Messy multiplicity: strategies for serialisation in new adult fiction

The love story has historically been one that has proved problematic for serialisation across multiple media. This is a narrative with a distinct trajectory: protagonists meet, fall in love and live happily ever after. Once this final milestone has been reached, and the characters are together, what opportunities are there for future storytelling?

Despite this, serialisation has become increasingly popular in romance fiction, leading to the development of new models of coquel- and sequelisation, rather than simply picking up events where they left off.

This chapter will examine these new strategies for serialisation in an emergent popular fiction category: New Adult (NA). NA, originally pioneered as a crossover marketing category between young adult (YA) fiction and adult fiction, features protagonists over the age of 18, and almost always has a romantic arc as its key narrative focus. It is also a category in which self-published authors have enjoyed success, making it ripe for textual experimentation. This article will explore several different modes of serialisation in NA, and the ways they are deployed in conjunction, exploring the way these serial experiments uphold, subvert, and remake the narrative structure of the happily-ever-after romance narrative.