The Booksmith now keeps its best-selling young adult titles in the front of the store, displayed prominently on tables among the adult bestsellers and new releases.
It all began with the “Twilight’’ series, which has the first of its two final movie installments, “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1,’’ hitting movie theaters this weekend. The book ignited a publishing industry trend that continues to see adults purchasing books written for teens.
The market shift is considerable. An example: Jonathan Franzen’s much-anticipated novel “Freedom’’ has sold more than 600,000 hardcover copies since it was released in August 2010, according to Nielsen BookScan, while Suzanne Collins’s “Mockingjay,’’ the third book in her “Hunger Games’’ trilogy - released that same month and geared to young adults - has sold more than 1.3 million single, hardcover copies to date.
Hardcover copies of books for young adults (known as YA books) are a few dollars less than adult releases, but the huge sales numbers still have the books earning more money at the register. As of last week, all three books in Collins’s “Hunger Games’’ trilogy were on the Amazon Kindle bestseller list. They beat out “The Help’’ and Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.’’
This reader-driven trend has changed the scope and priorities of the publishing industry. Six years after the release of the first “Twilight’’ book, literary agencies have restructured themselves to account for strong young adult sales. Publishers continue to increase the number of YA acquisitions.
Respected adult-market novelists, such as Meg Wolitzer of “The Uncoupling’’ and bestseller Harlan Coben, are now writing young adult books (Coben’s YA debut, “Shelter,’’ came out in September). And Barnes & Noble - which had already expanded its young adult collection after the unprecedented success of the “Twilight’’ vampire novels - now devotes so much real estate to YA that paranormal teen romancegets its own section, separate from regular YA.
