Am I targeting the right age?

Hi Day'O. I like the negative feel to your posting. I got some bad news today and threw myself headlong into illustrating my latest book. Bad news makes for good motivation.

I'm looking up the format I like for queries, it was posted on another board here. It is the outline format. I like it because I don't have to spend any time weaving everything together.

Sorry, couldn't find the thread. I did copy it and here are the categories the author used. Just punch in your info and style it how you like.

TITLE:

PLOT:

GENRE:

WORD COUNT:

EXTRA INFO:

DESCRIPTION/SHORT SYNOPSIS:

AUTHOR BIO; PREVIOUS PUBLICATIONS:


CONTACT INFO:

SASE enclosed or ...

Whether you have a PB or not? The short answer is it's how you edit it. Once you have written for a while you'll figure out which stories fit in which categories, but for now you need to ask yourself if you want to edit the story down to 500-1500 words for a Picture Book or Easy Reader? Or, edit the story up to a Chapter Book? (many more words.)

It sounds like a great idea either way for me. If there's a lot of story in the golden book stories, then take a look at Zen Shorts by Jon J Muth. If you have never heard of it, it's a collection of short stories bound in a picture book with a MC child and a talking Panda that tells the stories. I wonder what the word count on that is?

The content sounds fine for 8-10, although it could definitely work for younger readers as well if you wanted to go in that direction. It's more about language and tone and the complexity of the characters and the narrative.

The best way to judge is to read some stuff that targets 8-10 year olds and see if your work matches up with it. I'm not up with word counts for older MG, so I could well be wrong on this, but 33,000 sounds like it could possibly be a bit on the short side.

Hey Day'O. If you look at the published authors who received 100, 200 and 300+ rejection letters on their first book, I doubt they sweated the research.

It does make sense to research the agents and publishers we query. Why send a pirate book to the wrong place? Keep trying and work on new work. Books are like paintings. We make them, and they may just collect dust. They may not get discovered by the public for centuries. They are expressions of oursleves that pay off in their completion. If no one reads my book other than myself, it doesn't matter. I keep working forward. I concentrate on the next book. I have a day job with long vacations Once you get one book published, then you may have the editor's ear for some of your older works?

How long are the shorter stories? I wrote a 50,000 word book and included fairy tales, songs and poems. I have several picture books now that I have culled from it. One is a song and the others are fairy tales. The song is a 200 word edit of the book. So, I have managed to edit 50,000 words into three 500 words or less picture books.

Maybe you could use the best story from the captain's book for a PB/early reader? Then, you could suggest a sequel at the approporiate time?

Good luck.

DayO, sounds appropriate for the 8-10 yr old range to me! It's possible the phrase 'magical story book' sounds too babyish, but if you change it to 'the enchanted tome' or 'the mystical map book' or something, problem solved! Just think about what your target audience would think is really cool. Some cool magic books are found in Inkheart, Neverending Story, Harry Potter, so it's not like that's an unworkable concept or anything.

And if fighting sea monsters and zombie pirates is too little-kiddish, explain why people of all ages love the pirates of the caribbean movies. Seriously, sea creatures and pirates are standard fare for stories of all ages. They work in picture books, MG, YA, and adult novels. If you're worried the story is coming across as too young, then play up the elements of danger and what's at stake and how that affects the MC.

A recent book with similar content to yours that I just read is 'Drift House' by Dale Peck. Check it out. Sea creatures and pirates abound. If I think of any others, I will post them.

Day O'

When you are querying a middle grade book, you should aim for a wider age range, normally 8-12, or 9-12, unless you are trying to reach the chapter book audience, which is usually 7-9. For even early middle grade, 33K words may be a bit short. Usually 35-40K is more typical. One great shorter middle grade book is 'Rowan of Rin' by Emily Rodda. If you take a look at it, it might give you a feel for where your story fits. Good luck!

I'm sorry to disagree with what some of the others have said, but 33K is not too short for MG. At all. No agent or editor is ever going to look at 33K and say, "Oh no! That's too short!"

The best way to figure out if something fits into a particular genre is to read a lot in that genre. If you are unsure if the voice is appropriate for MG, read a lot of MG novels. I'd suggest beginning with the Newbery winners and honors books.

If you want to know the word count of the MG novels you've read, look up the titles here: http://www.renlearn.com/store/quiz_home.asp

Best of luck.

Smish

I agree that 33K for MG is fine. Early MG can be as short as 8K, and older middle grade can go well over 50K. (The book I mentioned before, drift house, was 96K, for a 6th grade reader!) And plenty of it is in the 30K range.

Kitty Pryde said:

I agree that 33K for MG is fine. Early MG can be as short as 8K, and older middle grade can go well over 50K. (The book I mentioned before, drift house, was 96K, for a 6th grade reader!) And plenty of it is in the 30K range.

Click to expand...

Agreed. The general guidelines for debut authors are the 20,000-40,000 mentioned by Day O in an earlier post, but there are definitely lots of examples of books that are both shorter and longer.

I think it sounds absolutely fine. There's nothing obviously off about the content. 8-10 is quite an odd age group anyway - it covers an awful lot of ground.

Don't get hung up on the word count, either. I know it's one of those few easily quantifiable things that authors like to fret about, but the language is much more important than how much of it there is. You can always write more, and the editor can always cut some, if there's a pressing reason to.

Day O'...

The content you describe and the length you have could work for MG. Or it might not. It depends a lot on how you've approached the story.

Remember, none of us giving you advice have actually read your book. We've read your query letter, or what you've described here, or both. That really isn't enough to tell you whether what you have is going to work or not.

The thing is, MG fantasy is an incredibly crowded field right now. It takes something really fresh and different to break in. So any of these elements might be just fine, but you still need to make your query letter (and book) really dynamic.

If you feel it is too babyish . . . and you are at a point to trim the word count drastically. You could aim for a chapter book, that middle ground between picture books and YA novels.