I got an interesting email this morning over breakfast. Apparently KDP Amazon has added a new feature or two which is supposed to help market your e-books. You can now select an age-range and (if you’re marketing your books to schools) a grade-range for your works. The former goes from 0 to 18+, the latter from “Board books” and “Picture books” to “Teen and young adult chapter books”. The people who wrote the email recommend you generally space your minimum and maximum ages or grades within 3 to 4 years.
I have to say, it sounded intriguing and decided to try it. Neither the email nor the new options on KDP (listed where you can put and change your e-book’s general information) list how exactly these ranges help get your books to your customers, but I think Amazon probably knows the ages of its customers, and can target books to their customers based on age and past buying experiences. In any case, I thought I’d give it a try and see if anything happens.
The one thing I can see wrong with this new feature is that they don’t go higher than 18+ or “Teen and young adult chapter books”. It would be convenient to have options that go higher, seeing as 18+ is a pretty wide range and I’m sure plenty of people would like to put a range on their books that’s closer to college-level or higher.
Then again, this is the early stages of these options and there’s room for improvements. Maybe in a few months they’ll adjust the ranges to allow for more diverse ranges.
In the meantime, I’m looking forward to seeing how author’s book sales are affected by this. Will you be doing these age ranges? Do you see any problems with these new options? And do you think they’ll affect sales that much? Let me know, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors 
I didn’t receive the email yet. Is this something you must do or optional?
It’s optional, though if you want to try, I say go ahead.
The email did say that it was for children’s books. That’s the reason why the age range doesn’t go beyond 18.
True, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it for books not meant for kids.
This feature has actually been available for a long time. I set the ranges on all my books well over 6 months ago. Amazon must have recently decided to promote the feature, hence this week’s emails.
Weird. Why have I never noticed them before?
Not sure. I can’t remember how I found out about it though. The fields are on the first page in KDP when you are updating book details. Just below the categories field.
Interesting. I wonder if anyone else never noticed them before?
I did, but never bothered. Because I don’t write children’s books. So I didn’t even put 18+ to the titles that are labeled “adult” on Smashwords… 😉
I’m starting to think of undoing my age range features for one or two of my books.
I noticed the age option, but I never messed with it because I don’t write children or YA books. I think that’s why it’s easy to miss. 🙂
I think this is a good way to help categorize your book for the right age group. There’s nothing worse than having a gruesome or sexually explicit novel next to a bunch of children’s books. I hope this helps Amazon put the books in the correct age groupings. Maybe this is their effort in letting authors know this option is there in case they missed it.
That might be it.