In 2008, when Maggie Stiefvater’s first novel Lament came out, YA was still an evolving category. “When I got into the game, teen/YA was quite low-stakes, a place where you could play with all genres inside one novel and be really strange, because nobody was making any money anyway,” she says. “It was a perfect place to come of age as a writer, and the community was odd and intense. We were the goth kids at the party.”
Enter the blockbuster Hunger Games franchise, then Veronica Roth’s Divergent series and Marie Lu’s Legend trilogy. With John Green’s 2012 hit The Fault in Our Stars, contemporary romance became a breakout YA category. The stakes—and the accompanying advances—were raised considerably, along with the profile of YA.
Annual fluctuations notwithstanding, YA has stayed on a growth track since the 2010s. But adult fiction is still the strongest category of the book market.
While well-established adult authors such as James Patterson and Brandon Sanderson have been writing for younger readers for some time, it wasn’t until recently that a significant number of YA authors began to venture into the adult market. We surveyed several authors crossing these categories to find out more.
Fiction’s fluid barriers
For Lu, whose first adult novel Red City is scheduled for an October release from Tor, writing for adults was the initial intention. “Legend, my debut YA novel, was originally pitched as an adult science fiction title,” she says. “At the time [in the early 2010s], YA was still a fairly new market. I hadn’t read much in it, and I didn’t know that what I’d written slotted neatly into YA dystopia. Once I started exploring the category, though, I found that my voice lent itself naturally to it.”
She’s not the only YA writer whose career started that way. “In the very distant past I had imagined myself as an adult fantasy writer,” says Adib Khorram, author of Darius the Great Is Not Okay, among other titles. “But once I wrote my first YA novel—it is unpublished and will never see the light of day, it was that bad—I was hooked.”
For others, YA was always home. “I was lucky enough to grow up in the heyday of young adult. I was not so far from a young adult myself, and that influence is clear in my early work,” says Red Queen author Victoria Aveyard. “My last series, the Realm Breaker trilogy, was a crossover piece with a mix of young adult and adult characters. It felt like a natural bridge in moving from YA to adult. My adult debut, Tempest, is centered on an adult woman on an adult journey. There was no realm where the story could be written directly for a teen audience.”
Like Aveyard, Adalyn Grace, author of the Belladonna series, was a YA reader first. “I started out imagining that I’d likely always write YA,” she says. “I was actively querying at 18 and sold my first book at 23. Now I’m 31, and both the market and I have evolved tremendously. Fantasy feels more open to women than ever before, and a lot of the ideas that excite me at this moment are skewing older.”
For some writers, including Jonny Garza Villa, author of the Pura Belpré Honor book Fifteen Hundred Miles from the Sun, the switch to adult wasn’t intentional. Their latest novel, Futbolista, came out in April and is classified as adult or new adult. “I’d originally sold Futbolista on proposal as a young adult project—one that sort of toed the line between young adult and new adult,” they say. “As I’ve become an author with some number of books behind me, the idea of expanding into writing for adults—and writing romances that center adults—felt like something both very fun and very natural for me.”
Stiefvater found her shift to writing for adults came gradually. “Somewhere around 2016 or 2017, I realized my reading tastes were changing,” she says. “What I wanted on the page was quite out of step with both the changing trends in YA and with what my peers were gushing about on panels. Scholastic, my longtime publisher, would have taken whatever YA I wanted to do next, but I saw the writing on the wall: I either needed to get comfortable with the idea of writing books that were for my audience and not for me, or I needed to think about changing categories.” Her debut adult novel, The Listeners, came out in June.
Changing perspectives
According to 2024 research performed in the U.K. by Nielsen Book (commissioned by HarperCollins UK), nearly two-thirds of YA readers are adults, with 28% over the age of 28, reflecting a trend that’s been building for more than a decade. Along with that shift, the lines have blurred between what’s expected in a YA novel and what’s considered adult, from the behavior of protagonists to the subject matter. Who is YA for? is a question that has circulated among readers, parents, agents, and publishers for years. The presence of a teen character alone is not enough to classify a book as YA.
“Where I have found the two categories to diverge is the treatment of perspective,” Lu says. “YA and adult characters and narrators react to the same event in very different ways. YA tends to be raw and immediate; this is something happening to someone right now, this is how they’re feeling right now. Adult perspectives, even from a young narrator, tend to feel more like looking back on youth, with more room to analyze decisions and consequences throughout time and from multiple viewpoints.”
Lu adds that Red City—a story about two friends turned rival alchemists—“could only work as an adult title” because some of the themes involved in the book required “a wider lens than I could afford in YA.” Still, there was an adjustment period as she started writing it. “I was so used to the pacing and characterization demanded by YA that I struggled to break out of them.” The process of developing Red City with her agent took two years, Lu says. “It was one of the most difficult exercises of my career, but I’m deeply grateful to her for it.”
While there can be a fine line between YA and adult novels, many authors point to context as the distinguishing feature. “Teens are often experiencing things for the first time, and so have no context for what they’re going through,” Khorram says. “Adults have that context, and it shapes their lives and responses in radically different ways. Exploring that shift is what excites me about writing for adults. That said, it’s also fun to write about wine and the unique adult pressures of jobs and family and relationships.”
Marie Rutkoski, author of the Winner’s Trilogy and other YA books, released her second novel for adults, Ordinary Love, in June. “Something I realized when writing for adults,” she says, “is that although we talk about coming of age as though it only happens once—when we are adolescents emerging into adulthood—we are coming of age all the time. For me, the crucial difference in writing for adults is exploring the synthesis between current and past selves. Adults are continually measuring who they are against who they used to be, and reconciling the stages of our lives.”
Having written YA for years was an advantage in crafting the dual perspectives in Ordinary Love, Rutkoski says. “A substantial portion of the book is told in the past, when the two girls are in high school. Writing those scenes felt easy and familiar. This is because of all my years writing for teens and portraying topics keenly important for that audience: first love, the tension between home and getting ready to leave it, and discovering the self.”
Garza Villa says there was “definitely an adjustment period” in writing for a mature audience and exploring “all the ways in which Futbolista would still carry some of that Jonny Garza Villa aesthetic while also letting me have some fun, knowing it could be a little more gratuitous now.”
Genre judgments
There’s a long-running perception among some readers and authors alike that writing for teens or kids is easier than writing for adults, casting doubt on the literary value of the category. “I think every YA author has dealt with this idea in some capacity,” Aveyard says.
“This is probably one of the most frustrating parts of writing YA today,” Grace says. “I’ve seen countless posts praising the Belladonna series, but then adding things like, ‘I couldn’t believe this was YA!’ or, ‘I know it’s YA, but I promise it’s worth reading.’ There’s this strange stigma, as if YA is inherently less sophisticated or less valuable.”
Rutkoski has found that novels are sometimes miscategorized. “Occasionally I’ll read a novel that’s classified as for adults and think, Oh, this is a young adult novel in disguise,” she says. “I felt that way about Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Ishiguro is a genius, of course, but he’s also rare. It’s far more common for a young adult writer to ‘write up’ and have their adult novel be well received than for an adult writer to ‘write down’ and have a young audience love their book.”
According to Stiefvater, this “age-old debate” about YA’s perceived literary value comes from a narrow viewpoint. “I have written a YA series that is tattooed across hundreds of bodies around the globe,” she says. “I have written an adult novel that asks impossible questions about the nature of empathy and responsibility during wartime. Which is more important? Which has saved more lives? Does one outrank the other?”
Ultimately, Lu says, “no one is a harsher critic than a 12-year-old. All YA authors know how smart young readers are. If they approve of your book, trust me—you’re legitimate.”
Audience crossover
For an author with a recognized name and a following in YA, writing in the adult category is not without risks. “In YA, personality is incredibly important; it shares a lot of DNA with YouTube, TikTok, TV, and film fandom,” Stiefvater says. “Readers are very aware of the author. I knew that being successful in adult meant reaching readers who would likely never know me beyond the author photo.”
At the same time, the recent increased attention on YA content from parent activist groups has put authors under scrutiny. In “writing up” for adults, there’s the chance that younger audiences will inadvertently or intentionally come across mature content by their favorite author, exposing the author to backlash.
“Whenever I post about my adult title, I make sure to include a disclaimer for parents, teachers, and librarians following me that this is not a YA book and that reader discretion is advised,” Lu says. “While I’m not here to tell people what they can and can’t read, I always want to make sure that they know what they are getting into.”
For authors whose earliest fans are now adults, there’s a sense of growing with the audience. “I was touched when a Goodreads reviewer said that they had read my YA books as a teenager and now, as an adult, had discovered my adult novels,” Rutkoski says. “I’m proud that some of my readers have grown up alongside my books and are at a good age to read what I write now. But what is a ‘good age,’ anyway? The truth is that a lot of young people read novels with adult content. I certainly did, and it helped me safely and intellectually explore more mature topics, such as sex, parenthood, professions, and adult friendships.”
Grace says she plans to keep writing both YA and adult. “I have several adult ideas brewing, but also several that may be a better fit for YA,” she adds. “The market does play a role in what I prioritize, but creatively, I plan to keep writing across both spaces.”
For Stiefvater, the move to adult is likely permanent. “My next project is an adult novel that follows a friend group over a decade—definitely the sort of project that would have been impossible in YA,” she says. “I do still have a toe in the teen pond, though. The Raven Cycle has a graphic novel adaptation beginning in July, and that is where the teens are.”
Aveyard says she’ll base her future projects on “what feels best for the current moment,” adding, “I do not see myself limiting to one age category or another. I hope to jump between the sandboxes forever, depending on where the inspiration takes me.”
Joanne O’Sullivan is a journalist, author, and editor in Asheville, N.C.