I’ll never forget the first rejection I received from a literary agent. “This is a great premise,” she told me, speaking of my then-unpublished debut novel, The Witches of Willow Cove, “and the story is fun and fast paced. But what’s holding me back here is the age range of the book. I found myself wishing the characters were younger—11 or 12—and I wish this novel were more firmly rooted in the middle-grade realm, sticking to middle-grade topics, rather than skewing older.”
Like all...
As a father of two voracious readers, I know it’s not always easy finding books for tweens and teens. By the time my kids reached middle school, they’d already devoured many of the most popular middle grade books and series. They wanted more, but it seemed like their options for age-appropriate books between middle grade and young adult were limited.
In today’s publishing environment, tweens and teens transitioning from middle grade to young adult books often get lost in the shuffle. The...