: Re: How to figure out what my target readers are? I write something between fantasy and sci-fi. But if someone would ask me what age group, target group I'm writing for I wouldn't know how to

@Moriarity138

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Target audience is all about selling the book, and marketing the book. It doesn't necessarily need to be a concern to you at all when writing it, especially if it affects your artistic decisions. But you do need to figure it out to sell it.

The question is who would be most likely to buy this book, and how do you convince your potential publisher of that fact? Here in the United States, fantasy books (that aren't epic fantasy) tend to be marketed towards children because there's a healthy youth fantasy market. In Britain, there is a strong adult fantasy market, so sometimes the same book is marketed for adults over there, and kids over here. This sometimes leads to situations such as the Golden Compass series, which was written for adults, and arguably inappropriate for children, but which had a child protagonist, and was targeted towards children on this side of the ocean.

So, if you're writing in America, and you're writing a fantasy book, and it doesn't have anything in it inappropriate for a six-year old, your target audience is de facto youth. The actual age will depend on the complexity of your word choice and plot, the age of the protagonist, and the length of the book (longer means older). Your target audience is probably a couple of years older than the grade-level the reading complexity tests at (people don't want to work too hard in their entertainment reading), and a couple of years younger than the protagonist (children tend to identify with a protagonist just a little bit older than them, it's aspirational). If your protagonists are grownups, your target audience is probably teens.

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