: Re: Are My Novels Middle-Grade or Young Adult? Having Trouble Figuring It Out I have written and thoroughly reviewed/edited three novels that I don't know if they would be marketed as Middle Grade

@LarsenBagley300

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Book 1: Young Adult, as your protaganist would be too old to relate to kids in middle or early high school (or even early middle school).

2 is probably Young Adult but could borderline be MR if you play your cards right... age wise it's probably on the cusp.

Book 3 is going to be reliant on what you classify book 2 as, and how close it is tonally, and alternatively. Since it's set in the same universe, it's dependent alot on how much it references the plot in Book 2 and characters and how closely the tone reflects (It's possible to have Book 2 be tonally darker than this one and thus one is for older teens while the other is for younger teens/pre-teens. Consider Harry Potter 1 vs. Harry Potter IV which the later is notably more mature than the former... when it was still in releases, it actually aged with the original target audience of Book 1 through the sequels).

Book 4 is plagiarism on the highest order. You know what you did wrong, and you shouldn't market it to anyone.

Keep in mind that books tend to get away with more graphic descriptions for kids than other media aimed at them (largely because to "see" the content you have to imagine it, so if a kid sees something really dark while reading, it's more on the kids imagination than the actual printed words... essentially, they are already "handling" the violence to a level they can handle, where a violent cartoon or movie locks the scale of violence in and leaves nothing to the imagination.).

To point, Compare Harry Potter, a highly successful book series that scaled with it's first readers age and maturity in content to the next most successful book series marketed to Middle Reader boys, Animorphs, which by all measures was a much more graphically violent book than even some of the worst violence in Harry Potter (Harry Potter was much more prone to villains killing named characters, but deaths were quick, clean, and painless while Animorphs killed very few named characters, but did not shy away from inflicting graphic and painfully described injuries that while they survived, clearly caused some PTSD as the books wore on. Many of the main characters were maimed, mutilated, eviscerated, or otherwise inflicted with injuries that made death more desirable (luckily, their ability to morph animals allowed them to heal any non-genetic injury so long as they lived through the process and within a 2 hour window... not that the morphing process was a pleasently described experience... and one character who knew about how it worked mechanically does say that the tech that pulls it off used to be painful, until a work around was found.) and it probably more realistically dealt with what happens to kids who are forced to fight in a hopeless guerilla war without any psychological support against an enemy that will given them some really sick trust issues. And while most on screen deaths are of the main villain's unnamed minions, they are often graphic and pretty much cannibalistic on most counts and most minions follow his orders out of rightfully stressed fear of the villain than any kind of respect or ideological common ground (Voldemort at least had some minions respecting him and agreeing with his cause.) and for much of the series, the main villain is at least tempered by his direct superior, who is much more pragmatic with her power... but he becomes nastier once he's freed from her authority.

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