I often struggle with who I’m writing for in my stories. Or more accurately, who I should be targeting with them in order to get published. Outside of a few funny adult picture books like “All My Friends Are Dead” and “Go the F**k to Sleep, I personally haven’t seen a huge market for them, so I’ve tried to write for a younger audience.
However, since I don’t have kids and don’t really interact that much with humans under 22, I really can’t help but think of adults when writing my stories and the finished product is often something that isn’t exactly a children’s story and also isn’t really a story for adults. A book marketer’s dream, no doubt!
And I sometimes get down about my inability to just focus on a target age group and write a damn story for them, but then think back to Stephen Colbert’s 2012 interview of the late Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, in which Sendak said, “I don't write children's books. I write, and somebody says, 'That's for children.'“
I love that. I believe his point was that if there is a story that doesn’t yet exist and you really want it to, then write it! But don’t write it for children or teenagers or adults. Just write the story the way you want to write it and leave it up to the book marketers or the world to figure out who it is for.
Now, the hard part is that unlike Maurice Sendak, I’ve never had access to a publishing firm’s book marketers or even an agent, so I need to convince people of influence that a certain target market will buy my book. But if I truly have a great story to share, I think my odds of doing that are probably higher than if I were to dumb down my story to appeal to four-year-olds. Because you know what? Adults are often the ones reading those stories to their kids and I’m sure they’d love to come across one with heart and humor and a theme that they can relate to on a deeper level, even if their kid is just focused on the funny picture of balloon flying up to the moon.