Rethinking the age category of the target audience.

Last Saturday I went to a party of my 11 year old nieces birthday party. She invited some of her classmates (both boys and girls) and I observed them during the day.

Some knowledge I got out of this observation:
- 11 year old girls are more grown up than 11 year old boys
- girls prefer to play social games (truth or dare, talking/gossiping, games about celebrities and talentshows)
- boys prefer to play soccer and other games
- girls of the age of 10/11 read books that are about puberty, school, holidays, animals.

Later I read an article, Ijsfontijn wrote. They researched what kind of games are interesting to play for what age. (You can read the article in Dutch here). It turned out that kids of the age of 10-12 like to improve their abilities, having control and taking desicions. Stategy-games are perfect for this age. 10-12 Year olds don't want to be looked at as children anymore. So they're not interested in reading 'children books' anymore, they want to read books for teens.
10-12 year olds like to play with a lot of other children, the more the better. So if they would play something on the Ipad, they would prefer to do this together with as many as other people/kids.

So it turned out that maybe 10-12 year olds wasn't really my target audience. (It could be a nice challenge to design an interactive book for them, but I don't want to have another challenge on my hand, I want to choose a target audience that is perfect for the kind of book I want to make, so that I can focus on the challenge of creating an interactive childrens book itself).


So ofcourse my question now was: what IS my target audience?
I looked back at my previous research and at Ijsfontijns research.
I don't want a to young target audience, I want a target audience that is busy developing their reading skills, because these kids are the most interested in reading and experiencing a story. It turns out that children of the age of 7 to 8 are really attrackted to hero's and rolemodels (with might and power), these characters trigger the imagination. These kids are more aware of the difference between fantasy and reality. They are also smart enough to understand a story, instead of just watching actions in a scene. So I my new target audience is going to be children of the age of 7 and 8.