Flatiron Books Expands Into Young Adult Titles

Posted on January 29, 2016

Flatiron Books has been quite a successful nonfiction imprint for Macmillan. It entered the market with a bang, publishing What I Know For Sure, a collection of essays by Oprah Winfrey that ran in O magazine. Now Flatiron is expanding its horizons: it is entering the Young Adult market. Sarah Dotts Barley will head the new venture.

Ms. Barley joined Flatiron in 2014 from HarperCollins where she was an editor for middle graders and teen books. She told Publisher's Weekly what she is looking for in future acquisitions: "What I want in a novel is a distinctive and compelling voice, a narrative with great storytelling at its core, and stories and characters that feel different and that I haven’t read before," she said. "I tend to be most drawn to books that are a mix of literary and commercial, and books that have a strong emotional pull."

The first books published by the imprint were written by debut authors, but the line will include established authors in the future. A hallmark of the line will be its diversity and a cutting edge approach to today's culture. In May and June the imprint will release its first two titles: If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo, a story of a trans girl who moves to a new town, and American Girls by Alison Umminger, a darkly humorous coming of age story set in Hollywood.