Marketplace: YA Fantasy vs Adult Fantasy

Trends come and go, and by the time time one is spotted it's usually already on its way out. Right now, fantasy is hot, and YA in general is very hot. But if you're starting a book now, it'll be 2-3 years before it hits the shelves, and by then who knows what will be hot.

Writing what you want is always the best way to go And great books sell no matter what the genre or what's hot.

In every bookstore and library I've ever visited, the SF/fantasy section is bigger than the entire YA section, and much bigger than the YA fantasy section. YA fantasy is selling well, but I'm pretty sure adult fantasy has both way more books coming out, and way more sales (not counting Twilight).

ETA: I don't have concrete statistics on this...but I suspect they could be found somewhere.

Kitty Pryde said:

In every bookstore and library I've ever visited, the SF/fantasy section is bigger than the entire YA section, and much bigger than the YA fantasy section. YA fantasy is selling well, but I'm pretty sure adult fantasy has both way more books coming out, and way more sales (not counting Twilight).

ETA: I don't have concrete statistics on this...but I suspect they could be found somewhere.

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That would make sense, since 'Adult fantasy' (as in fantasy books aimed primarily at adults) is an entire genre/publishing category unto itself, whereas YA fantasy is sort fo a genre within a genre.

I think Kitty is probably right.

However, I don't think that means YA fantasy isn't selling well. It just means there isn't as much. It's kind of hard to force a story meant to be YA to be adult (or the reverse), so ignore which one is technically more popular, and write your story how it's meant to be.

If you want to get into subgenres, YA urban fantasy and YA paranormal romance is extremely hot at the moment. Meyer, Mead, the Casts, Caine, and that's just off the top of my head. (Hmm. All vampires.)

A LOT of adult writers of fantasy, sci fi and romance are crossing over into YA to take advantage of the market, so that tells you which one is hotter. I've been reading YA pretty intensively for a while. Some of these people are naturals. (i.e. Richelle Mead). Others are simply terrible (whoever wrote Lybrinth, so many of these romance authors). But they are clogging up the market and claiming those potential contracts, so it might be easier to break into Fantasy vs. YA right now.

A lot of adult fantasy is YA fantasy, too. Look at Mercedes Lackey--more than one of her books has characters that are young adults, going through typical YA plot lines, with fairly YA vocabulary. She's not the only one, either.

Yeah, the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section for adults defnitely outweighs the YA Fantasy section (and what little YA Sci-Fi there is). However, my book is definitely a YA Fantasy, and I wrote it because it was the story I wanted to tell. It had nothing to do with what the market said was hot. Write what you want and if you do it well, you'll find a market for it.

YA

YA fiction is new, where you have a lot of stories dealing with teens YA fiction is new because it deals more with Teenagers that allow you do explore things far more realistically. Sex and swearing can be used where in books that were just about teenager that are for kids you couldn't.

Harry Potter though it is a kids book, opened the door for YA Fiction/Fantasy. Books that had a great story and dealt with issues that teens face became big. Teenagers suddenly read now and now YA section is growing. Where Adult Fantasy has been around longer and does make more sales, YA is growing more and more every year. Go by or at least go flip through the Writers Guide 2010 and you will see that YA books are wanted compare 2010 to 2005 and you will see far more publishers are looking for YA now then back in 2005.

Tim

crzywrter:
YA fiction is new

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No it isn't. YA fiction's been around for ages - easily going back to Lewis Carroll. What is new is the fact that publishers and the market are paying more attention to it.

crzywrter:
Harry Potter though it is a kids book, opened the door for YA Fiction/Fantasy

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Harry Potter is generally viewed by the market as a series of books that goes from middle-grade to the YA markets, with the themes darkening as the series progresses. Although Harry Potter did not open the door for YA fiction or fantasy (both of which had been happily in existence for years before Potter himself was a gleam in Rowling's eye), the force of sales forced publishers to sit up and take the market more seriously. Stephenie Meyer has helped to continue this trend.

At the moment, everyone's looking for the next break-out book and many publishers are looking at expanding or creating a YA range. However, this doesn't mean that the adult market for fantasy is dead.

Paranormal romance and urban fantasy are both doing very well at the moment - so much so that bookstores are beginning to create specific paranormal romance sections within their stores. One of the biggest advances paid in 2009 for a novel was for an old-fashioned dark fantasy/horror about vampires.

However, like Danthia said, what's hot now might not be what's hot in 2012/2013. It's not a brilliant idea to write for trends, but if you're telling a good story, there's always going to be a market for it.

MM

New

As you are right about YA fantasy being around before Harry Potter, but it was rare and Harry Potter open the floodgates for it to be mainstream. I was taking YA as being new since as a very unlikely to see a YA section in a bookstore until recently. Where YA has been around, but it was classified differently.

Tim

crzywrter:
I was taking YA as being new since as a very unlikely to see a YA section in a bookstore until recently. Where YA has been around, but it was classified differently.

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It might just be a UK/US thing, but certainly here in the UK when I was a child/teen in the 80s/90s, there were teen sections in local bookstores and libraries. In my day (and just saying that makes me feel old) teen fiction was dominated by series like Sweet Valley High and Point Horror but there were a host of US writers as well, notably Judy Blume who were v. popular.

MM

Actually I kind of agree with Tim. Not that YA didn't exist, but that the form of YA now didn't exist. What used to be considered YA was often read by pre-teens (Sweet Valley High is an excellent example). When kids became teenagers they would move on to adult books. I'd argue the last decade is the first time when actual YAs (teenagers) started reading YA. And that what used to be YA is actually now Middle Grade.

I wrote a blog post on the subject, what I have dubbed The New YA.

I'm not sure he's entirely accurate about the book sections though, as there has been a divide between adult and child literature for a while, but I can see the point about the new YA being very recent.