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Managing different age groups for different works.

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Troglodytic Trouvère
Article Team
I'd like to hear some thoughts on managing different target audiences for different works. Specifically I'm talking about works that are targeted at different age groups. How would you go about ordering your website(s)? Marketing? Amazon pages? What considerations do you make and how do you segment your audience?

To get the ball rolling, imagine you're a self-published author and have one book (an adult noir for example) dealing with mature themes that are unsuitable for children, but have also written a children's book. You don't want the latter book's target audience to cross over into the former. How would you set things up to facilitate that? Would you simply add a content warning and leave it at that? Would you set up separate accounts/pages on book selling platforms? I'm interested to see how much this factors into your marketing.
 

pmmg

Myth Weaver
I would use pen names if I was crossing age barriers. I would not want my children's fiction to be mixed in with erotica...cause, well that would be awkward. Though I don't see myself as writing either.
 

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Troglodytic Trouvère
Article Team
Fair, those extremes would warrant it. What would be your general cut-off point pmmg ? Let's say you wrote a young adult book and a book for older audiences. Would that warrant different pen names, or is it only that particular extreme?
 

pmmg

Myth Weaver
I would probably want a different name if I was writing in different sections of a book store. Maybe not 100%, SciFi and fantasy seem close enough related. But I might want a different author name for a young adult than in SciFi, I am not sure.

I think I would draw a line at above and below about the same place the movie's do. I think my writing falls in the PG13 range, and sometimes can be R. I dont really write G rated stuff, but if I did finish and publish, and felt I had some room for something next, I might. I think my ideal audience would be the high-school to still young at heart ground. maybe 16-50 or such with a bell curve kind of shape for readers.

Someone early 20's, still going to action movies and playing Dungeons and Dragons...that's my crowd.

(Though I might have to ask, has my lines of delineation been shaped by the movie ratings system, or would it still seem a fair place without it? I dont know. Different people always fall somewhere on a sliding scale with age. Some are mature for their age and some less than mature... But what can you do? I just hope more than 10 people read it.)
 
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It depends a bit on how you want to brand yourself.

Common advice for Indie authors is to use a pen name for each sub-genre you write in. The logic goes that readers tend to stick to a single sub-genre, and that you don't want to confuse readers. They should know what to expect when they pick up a book from you. I know of some romance writers who use multiple pen names in this way. One for each type of romance they write.

Personally, I don't go that extreme (though I'm also not successful in monetary terms, so make of that what you will...). I would draw the line at "do you want readers to possibly transfer between your different subgenres or not?" If you don't, then use different pen names, and if you do, then use a single pen name. It's a personal choice, and very dependent on what you write.

For instance, Brandon Sanderson only uses his single name, and he's published everything from middle grade to adult using that name. However, he writes Fantasy (and Fantasy SciFi), and his writing style is such that it would be fine for a younger kid to read his adult stuff. A 13 year old might not understand all of the Stormlight Archive, but the language and story itself are fine for him.

Now, this would be different for George R.R. Martin I think. You don't want to give a 10 year old A Song of Ice and Fire, just because of the type of language. In that case I probably would use a pen name for children stuff.

Now, if you want specifics on how to do it, that's the easy part. Just fill in a different name in the "author" box when uploading the book to Amazon, and you're done. Same with a website. Just register a different domain and add stuff to the page. The names don't even have to be very different. Many authors simply add an initial to create a different pen name, or write their full name instead of initials + last name. Again though, that depends on whether you want to be found or not. If you write erotica and middle age books, then you probably want to make the names very different. If on the other hand you write two different types of romance you might not care if people figure out R. Donatus and Roderick Donatus are the same person.

Small word of warning, don't make 2 different Amazon accounts for the different pen names. It's against Amazon's KDP terms of service to have 2 accounts for 1 person, and they will terminate both of your accounts and never let you back in if you do this. Use 2 pen names under the same account.
 
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