Boomer Lit vs. YA Lit

ByPhyllis Zimbler Miller

As an official Baby Boomer, I was pleasantly surprised to read Publishing Perspectives’ article “Is Baby Boomer Lit the Next Hot Genre?” by Claude Nougat.

It is nice to know that publishers have noticed how many of us Baby Boomers like to read. And here is what I found especially interesting (the boldface is mine):

A group has already been created to discuss Boomer Lit on Goodreads. It has its own Facebook page and Twitter account … [T]he group has been able to quickly do some important work clarifying what exactly Boomer literature is and is not. Among the major early findings:
Boomer lit is not about nostalgia or evoking the past. Any story of “coming of age” set in the 1960s or 1970s properly belongs to YA lit.
Nor does having some characters of Boomer age in a novel enough to qualify the book as Boomer Lit. Instead, it needs to address the transition issues that are central to Boomer’s [sic] lives.

The reason the above boldfaced paragraph held special interest for me is because I’m writing a YA short story — PINKY SWEAR — that is a prequel short story to my women’s friendship novel MRS. LIEUTENANT. PINKY SWEAR takes place in 1964 and is a “coming of age” story.

My business partner Yael K. Miller and I are working on the cover for this Kindle short story, and at the same time we will be creating a new cover for MRS. LIEUTENANT to “go with” the short story cover.

(Full disclosure: I did join the Boomer Lit group on Goodreads, “liked” the Facebook Page, and followed the Twitter account.)

Click here to read the entire Boomer Lit article.

© 2013 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks, including TOP TIPS FOR HOW TO PUBLISH AND MARKET YOUR BOOK IN THE AGE OF AMAZON and the romantic suspense spy story CIA FALL GUY.

Click here to visit her Amazon author page at www.amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller

She also has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the co-founder of the online marketing company www.MillerMosaicLLC.com

6 Comments

  1. Thanks for mentioning my article on Publishing Perspectives, I’m so glad you found it interesting! Yes, Boomer Lit is interesting to contrast with YA lit because they have one thing in common: placing transition at the heart of their stories – in the case of YA lit, the first transition going into adulthood and maturity (the second stage in life), in the case of Boomer lit, the second transition, out of “maturity” into the third stage in life…Any good literature is really about transition, so I view it as a natural to pass on from YA lit to Boomer lit: that’s what I did! Before A Hook in the Sky which is about a retiree-turned-artist to the dismay of his wife, I wrote a New Adult series, The Phoenix Heritage about an American computer techie searching for his family roots in Sicily and meeting the ghosts of his ancestors in an abandoned palace…

    So, Phyllis, we’re all waiting for your future Boomer lit novel!

    1. Claude — Thanks for adding your own writing experiences to this blog post; much appreciated. And I have to decide if I am comfortable writing about this third stage before I attempt a Boomer Lit novel.

      1. Phyllis, I’m sure you’ll get to it and indeed, feel VERY comfortable with it! Basically, there’s no secret to Boomer lit: it’s “slice of life” literature – just happens to be the third slice of life, LOL! It can be dramatic but it can also be humorous, full of fun.

        I didn’t start out writing Boomer Lit either. I began with a New Adult series, The Phoenix Heritage (3 books) featuring a young man, 19 year-old and a computer geek, out on a quest to find his family roots in Sicily and discovering far more than he ever bargained for…By the third book, he’s in full battle mode against the Sicilian mafia and violent Russian hackers!

        And then, only then…I got into Boomer lit! I identified the genre and started to spread the word about…

        1. I love the description of your New Adult series “The Phoenix Heritage”! And thanks for spreading the word about Boomer Lit.

  2. Claude Nougat is a featured member on Goodreads Boomer Group for her excellent Boomer Book A Hook In The Sky. She participates in the weekly Boomer Lit Friday Blog Hop (as do I). The Boomer Blog Hop is interesting because it gives some perspective to the range of books that are now included as “Boomer Lit”. And interesting because steadily every week more and more authors are signing up for the hop. This last Friday there were 24. Anyone interested should go to goodreads.com and look up the Boomer Lit Group.

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