Coming September 15th!
Middle grade books are one of the hardest genre books to market. How do you find the 8-12 year-olds and put books into their hands?
The problem is that your audience doesn’t buy books. Though kids increasingly have access to “loose change,” they don’t usually buy books. Instead, parents, grandparents, teachers, and librarians hold the purse strings. You must appeal to the dual audience of kids and the adult in their life. It’s complicated.
In schools, teachers work hard to develop lesson plans around certain books and then reuse those lessons for years. In one local school, every third grader reads Charlotte’s Web. And they’ve done that for a couple decades. The prep work for Charlotte’s Web is done, it’s fun, and it’s easy to implement. Why should they replace a known winner with an unknown author? It would be SO much extra work!
That’s what we have to fight against, the classic books, the dual audience, and the usual indifference to new titles. How then, do you build an audience for a middle grade novel/series?
First, it’s hard and can take a long time to build a reputation. Some school librarians say that authors need ten or twenty books before they start to consistently notice and consider buying their books. Of course, there are instant successes, but generally the need for a backlist holds true. You will likely have some lean years at first. But if you persevere, it’s possible to build a reputation, and thus, a career.
Understanding that it’s a long-term process, there are still things you can do right now. The rest of this post is for paid subscribers about strategies to help build your audience for middle grade books. Warning: This is a long post.