I’ve been working on uploading Varlandria to IngramSpark this week. (It’s available now, by the way!) This online service distributes my novel everywhere that books are sold, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org, as well as bookstores and libraries.

It’s a great service, but I’ve been having an issue. There’s only two options for audience categories: Middle Grade or Young Adult. I need a third choice because Varlandria falls right between these two age groups. That’s where Young Teen Lit comes in. (Check out the link for a terrific group advocating for this new category of books.)

Middle Grade books, like The Secrets of Shadywoods, are written for children, ages 8-12, in upper elementary school. These novels are usually between 30,000-50,000 words and have main characters between the ages of 10-13. The stories often focus on the characters’ immediate world, their friends, and their family.

Young Adult fiction is written for readers between the ages of 13 and 18, in grades 7th through 12th. YA books feature main characters between 15 and 18 years old and typically have a word count of 50,000-75,000. These stories include more mature subject matter and are often told from the protagonist’s point of view.

What about books for the kids that are ages 12-14? Oftentimes, the kids in this age range can be too old for Middle Grade adventures and too young for the mature themes in Young Adult. These readers need books with 13 and 14 year old protagonists and stories involving mystery, action, adventure, or romance— all geared toward young teens.

When middle school readers go to the bookstore or the public library, they usually have two choices: the kid section or the Young Adult section. Most 7th and 8th graders don’t want to walk around the board books and little chapter books to find the shelves of Middle Grade selections. Also, Middle Grade doesn’t necessarily mean middle school; it means grades 3-6. So, that leaves some middle school readers wandering around the YA section, trying to find books that are appropriate for their age level.

As I uploaded my book to IngramSpark and entered the metadata required, I had to choose between Juvenile Fiction/Ages 0-12 and YA/ages 13-18. Since Varlandria would appeal mostly to the Young Teen Lit crowd of 12-14 year old readers, I chose the younger of the two and entered the highest available age range in that category— ages 11-12, grades 5-6. Sadly, that labels the novel only for those ages in the online market and doesn’t indicate that older readers would enjoy it as well.

Hopefully there will be a new category for Young Teen Lit created in the future. For now, I’m just putting my newest book baby out into the world and trusting that it will find its readers.