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When you set out to really entertain adults as well as kids, your audience is basically anybody who is breathing.

I've grown up with my audience; they're my age or older. Not a lot of kids are coming to see me.

If my musical tastes are continuing to grow up, and I am not really too interested in the music that my kids listen to, then I assume that the audience is doing the same.

If your audience is young, it'd be youth culture, if your audience is older, it'd be older people, if it were senior citizens, it'd be senior citizen issues. So you try and hit the target audience.

The kind of audience I'm speaking to is a very wide range of people.

Somewhere in this process, I begin reading and showing my book to my audience. When I say my audience, I mean a single imaginary child who is a blend of myself as a young person, the students in my wife's classroom of first- through third-graders, and the students from two classrooms I visit regularly in the Bronx, New York.

I always figured there would be a kid audience and an adult audience, and there is. That's true for 'Hunger Games' and 'Twilight' and 'Harry Potter.' And 'Maximum Ride,' for sure. In particular what happens is a lot of parents share the books with their kids, and the mom has read it, and the kids, and they talk about it.

I tend not to think about audience when I'm writing. Many people who read 'The Giver' now have their own kids who are reading it. Even from the beginning, the book attracted an audience beyond a child audience.

Youngsters are the most discerning audience. They want entertainment, they want issues.

What I am finding now is that my audience is getting younger as I get older, which is a very good thing as you know - you don't want them to get older as you get older.