Writing: Targeting Your Market

This is my post for Day 17 of the Author Blog Challenge. (I have been following each day's prompts, but the past two or three prompts started to get mixed up. I would read one day's prompt only to see it being referred to as a different day's prompt in the next e-mail, so I'm a little confused on what days I am supposed to use which prompts. I have just been doing each one in order and hoping that it is on the correct day.)




Describe the market for your book – to the tiniest detail (e.g., childless divorced women past age 50 who want to remarry). Why that demographic? How do you connect with them to market to them?


For my fiction novels, I am targeting the Young Adult market. Several of them are written for the older age group within that audience, older teens and 20-somethings. They are aimed at girls; all of my main characters are girls. Of course, as many have noticed with recent YA books, these books often appeal to married women with children and 30-something single women and others. The Young Adult market is becoming wide open and appealing to a much wider variety of audiences. My first 5 children were all girls, so I spent decades raising all girls before I gave birth to my boys. I think this is a big reason why writing for female markets has always come so easily to me.


Some of my fiction novels are marketed to younger teens, and that is the very specific audience they are aimed at. They will hopefully appeal to 12 to 16 year olds. This is different from the children's chapter books that I am writing. Those books are aimed at 8 to 12 year olds. My children's chapter books are aimed towards girls, so far, in that all of my main characters are female.  My children who are of the age to read these books are girls and that is why female characters have come so easily to me.


I have also written some children's picture books. Some of them are aimed at very young children, from 2 to 4 years old and some of them are aimed at slightly older children, from 4 to 6 years old. I am still working on honing my craft when it comes to writing picture books. There is a lot more to the genre than one might notice at first glance. The ideas for the picture books came to me through inspiration from my children. As a mother of 7, I have been given loads of inspiration from my children over the years. I used to read my children stories at bedtime (when they were young) and still do. Sometimes, I would make up a story to tell them instead of reading them a book. They loved these "made-up stories" best of all and frequently asked me for them instead.


I do have an idea for a children's chapter book for boys, but as I am working on so many other writing projects at the moment, I have set this idea to the side for now and will re-visit it later, when more of my other projects are complete. The idea came from my 5 year old son. He asked me to create a superhero to write about. In a few years, he will be reading chapter books, so I came up with a superhero to write a story about for a chapter book.


My non-fiction books is aimed at anyone who wants to lose weight and live a healthy lifestyle. There is no specific age group, as I know from experience that there are people from all walks of life who need to change their eating and exercise habits.


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