Knowing Your Age Range and Genre
When you query a manuscript, you need to be able to accurately identify the age range and genre you’re writing in. It’s important for finding the right agents, but it’s also important for making sure that you’re following the norms of the kind of book you’re trying to pitch.
Age Range
There are a few main age ranges, which are the categories your manuscript fall into when publishers are considering who the audience is:
Board Book - picture books meant for ages 0-3. These are the books printed on thick cardboard that’s perfect for chewing on!
Picture Book - books for ages 4-8, which tell stories through pictures, usually with minimal text
Easy Readers/Chapter Book - books for ages 5-8, when children are starting to read on their own, but still need shorter books and less complex text
Middle Grade - books for ages 8-12, which start to get more complex in terms of character development and theme, and which start to get longer as well
Young Adult - books meant for teenage readers (often thought of as 13-18) which deal with complex themes and topics, often in a more mature way
Adult - books meant for readers 18+
One caveat here is that people often wonder about “new adult,” which was an age range meant more for college-age students (roughly 18-25 years old). However, new adult typically isn’t used anymore as an age range—you should pick either young adult or adult as your manuscript age range.
When it comes to knowing which age range you’re writing in, in my experience it mostly deals with themes as opposed to character age. While typically the character’s age reflects the age range you’re writing for, there are always exceptions, especially when we get to adult versus young adult. If you’re wondering, I’d look for comps based on theme and content, and see if you can find a clear answer there—for example, books that deal with coming-of-age themes are typically young adult, and most young adult books deal with coming-of-age themes.
Genre
There are a lot of genres out there. Contemporary, fantasy, horror, literary…in short, too many to list in this post (although here is a good explainer of a bunch of different genres, my agent Hannah VanVels Ausbury has great explainers on fantasy genres, and here’s a great post on sci-fi versus fantasy).
How do you figure out your genre? Sometimes you just know - if you’re writing about a world you’ve created with wizards, dragons, and magical spells, it’s pretty clear you’re writing fantasy. But what if you don’t? You look at the genres of your comp titles! This will tell you what genre publishers think books like yours fall into.
Sometimes, a book crosses genres - maybe, for example, you’ve written a horror novel, but it has elements of a speculative fiction genre because the horror comes from a magic curse gone wrong. In cases like this, your query letter can indicate that it’s a genre crossover (and indicate what those genres are). However, you’ll probably need to pick just one genre if the agent uses Query Manager for submissions, since these forms don’t allow you to select multiple genres.