To celebrate the launch of my first book, I recently wrote an essay exploring the importance of upper-middle grade fiction. You can read the entire article over at the Novel Novice website, but here's en excerpt:

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 “This is a great premise,” she told me, speaking of my then-unpublished debut novel, The Witches of Willow Cove, and the story is fun and fast paced.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 rejections, it stung. But it didn’t sting quite as much as you might expect, because if there was one thing I knew about my book, even as an unpublished author languishing in the slush pile, it was who I’d written it for: the tweens and younger teens who’ve started to outgrow traditional middle-grade books, but aren’t yet interested in the themes they encounter in older-skewing young adult novels. What this agent was telling me was that she didn’t get my book, not really, so we wouldn’t have been a good fit anyway.

Don’t get me wrong—she was far from alone. I heard a lot of variations on this theme. “For one thing,” said another agent, “I think this falls squarely between middle grade and young adult fiction, which is a very tricky place to be. Characters in young adult are usually 16 and up,  and in middle grade, they’re often 12.”

“Would you consider aging down your characters and resubmitting it?” asked another. Then there was the agent who suggested I take the opposite approach and revise it into a young adult novel “with more sexual tension between the leads.” Which, just… no. That was not what I was going for at all.

But the message, no matter the delivery, usually boiled down to something like this: Nobody knows where to shelve a book with a 13-year-old protagonist, let alone one like mine that’s the first in a trilogy and will see the characters age to 14 in book two and 15 in book three. Where do you put such a series in a binary world that defines middle grade as 8 to 12 and young adult as 16 to 18? The answer, of course, is upper-middle grade. 

This post originally appeared on Novel Novice. Read the rest of it there.