Almost everyone who writes something and sees it published wants someone to read it. For example, I would like you to read this blog. Everything we write that we share exists in a relationship: you and the reader.
A writer who does not have an audience or does not know their audience is reminiscent of me standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and calling “hello!” I listen to my voice echo, but I really don’t know if anyone has heard me or if my efforts have benefited any more than simply echoing off the canyon walls. Especially in this age of over proliferation of written material, I’m not sure the analogy falls far from the truth.
For this reason, I believe every writer should know their audience for each project. The better they know their audience, the more people who would be interested in this topic, this author is likely to reach. It may seem odd, but if you write for everyone, you get lost in the busyness of media oversaturation and end up writing for no one. If you write for a specific niche, you write for a larger audience than you could have gotten otherwise.
Knowing your audience does impose constraints, just as preparing dinner for someone who is gluten-intolerant limits your choice of what to serve. Yet, to have this guest over, you choose to accept the constraints. It’s the same with writing, if you expect any readers who are proverbially gluten-intolerant to “eat” it. You have to “fix” what someone wants to “eat.”
Some writers get all bent out of shape when you tell them they need to tailor their work for their audience. They think it will limit them. They believe it will cheapen their authenticity. The truth is that the story itself will limit and define your audience. A clear story has a clear readership. Always has. Always will. Knowing your audience strengthens you because it strengthens your story. Knowing your audience is not about constraints, but rather about clarity of story followed by connection with those who are looking for that fare.
A complaint I often hear from agents at the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference is that when they ask someone participating in an Agent Roundtable who this book is for, far too many say, “Oh, it’s for anyone who loves a good mystery.” Where do you put that on the bookshelf, or what Amazon tags do you use? I don’t think Amazon has a tag that says, “Good Mystery for Everyone Who Loves Mystery.” I have not seen that tag. A defined audience sharpens your message and your sales. You must be specific to find your particular audience when they do an online search.
The flip side is that the tag must fit the story. Readers buy books or read stories or poems that they anticipate will match their pleasures. Readers have different things they are looking for, and look for other things at various times. This could be to be seen in the story, to be entertained, or to be challenged. A person looking for entertainment certainly doesn’t want a headache challenge. They’ll put the story down. You, the writer, gained nothing. Decide what you’re writing, this particular thing, is supposed to do for the person reading it. Then you develop the following.
Publishing is all about communication. Agents, editors, publishers, booksellers, and readers all want to know the same thing: who is going to buy this book? If you can’t answer that, they will collectively answer for you: no one. Keep the power. You define who your writing is for. Stick to that when you are writing. Stick to that when you are selling. Stick to that when you are marketing.
Before you write that first word, unless you want to waste everyone’s time, including your own, define your reader, not in the abstract, but in specifics. I recommend being very specific. What is the age, gender, education, or geography? All these shape the tone, vocabulary, and cultural references in the work. Writing for twelve-year-olds differs greatly from writing for graduate students. Define interests, fears, and aspirations. Are your readers seeking escape, validation, instruction, or confrontation? It’s essential to know. Has your intended reader read hundreds of novels in your genre? Are they new to the genre? Each would expect different things. Will your target audience appreciate subversion of the genre, or will they be repelled because of the lack of respect for tradition? Ease of reading is also a factor. Is your likely reader going to be speed-reading on a subway, distractedly reading on a beach, savoring chapters at night before bed? This will determine the words, vocabulary, sentence structure, and paragraph length, as well as rhythm and pacing. The clearer the picture you have of your reader, the clearer your book will be to the one who picks it up.
Tailoring your writing for a particular audience is not the same as watering it down or limiting yourself; it’s about crafting a message that resonates with that audience. The best writers elevate their readers rather than condescend to them. Knowing your audience, writing for them, and tailoring your story to meet their needs is your responsibility and a service to your readers. So, how do you write toward reader resonance without feeling like you are writing toward reduction?
First, you must always respect your reader’s intelligence. Over-inflated literary writers think they need to talk down or simplify stories when they are forced to write genre fiction. Far from the truth. The same happens when genre writers try to write literary fiction and feel that the secret is to write it in a hoity-toity manner. Honesty and respect are the solutions in both cases. Don’t oversimplify out of fear or your misconceptions. Trust your reader to rise to your occasion regardless of what you write and, when you do write, write honestly as yourself within a conversation with them.
To continue this point, when writers oversimply, it is often less about clarity and more about fear: fear that readers won’t follow, or worse, that the readers will not care. But readers, certainly not me, don’t come to stories to be patronized; we (I) come to be trusted and given the benefit of the doubt that I can follow. To respect a reader’s intelligence is to honor the fact that they can handle nuance, grapple with complexity, and ironically live inside ambiguity. However, you must know the reader to understand what they can handle. Respecting your reader doesn’t mean being obscure for obscurity’s sake, but it means refusing to flatten (dumb down) your ideas into something safe and shallow. The most significant works, whether novels, essays, or memoirs, invite readers, a specific type of reader, to dance. You set the rhythm, and because they are fond of this type of music, per se, you trust them to learn the steps, incorporating your originality and fresh takes. Of course, sometimes the reader will stumble if you are pushing the edge, but most of the time, they will soar at your ingenuity. In either case, readers will feel valuable and valued because you saw them, wrote for them, and believed that, even when you stretched convention, you were consistent with them, and you thought they were capable of following. No matter what you write, respecting someone’s intelligence means offering, without rushing to explain it all away, all the standard conventions of layered meaning, subtle metaphor, and moral tension, if indeed you must explain at all. When writing for your audience, you don’t need to hold their hand at every turn. You need to see the reader. Give your reader, the one you have identified, space to discover, interpret, and arrive at their own thoughts and conclusions. Readers who feel trusted and respected because you wrote this particular work just for them will reward you, the writer, with deeper attention, loyalty, and the sense that they are not arbitrary consumers, but selected participants in your work. That, in itself, makes the reader feel really special. Nothing is better than getting an email from a reader who says, “I just feel you wrote that story for me.” This is the essence of identifying your audience.
Second, respect your readers’ limits. You think you know your audience, but never assume that they have knowledge that they might not have. It’s your job as the writer to build the bridge. When readers read that first line of your story, they bring two kinds of limits with them: one is cognitive, and the other is emotional. Cognitive limits refer to the amount of new information that can be processed simultaneously. Emotional limits refer to the intensity that can be handled at any given moment. Respecting your readers’ two limits does not mean diluting your work. It means sequencing it in a way that they can follow and feel naturally, without allowing them to lose their place in the story. Knowing your reader gives you an idea of their capabilities, which, for example, vary between writing for middle-grade, YA, or older adults. Comprehension in any group varies. In all cases, with the reader in mind, introduce only the minimum needed to make each beat unfold. If needed, remind the reader lightly, still keeping with the forward movement of the story, but don’t become pedantic. Re-explaining loses the reader’s attention, but an echo restores the reader’s orientation without coming across as a lecture. As you move forward, with your reader’s limits in mind, add one new thing at a time at the rate that this reader can follow. Keep new characters, new settings, and new concepts in their own paragraph introduction. You will know that you have assumed incorrectly about your reader when one must stop and ask, “Wait, who is…?” or “What was that again?” If you have beta readers who are in your target demographic and provide feedback on these moments, consider timing the revelation differently.
The third technique involves, with your reader in mind, balancing surprise with familiarity. Readers crave both. This is why you should never write to a formula. By knowing your audience, you honor them by delivering what they came for (genre promises, emotional shifts, logical development) with the thrill that comes from unfolding your story with fresh forward movement unique to your voice. Surprise and difference never mean randomness. It has to fit. You make your surprises in recontextualization, revealing new patterns from previous details that do not break your story’s promise, which was probably revealed in your first sentence.
Three real-world examples of how identifying your audience ahead of time helps clarify your vision and keep the content finite. A fantasy novelist might assume readers are new to her invented world and may over-explain, boring seasoned fantasy readers. The danger is that if she underexplains and writes for avid fantasy readers, she’s going to lose curious beginners. Knowing the audience ahead of time allows the writer to determine what to include or exclude. A nonfiction writer addressing entrepreneurs’ needs to decide if he is writing for those who are at the dreaming-in-a-garage stage of their career or writing for CEOs managing multinational teams. Each of these demographics, which the author identifies before writing their first word, requires different choices within each step of their writing. It could be the same topic, but how it is explained and the tone taken will be completely different. Even a memoirist needs to identify their audience in advance. How he might write about grief will vary depending on whether he wants to convey raw intimacy (to the audience of those newly grieving) or offer retrospective wisdom (to those seeking distance and meaning). The audience will always be the defining guardrails that the writer must stay within, and the writer must identify those guardrails before writing the first word.
When you stop trying to write for everyone and instead choose to write for a specific audience, your storytelling will transform and become more focused. The story will gain shape. It will sear with focus. It will tremble with urgency that hits the desired reader right where it counts. By identifying the audience, you, as the reader, are no longer shouting in the void, but rather are conversing directly with someone who most needs to hear you. This type of identification and intimacy builds a loyal reader base. These are the readers who will finish this book and then come back to you for more. They are being heard. They reward you by buying your books. Each book of yours that they read, if your target is finite, will make them walk away feeling that “This book was written for me.”
In your current work-in-progress, have you identified who your book is for? Can you easily explain to yourself who would read it? Name this audience. Define them. Then, as you write, claim them. Good writing honors three truths at once: your story, your voice, and the specific reader’s need. Neglect any of the three and you risk falling into generalities and disconnection. Embrace all three. Calculating all three in advance by identifying your reader allows you to create works that not only exist and are available on the shelves, but also matter to those who need them most.
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