10–13
Upper middle grade
Typical hero: 11–13
School-shaped life, parental presence, cleaner language. Not YA, however dark the theme.
Young adult fiction studio
Write the book a teenager cannot put down.
Young adult fiction is not a reading age you write down to. It is a pressure chamber: first love, first power, first time the world refuses to be fair — told at the speed a fifteen-year-old actually lives.
Who it is for
The age band is a promise, not a prison.
Retailers, librarians and imprints still sort by age. Get this wrong and a perfectly good novel is shopped as the wrong book. Get it right and every later choice — voice, heat, word count, cover — snaps into place.
12–18 (core 14–18)
Young adult
Typical hero: 15–18
The protagonist is a teenager whose decisions now have adult-sized consequences. This is the desk you are sitting at.
18–25
New adult
Typical hero: 18–24
Campus, first job, first flat, first tax return. Shelf it as adult or NA — not as YA with a drinks licence.
The studio
Four drawers. Open one.
01
Sub-genres
Fantasy, dystopia, contemporary, romantasy, horror — what each shelf actually wants.
02
Tropes
Chosen ones, found families, love triangles: tools, not crutches, and how to turn them.
03
Craft
Word counts, voice, first pages, and how to keep a teenager reading past lights-out.
04
Publishing
Authors, imprints, queries, and how to position a book for a house or for yourself.
Companion studios
The rest of the workshop.
Word count at a glance
Length is a market fact.
| Lane | Typical range | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Contemporary realistic | 55,000–80,000 | Voice-led; extra length needs extra event, not extra mood. |
| Romance | 60,000–85,000 | Relationship is the plot; keep the social world in frame. |
| Mystery / thriller | 70,000–90,000 | Clueing and set-pieces need room; still cut the tour of the school. |
| Horror | 60,000–85,000 | Dread prefers compression. If it is long, it should be a siege. |
| Historical | 70,000–95,000 | Research should not inflate the page count. Texture, not lectures. |
| Science fiction | 70,000–100,000 | One big idea, fully paid for. Series bibles belong in a drawer. |