Sunday, April 28, 2013

Difference Between Children's, Middle-Grade and Young Adult

Because you're a teen writer, I'm going to assume that you're probably not going to write for adults. So, you need to know your categories, and this is what this page is about. Remember, all word counts mentioned are estimated word counts.
So, the first category is Children's. These involve mainly picture books and the word count doesn't go over three thousand. I can't give you much advice on these, because your reputation and luck are a bit more important than your writing skills.
Middle grade is for kids up to the age of 10 or 11. The word counts usually falls in the range 20-30 thousand.
Finally, we have young adult novels. This is the category that I'm going to be covering in detail, because if you're a teen writer, I'm guessing that you're writing a novel for teens. (Most probably.) This is also the most general category and the one which is a bit confusing with word count.
Technically, this category involves people in the ages group 12 to 17, so as you can expect, there's a lot of variety on what to write and how long.
Generally, the word count is suggested to be between 50,000-65,000. But the thing is that that's very general. There are lots of exceptions, and I've seen young adult (often abbreviated to YA) novels sell that have word counts up to 80,000. Some of the sci-fi and fantasy ones even go to the 100,000 word range.
There are a lot of diverse opinions on this issue. What I'm going to say is that it probably depends on your target age group. If your book is targeted more towards 12-14 year olds, then you can expect the word count to be a bit lower than one targeted towards 15-16 year olds. Generally, you can add around 15,000 to the expected word count for any target audience if the theme is science fiction or fantasy, because they involve intensive world building.
I'd say that you should first try to write down your whole book. If you're getting a word count of over 100k, you might want to revise it a little bit. Unfortunately (or fortunately), there's no very strict range that you should tailor your book to. It's kind of something that you'll just have to go with your gut on. 

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