Behind the Curtain - Writing Advice
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If you've spent much time here in the Behind the Curtain section of DOF, you've probably got a pretty good feel for how I think when it comes to the economic aspects of being a writer, and one of the chief rules I think every writer should live by is the concept of maximizing the size of your audience.
Now I understand that we all have certain areas that we love to write in, and I'm not proposing that you abandon what you love to turn out something you hate, but that you think will appeal to everyone over the age of six.
Instead I'm trying to say that when faced with two routes, both of which you fancy equally, neither of which will drive away your core audience, why not pick the one that might give your work broader appeal. From a standpoint paying your bills, you'd be better off with a book that has an audience of a million people and which only gets 25% market penetration than a book that gets 90% penetration of a market that is only 10,000 people.
I know, it's an overly-simplistic model, and it's an awfully basic concept anyways, but if you really watch, you'll be surprised how many books you see that get rave reviews among a very tiny segment of the population, which have perfectly targeted their audience, but which ultimately never really generate the sales that would have been possible in a larger market.
I've noticed a trend recently that I think is worth mentioning in relation to this discussion. Namely, more and more people are reading YA books or children's books, and it's a phenomena that goes beyond just Harry Potter. I seem to run into more and more people who are reading Twilight, or the Mortal Instruments or something else that is primarily targeted at teens, but which has them completely captivated.
I'm not really sure what the driver is. Possibly there are more struggling adult readers than we like to acknowledge, and these individuals have finally realized that YA stories can be immensely entertaining without making one feel like the village idiot. Alternately, maybe more and more adults are finding the level of sex, violence or profanity in 'adult' books are getting to be more than they want to deal with, and they've found a kind of safe haven with younger readers. It may be as simple there having been a bigger ratio of really good new YA authors as compared to new authors of other segments lately, or it could be something else that hasn't even crossed my mind yet.
Whatever the reason, I'm starting to get the feeling that YA books have a much bigger audience than what they did a decade ago, and I think that's something that as authors we'd do well to keep in mind. A clean, entertaining story has decent odds right now of crossing over sales to adults. Most adults novels I've read lately on the other hand have little chance of ever crossing over to younger readers. In decades past this might not have been a very big factor to consider, but with the amount of disposable income young adults have in today's world they can sustain an author's career even if the books never manage to obtain any crossover success.
If there isn't a need to exempt a segment of your potential audience, by all means, keep them in the game and you may very well see the payoff in better sales. For now that seems to mean keep YA's as part of your audience. As market trends change you may find that your audience changes, but the concept of keeping your market broad will remain a fundamentally sound concept.