When you start a project you pick a format type, a target audience, a genre and usually one or more sub-genres. These are not filing labels. They change what the AI generates and they decide who finds your book in the library afterwards, so they are worth a moment's thought rather than a guess.

Format type

What kind of thing you are making: book or novel, short story, children's book, graphic novel, comic, webtoon, or a script.

This is the most load-bearing choice on the screen because it sets the physical shape of the project. A webtoon gets a tall vertical canvas with no spine. A comic gets print dimensions. A children's book gets landscape or square spreads. Changing your mind later usually means rebuilding, so pick deliberately.

Target audience

The age band the work is written for: 2 to 5, 6 to 9, 9 to 12, 13 to 17, or adult.

This does more than any other field:

• It steers the writing. Vocabulary, sentence length, chapter length, subject matter and how much is left implied all shift with the audience.
• It steers the art. Younger audiences get softer, clearer, warmer illustration.
• It controls who can find your book. Readers filter the library by audience, and parental controls and the BookZeta Kids app both work off this field.

Choose the audience you are genuinely writing for, not the one you would like to reach. A book tagged 6 to 9 that reads like adult fiction disappoints everyone who finds it, and a genuinely adult book tagged for children is a content problem.

Genre and sub-genres

The genre sets the conventions: what kind of story this is and what a reader of it expects. Sub-genres narrow it, and you can pick more than one.

Sub-genres are the ones that do the useful work. "Fantasy" tells the AI very little. "Fantasy, cozy, low-stakes" produces a completely different book from "Fantasy, grimdark, military." The more precisely you narrow, the less generic the draft.

Two habits worth having:

• Be specific rather than broad. Broad genre tags produce average output, because average is what "fantasy" means across everything ever written.
• Do not pick sub-genres that fight each other. Cozy and grimdark in the same list gives the model contradictory instructions and you get mush.

How they affect discovery

Everything above becomes a filter in the library. Readers browse by format type, genre, sub-genre and audience, so these fields are effectively your book's shelf position.

Two consequences:

• Accurate tagging finds the right readers. A cozy mystery tagged as a thriller reaches people who wanted a thriller and will rate it accordingly.
• Specific tagging beats broad tagging. Fewer books compete in a narrow sub-genre, so a well-tagged book is easier to surface than one filed under a category containing everything.

The same logic applies when you publish elsewhere. See Amazon KDP keywords and categories.

Changing them later

Genre, sub-genres and audience are metadata and can be edited after the fact, which changes where your book appears in the library.

What editing them does not do is rewrite content that has already been generated. Changing the audience from adult to 6 to 9 on a finished book relabels it, it does not make it appropriate. If you got the audience wrong, fix the book, not just the tag.

Format type is the exception: it is structural, not metadata, and it is not something to change on a project in progress.

Quick guidance

• Not sure of the audience? Pick the age of the reader you are picturing, then check a comparable book in the library.
• Not sure of the genre? Name three published books yours would sit beside, and use what they are shelved as.
• Tempted to tag broadly to reach more people? It reliably has the opposite effect, in the library and in stores.

Next: Creating your first project and Writing a story description that gets good results.