As I promised last week, in the next couple of episodes we’ll be tackling genre, format, and category, as these are key to understanding your audience. For today we’ll just be focused on format and category, how they’re different from genre, and how to know the expectations for the format and category you choose.
Now this is an area where many writers get confused, and understandably so. Many people, even folks who have been in this industry a while, use some of these terms interchangeably and lines blur between them, but I’m going to try to keep things as clear as possible using the most common definitions I have seen in my time.
Format is the most straightforward of these. Books come in many formats. The basic formats include ebooks, print (including paperback, hardcover, and large print), and audiobook. But it can also get more complicated. With books for young children you have board books, which are extra sturdy books with cardboard pages babies can chew on or spill things on. Then there are books that combine illustration and text, like comics and graphic novels. If you’re creating a text-based story, format might not enter your thoughts much during the composition stage. After all, a novelist may hope to see their book in paperback, hardcover, and audio, with little-to-no alteration of the text between these formats. But board books are sometimes written specifically for a board book market, and while graphic novels can be any genre and for any age group, there are conventions and expectations that comic and graphic novel readers have that novel readers don’t and vice versa. So that’s one place that format edges a bit on genre.
Finally, with increasing audiobook consumption in recent years, we’ve also seen a rise in audio-first stories. Books produced first with an audio production in mind. A traditional book version may come later…or not at all. Writing with an audio-first mentality also changes the choices you make as a writer.
Next, let’s tackle category. By category, I don’t mean the categories you see on Amazon or another retailer. Those are genres and subgenres. I mean age category. Let’s start with the youngest readers.
As I mentioned before, board books are for babies and toddlers and may only be a few pages long. The next step up are standard picture books. Picture books are for ages 3-8, meant for a dual audience—kids and adults helping them—with nonfiction picture books—especially picture book biographies—sometimes skewing higher than 8 for the kid range. Now, I say they are for ages 3-8, but that’s for the category overall. If you’re writing a picture book, you should get more specific about the age of your audience. Are you writing for preschoolers or younger elementary school kids? Maybe for a little kid transitioning to elementary school age? Picture books are very short, typically 32 pages. Length in terms of word count varies a bit depending on the audience of the picture book. The younger your audience, the shorter the book. Most picture books are 500 words or less, though nonfiction can go up to 3000 words.
The key with picture books is letting the illustration do its work as well. It’s not easy to get a full story in 500 words, but remember that the illustrations do just as much work.
The next category up is early readers. These are typically 6 by 9 in size and have simple words. They’re meant for ages 5-8, roughly, for kids learning to read independently. So simplicity of language is more important here than for picture books. They’re usually up to 1500 words.
After that come chapter books, still short compared to adult novels, but a big step up in length for kids: 4000-15,000 words, meant for ages 7-10. These books likely do have some illustrations, but the work is primarily text.
Middle grade novels are aimed at ages 9-12 and can go up to 50,000 words, but maybe even 65,000 for fantasy and science fiction.
Young adult books are aimed at teen readers, and basically they are at the same length of adult books in their respective genres. Now, young adult is a category that is often muddled with genre, especially as at least half of young adult readers are actual adults, not teens. That’s a can of worms that is a little too big to open in this particular episode, but suffice it to say young adult has its own tropes and expectations in addition to the expectations and tropes of whatever genre the book might fit into.
And after that, there are books for grownups. For a while new adult was marketed as its own category, aimed at those first years of adulthood. Sometimes I still see it, but not much anymore.
Now, to add onto all of this, if you’re a teacher or a parent and your kid is reading books that interest them, please don’t worry if is above or below whatever category they are “supposed” to be in. These are marketing categories. Every reader is different. A kid is reading? Wonderful! And if all they want to read are graphic novels, also wonderful. Get them as many as you can and let them tear through them. Graphic novels are real books. They aren’t easier because the text is shorter, in the same way a short story for adults isn’t easier than a novel for adults. It’s just different. Plus, graphic novel readers get to learn about and appreciate the intersection of visual art and text in a way they wouldn’t from text alone.
As you can see, there is a lot of variety here. And when we layer on genre, subgenre, and genre crossing, it gets even more complicated. But we’ll come to that next week.
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