Adult or YA?

view this thread, where a discussion is in progress as to what constitutes YA or not.

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18013

If your main character is under about sixteen, unless your book is filled with adult themes it'll probably be marketed as YA anyway. That's why Diana Wynne Jones's book Hexwood--emphatically not a children's book (in my opinion, anyway), but with a child protagonist for the main part of the plot--is in YA.

Part of it, I think, is how the author views the underage main character. If you view him/her as a child, even a child with difficulties ordinarily faced by adults, you're probably writing a YA book. If you view him/her as an adult, even an immature adult who has much to learn, you're probably writing a novel for adults. I don't know how to explain it better than this, but I've read an awful lot of YA as well as novels written for adults with younger protagonists, and I can always tell the difference in tone no matter where the book is actually shelved in the store.

Well, mostly the MC in YA tends to be from thirteen-fourteen to seventeen. Usually they don't get older than that. Sometimes editors have authors shave off a few years from the MC's age when they're around eighteen-nineteen.

There's a lot of "racy" (haha, I said racy) stuff in YA, although a lot of it is getting sifted into YA from adult, from what I gather, to cater to the eighth grade boys who get a kick out of that stuff (I'm not kidding--I know these kids...). I have a pretty good handle on what is YA, I think, mostly because I'm a sophomore in high school, lol.

The better judge is themes, although age can be important. It can be hard for a high school student like me to read about a ten-year-old, shallow as that may be, if the conflict is one where the MC might have been made fourteen or so instead--shallow as that may be.