ABSTRACT
Since 2009, Dutch publishers are increasingly marketing and branding books as young adult literature (YAL), thereby wishing to appeal to a specific target group of young people. In exploring YAL as a brand, we observe an interesting and broad branding process, within which attention is devoted to strategies that focus on branded relationships and the creation of a lifestyle, and within which the use of social media and the utilization of readers as influencers are key. This interactive branding process is explored against the theoretical backdrop of Bourdieu’s theory of the reversed economy and Martens’s (2016) new model of publishing. The Dutch publishing house Blossom Books provides a case study for examining the (re)distribution of the roles of publishers and readers and shows how exceptional the branding of YAL is.
