Simon & Schuster Launches Scarlett Press, and Now Four Publishers Have a New Adult Imprint

Simon & Schuster has launched Scarlett Press, a new imprint built specifically for new adult romance, with its inaugural list due out in early 2026.

The announcement went out through the publisher’s own trade page last fall, and it’s been sitting on my radar since. What makes it worth writing about now isn’t the announcement itself, it’s the company it’s joined. Penguin Random House UK launched DUSK this year. Harlequin has MoonFire coming in January. Penguin Random House also has Berkley XO, aimed at 18 to 24 year old readers. That’s four major publishing houses building a dedicated new adult romance line in roughly the same season, not one company testing a trend and hoping it sticks.

No individual Scarlett Press titles have been named yet, so there’s nothing here to add to a TBR. But the pattern is the actual story. Self-published and small-press authors have been serving this exact reader for years, the ones who move between YA, new adult, and adult shelves without much regard for where a bookstore decides to file them. A single imprint doing that could be a bet. Four of them doing it inside one publishing cycle looks a lot more like the industry finally admitting where its readers already are.

I’ll believe the specifics once Scarlett Press names its first books, and I’ll be watching for whether “new adult” from a Big Five imprint means anything close to what indie dark romance and romantasy have already built the category into, or a much softer version of it. Either way, this is one to keep an eye on, not because of what it announced, but because of what announcing it says about who the big houses think is actually buying romance right now.

Bloodthorn · suvienur.com