Is it MG or YA? Tips To Discover Who Your Audience Is

A common mistake among authors who write for the younger set is to refer to young adult and middle grade as genres. That's not the case - middle grade and young adult refers to the age range of the target audience, also called a category.

That's where things stop being simple.

Middle grade and young adult have overlapping areas, and what of the term upper middle-grade? What kind of content is acceptable in middle grade? Is it only the age of the protagonist that determines whether the category is MG or YA?

These are all great questions, and so I put together a brief podcast episode to address exactly this issue. Enjoy!

Author Kurt Dinan on the Sophomore Slump

Welcome to the SNOB - Second Novel Ominipresent Blues. Whether you’re under contract or trying to snag another deal, you’re a professional now, with the pressures of a published novelist compounded with the still-present nagging self-doubt of the noobie. How to deal?

Today's guest for the SNOB (Second Novel Omnipresent Blues) is Kurt Dinan, author of Don't Get Caught, available from Sourcebooks. Kurt is a high school English teacher living in Cincinnati.

Is it hard to leave behind the first novel and focus on the second?

My hope was always to write a sequel to Don't Get Caught, but the publisher said they wanted to see how sales went before committing to another. Knowing that meant I’d likely be waiting a year or more, I decided I had to move onto other characters, which, yeah, proved harder than I thought it would be. Luckily, I’d been taking notes for a different book, so I just threw myself into that. My head, however, kept returning to the world I’d established in DGC, and so I’d jot stuff down when it would come to me in case I ever use those characters again.

At what point do you start diverting your energies from promoting your debut and writing / polishing / editing your second?

Promoting a novel becomes a second job, or if you’re writing another novel and working a “real” job, a third job. I did a lot of preliminary promotional work prior to DGC coming out, but once it was out, I didn’t do too much that took away from working on the next book. I’m not sure how much control you have over the sales of your book, anyway.

I also go back to that great line from Searching for Bobby Fischer where someone says, “It's unsettling, isn't it? When you realize there are only so many things you can teach a child. And finally...they are who they are.” Eventually you have to move on, and I did that pretty quickly.

Your first book landed an agent and an editor, and hopefully some fans. Who are you writing the second one for? Them, or yourself?

It’s a terrible balancing act, right? You’re to write the book for yourself, but your agent and editor are thinking about the fans, so you have to take all of them into consideration and hope that somehow you hit that sweet spot where everyone is happy. I spent two years writing the follow-up to DGC, and my agent came back with, “great characters and great world, but this isn’t the story they deserve.”

So I’m starting again, which is frustrating, but you have to trust that the professionals know what they’re doing. You can write a book completely for yourself, but that doesn’t mean that anyone else will like it, so you have to learn to collaborate.

Is there a new balance of time management to address once you’re a professional author?

I’m not sure how and when other writer’s write, but once I sold DGC, my writing routine didn’t change all that much. Because of…well, life (four kids, full-time teaching job, etc.), I’ve had to carve out my writing time, and that means working from 3:30-5 in the morning. I don’t write full time like I’d like to, but if I did, I certainly wouldn’t be working those stupid hours. But you do what you can, right?

What did you do differently the second time around, with the perspective of a published author?

I’m a lot more patient with the writing process. I have a better understanding now that bad writing days come (and in some cases, really, really bad writing weeks), but it’s all part of the process and it shakes itself out eventually if you keep working at it. I’m better now at handling the frustration that comes with writing because I have some evidence that I can be successful at writing, even if I don’t believe it all the time.

Courtney Brandt On Always Being Alert for Inspiration

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today's guest for the WHAT is Courtney Brandt author of seven YA novels, including The Queen of England: Coronation. She also writes adult works under the pen name Ann Benjamin.

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

Promise not to laugh? I was out for my birthday in 2014 and had, to put it delicately, a few too many glasses of champagne. At some point the next morning, I was having a lie in, and as my brain was wandering, it focused on the topic of British royalty (as one does) and I somehow wondered what the United Kingdom might be without Queen Victoria. I was lucky enough to hold onto that thread, and sometime later began the first draft of what would become The Queen of England: Coronation. Ideas drop in like this from time to time, it’s just important to listen and be alert.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

The book was always going to be driven by my protagonist, Queen Juliette. Here is this poor girl, made Queen of England, with her country under attack and she really has no idea what she’s supposed to do. Juliette needed to find out who was behind the death of Victoria, and plan for her coronation. Those were the concrete plot points I had in place. From there, I was able to build in supporting characters and other plot points.

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

In this instance, I thought the coronation was going to serve as the final action in the book, only to be surprised when it ended up in the second act. How Juliette works through her ‘chaos coronation’ is the foundation for her real role as Queen. As much as I wanted to use the coronation as the grand finale, it wasn’t going to happen. In the second and third books of the trilogy, there’s been a bit of moving around, but for the most part, I’ve followed the original plot.

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

I’m fortunate in that ideas come to me all the time. I have three novels waiting to be written at the moment, and am still quite active in certain fandoms (I got my start by writing fanfiction).

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

Excellent question. For example, I usually write a novel a year, and I really thought 2018’s was going to be one I’ve had in my mind for two or three years (sorry, A.U.!). Then, out of nowhere, late last year a new, more timely idea, popped in my head and it’s going to be this year’s book. I’m looking forward to both projects, but there is something about my new novel that seems more relevant. An exception to this is when I’m working on a series…and tend to work those out before moving onto another project. However, I wrote my first series out of order, which I realize that makes almost no sense.

I have 8 cats (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

I have an old lady cat who has a basket on my desk. I’ve written in all kinds of environments, but for now, I love my desk top and a twenty-two year old Japanese bobtail. I also have a dear author friend who lives in Texas, quite a few hours behind me in Dubai. We don’t check in every day, but we touch base when big projects are nearing completion.