Discerning your genre: MG, EYA or YA?

By guest Shannon L. Mokry

So you want to write a children’s book, but you don’t know where to begin? First get those ideas on paper, just the basic outline or concept to start with. Then, before you go any further, decide what age group you’re writing for. Next, consider what subgenre you are wanting it to be. If you have already finished your piece and are only now looking at defining it, all is not lost. Most manuscripts need several revisions before they are ready to publish.

So why is it so important to define now? What is a genre anyway? Both of these things are important because they tell you how long your piece needs to be, and what expectations your readers will have . If you want your book to be read, then it is important to understand your audience.

When I decided I wanted to write for children there were several questions I needed to ask myself. Will I be writing fiction or nonfiction? What age am I writing for? Children’s books fall into several age brackets. Hilari Bell does an amazing job listing them all in detail here.

For our purposes, the bare facts look like this:

• 8-12 Middle Grade (MG) 40,000-55,000 words, MC(Main Character) is usually 10-12. It’s important to keep the story age appropriate. You really start to see subgenres at this point; is it a mystery, a fantasy, sci-fi? No specific page count. Still mostly sold in paperback.
• 10-13 Early Young Adult (EYA) 50,000 words, MC 13-14. This category is a gray area. While it had some popularity a few years ago, it is important to note that libraries and bookstores don’t recognize this category. If you find yourself here, pick MG or YA and make the adjustments needed. This article goes into more detail on why EYA is not a real category. 
• 12-18 Young Adult (YA) 55,000-70,000 or longer. These are full on novels with a MC usually 15-17 yrs old. No language concerns, no specific page count. You start to see an real uptick in ebook sales.

Now let's look a little closer at the differences between MG books and YA books. The vast majority of MG books are written in third person, while the majority of YA books are first person. That doesn’t and shouldn’t restrict you, but it is important to be aware of. Another factor is where the average MC age comes from. Kids want to read about kids their age or older. They do not want to read about younger kids. For example, a 16 year old doesn’t want to read about a 12 year old, they just don’t relate. For a similar reason, an 8 year old can read about 10-12 year olds just fine, but doesn’t relate at all to a 14 or 15 year old. That really makes sense because a 8-10 year olds are still in elementary school and while they may be looking forward to middle school, high school is too far into the future.

You may notice a that MG book doesn’t deal with edgy topics. There shouldn’t be any bad language or intimacy, drug use or explicit violence. Some of these things may be hinted at but not gone into detail and not be things your MC is experiencing. With YA all those rules go out the window. YA readers want to read about edgy subjects. They are exposed to and experimenting with the darker things in life. You can still write clean and sweet, but ignoring the roller coaster of emotions that a teen goes through will just make your book unrelatable.

About the Author

Shannon L. Mokry lives in Texas where she homeschools her three daughters. The Bubbles stories were inspired by stories she would tell her youngest daughter Charlotte. She recently published a MG novel.

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About the Book

Escaping Gardenia

MG fantasy

Friendships are forged in the most unlikely of places.

From a kingdom at war with dragons, Ivy is sent to scout out a path to safety. Along the way she learns about magic and accidentally hatches a baby dragon.

Safety is the next kingdom over. Vlad, a gamekeepers apprentice, joins in the effort to help the refugees. His only intent is to help as many people find safety as he can.

Making new friends was the last thing either of them expected. Can they get Ivy's village to safety and learn to trust each other? Or will they learn to late that even well meaning secret can have big consequences?

Available from Amazon

Q4U: What are some of your favorite books written for these age groups?

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Lessons Learned: Author School Visits

by guest Chrysa Smith

Some schools do it every year. Others have never had an author come into their school to speak to their students.  Yet for me, it's the only way to sell children's books--to sell books in quantity. But it's surely not for the faint of heart. Here are some of the lessons learned from "going back to school."

I learned long ago that if I wanted to get noticed as an author, I'd need to offer more than my book. After all, what makes my book different than the tens of thousands of children's books out there? So, after a little research and a lot of chutzpah, I decided to create a school program that went along with my first book.

Naturally, it spoke to my book, but it also included quite a bit about the writing process, which can also set an author apart. The presentation then became a lesson. More than a show 'n tell from an author, kids learned a few things without realizing it, all from a different perspective. And from my experience, teachers love it.

 Eight years ago, my program began as an overhead presentation (so much for technology). But it evolved, as the purchase of a projector gave birth to a PowerPoint, complete with cool graphics and fancy effects. A screen presentation is a 'must' if you visit schools, as assemblies are often held in gyms, auditoriums or cafeterias. Many schools do have Smart Boards with internet access and presentations can be shown from laptops. So it helps to have presentations on a memory stick as well--a little easier to tote and compatible with those schools that have the latest technology.

Presentations must fall in line with school schedules and teachers have to clear the space, the date and rearrange classes for the day, so while you might expect innumerable schools as your target market, my experience has shown the return on contacts to be quite low, thus my point about it not being for the faint of heart. Scoring school visits involves lots of time--lots and lots of time, perseverance and a budget--all necessary to create things like bookmarks, postcards, brochures--all must-haves in order to spread the word about you.

But perhaps the biggest question of all is how to market to schools? I wish I had a magic formula to share. To put it simply, it involves lots of contact. Emails, direct mailings, getting on school visitation websites. And while I have listed myself on 'authors who visit schools' sites, very little has come of it. For the most part, I do email blasts, and it does yield some results, but with the ever-growing number of protective filters out there, so many emails go unopened, which is why complimentary postcard mailings help. And don't underestimate the value of going to book fairs. I have sat at many, twiddling my thumbs and contemplating the universe, but some of the seemingly unending events have yielded school visits. All it takes is one contact to sell a few dozen books and perhaps lead to another school visit.

My advice? Start out locally. Hitting schools where you live is the best place to begin. They are often more open to authors who share their community. Discipline yourself with regular contact with them, and slowly, like a spider or world-wide web, cast your net larger and larger--as large as you care to or as long as you can stand being back in the classroom once again Good luck!

About the Author

Author of the easy-reader series: The Adventures of the Poodle Posse and a new picture book, Once upon a Poodle, Chrysa Smith always likes to see the fun side of things, as she observes her miniature poodles during devious endeavors in her home. A long-time feature magazine writer and shorter term children's author, Chrysa has always been a fan of the written word. It's just that now, it comes in simple, concise sentences.

Connect with Chrysa:

website / e-mail / Facebook

About the book

Once Upon a Poodle

Mom's Choice Award Silver Medalist for excellence in Juvenile Fiction

When miniature poodle Woody goes on a hunt for a new brother, all sorts of adventures are in store. Several attempts bring chaos into the house while trying to find a suitable creature to become the latest member of the family. Feathers fly, gardens are harvested and nuts are cracked in this full-color illustrated tale that embraces fun, problem-solving and learning what family and friendship are all about.

Available here: The Well Bred Book / Amazon

What questions do you have for Chrysa about booking and planning school visits?

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Why choose the Indie path? My story

Photo by palomino, morguefile.com 

Independent publishing has truly revolutionized how books get into the hands of readers. Authors themselves can get books to market themselves quickly and cheaply. The prevailing thoughts about it tend to fall into these two camps:

This is great news: authors are earning more sooner, unheard voices are emerging, genre-benders are seeing the light of day.

This is terrible news: quality is a thing of the past, we’re drowning in a deluge of bestseller knockoffs, it’s impossible for non-genre authors to get any traction.

In my experience, the Indie Revolution is neither all roses nor all doom. When you want to bring something completely different to readers, it can be the best option, because legacy publishers tend to be risk averse, and new approaches are by nature risky. But book marketing is tricky no matter how you publish, and when you’re going it alone, something of a daunting task. Building an audience takes time, but the independent author has the advantage of “the long tail”--your work is available as long as you like, rather than having to earn out in a matter of months or face a premature death.

A number of factors led me onto the Indie path.

First is my broad experience in publishing. Over the past 21 years, I’ve done copywriting, editing, graphic design, print production, project management, scheduling, and copyrights and permissions. It felt like a natural extension of my existing skill sets to produce polished, professional books after years of producing magazines and newsletters.

Second is the nature of my fiction and poetry, which takes faith seriously but doesn't sanitize real life problems. I soon discovered that what I think of as the sweet spot (the dramatic place where life and beliefs collide) falls into a publishing no-man’s-land, too faith-saturated for the secular market, but too edgy for the Christian market. You’d be surprised by how little it takes to be “edgy” in the Christian market, where even “gosh” might be considered profanity. I explain more in an interview I did with Author Karen Akins (http://novelsduringnaptime.blogspot.com/2012/10/edgy-clean-writing-across-genre-divides.html).   Rather than choose a side, I opted to forge a new path.

Finally, I considered the following three questions:

1. What does success look like TO ME?

Quitting the day job to write full time might be your goal. Or having a loyal following of readers who appreciate your work. It might mean having a certain level of control. Producing work that you feel proud of. Reaching a particular target audience with something helpful and life-giving. Having creative freedom to write in several different genres or across categories.

2. What are my no-go areas?

What sacrifices am I not willing to make in my career? This might involve decisions about genres and approaches, financial risk, public exposure, associations. Where are you unwilling to compromise?

3. What kind of writing lifestyle can I maintain?

This question is perhaps the toughest to answer. It has to do with your stamina, your level of self-motivation, your ability to deal with outside pressure and to some degree the strength of your ego.


After much research and soul-searching, I concluded that publishing independently fit best with my work and my goals. It enables me to tell the kinds of stories I feel called to share without downplaying either the grit or the spiritual aspects. I can produce at my own pace, market at my own pace, and work in multiple genres.

(This had originally been a guest post I'd written for Michelle Davidson Argyle/The Innocent Flower.)

Have you wrestled with publishing path decision-making? What questions or concerns do/did you have?

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Market fit

I write contemporary YA and have been reading heavily in the genre for years--the humorous, the romance-driven, the heavy-hitting "issue" books, the lyrical coming of age. There's a lot of diversity. There's also (may I say it?) a lot of sameness. As Blake Snyder notes about "salable work" in Save the Cat, "give us more of the same, only different."

A few of things I noticed aren't being published in contemporary mainstream YA--cross-generational relationships, grieving someone other than a peer, characters struggling to mature in a faith tradition and make it their own (rather than rebel against it).

I looked at Christian-market YA and didn't see anyone coming from mainline or reformed Protestantism. Apparently all fictional Christians are low church evangelicals or Amish, despite the fact that among the billions of Christians worldwide, they're a minority (in the case of the Amish, a tiny one; see the numbers here). The characters are almost never urban, except for the African-Americans. They don't interact with Christians from other countries except in missions contexts.

I realized my novel didn't fit many of the cliches/tropes publishers seem to want. I have an Anglican teen from NYC who has lost a parent. Her relationships with extended family are are as important to her healing as her relationships with her peers. She's not another secular/non-denom suburbanite who loses a best friend/sibling and heals by hooking up with dream boy. (Sorry if that sounds snarky--I've seen this formula quite a bit.)

I realized I could abandon the story, spin it in ways more palatable for one market or the other. Or I could go it alone.

When you write outside the box, there's risk. But there's also opportunity. Because outside-the-box stories have the potential to build a readership among those tired of or bored with current cliches/tropes. The trend-setting books are often ones no one saw coming.

And when traditional publishing isn't willing to take the risk, you now have other options.

Have you assessed the market fit of your work? Do you like to read outside-the-box stories that push against reigning tropes in a genre?

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New adult: the chicken or the egg?

There's a lively discussion going on over at Elle Strauss's blog about genre niches that aren't being filled. Many readers commented on the lack of books geared specifically toward college-aged kids.

The prevailing wisdom among legacy publishers--at least as far as I can see--is that college kids don't read for fun. They're too busy studying.

The truth is, if they're "too busy," it's playing XBox, going to frat parties and watching Jersey Shore. The college years are some of the most free and breezy of your entire life. The number of classroom hours is a fraction of that of high school kids. And the amount of "homework"? Well, my professor husband says it has steadily dropped as the cost of tuition has gone up. (One of the many things very broken about higher ed these days is just how little actual work students do. Make them work hard, you get bad evaluations and lose your job.)

This market niche is ripe for the picking, not only because of the sheer amount of free time college kids have. They also grew up reading, thanks to the phenomenon that is Harry Potter. The reason they stop reading isn't busy-ness. It's the lack of reading material that appeals to them. They want books more mature than YA--dealing with the transition to adulthood, without being fully adult. And since none exist, they stop reading. So maybe the "lack of market" is a self-perpetuating problem.

Let's be honest here--isn't advertising done in part to create demand for a product? Make enticing products and advertise like crazy and the co-eds will come.

What do you think? Is this a niche that indies/small presses should band together to fulfill?

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