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Berkley Books, a Penguin imprint for commercial and genre fiction, will join forces with Penguin Young Readers to launch Berkley XO, billed as an adult-YA crossover imprint. Announced today by Penguin Young Readers president Jennifer Loja and Berkley publisher Christine Ball, Berkley XO will publish a “highly curated” list of no more than 10 fiction titles per year, pulling talent from both parent imprints to assemble custom teams for each book. Ball and Loja will oversee the imprint’s publishing strategy, with Jen Klonsky, publisher at Penguin’s Putnam Books for Young Readers, and Berkley editor-in-chief Claire Zion leading a team of editors from both divisions in acquiring titles for the Berkley XO list.

In a conversation with PW, Ball spoke to the limitations of marketing certain novels, especially genre titles, as strictly “adult” or “YA.” “Within genre publishing, there is more of an overlap in adult and young adult readers,” Ball said. “And the readers of Penguin Young Readers are our potential future Berkley readers.” Ball noted that Penguin Young Readers and Berkley have already been collaborating on titles for some time; Berkley XO will make the teamwork official. While most likely not every Berkley XO title will be…