arises. Will she be able to remember enough to help the BCO?