: Re: Should I stick with American terminology in my English set young adult book? I am writing a book that is set in England, but because I would get the book published in America I don't know

@Holmes449

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By far the most successful young-adult novels in history, Harry Potter, use British spellings, terminology, idioms, and slang—and they did nothing to stop those novels from being more successful than any other. References to prefects and so on, slang like “snogging” etc., caused no problems. For that matter, few Americans had ever even heard the name “Hermione” before, and just about no one I knew was actually certain how it was pronounced until the movies came out. And none of that mattered, because the audience was enjoying the stories.

I think you will find far greater success in general if you don’t underestimate your audience—young adults are quite capable of figuring things out from context clues, or hitting a search engine if all else fails, and will happily do so if they care enough to understand the words you use. The differences between British English and American English simply aren’t that large in the first place to make this an overly-onerous burden—provided they actually like your story enough to bother. The choice of terminology is very, very unlikely to make the difference.

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