How to Identify Your Audience
How do you define the audience for the book you’re writing?
Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorite 20th century writers. He famously listed his eight rules for creative writing, and they’re all worth taking a look at. His seventh rule states: “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”
This is the foundation of our approach.
A book that tries to please everyone will please no one. A book that targets one specific person will please many.
Let me simplify and round out the rule just a little bit. When defining an audience for your novel project:
Write for one person, who is real, and who is not yourself.
You’re going to choose one person who exists in the real world, and it can’t be you.
You don’t have to dedicate the book to this person. In fact, no one ever has to know who you chose. But in your mind’s eye, who are you writing the book for? What one person would be the perfect reader?
When you choose one person, you can now ask questions like, “Would this person find this plot element interesting?” or “Would this person be offended by this content?” or “Would this person laugh out loud at this gag?”
The ability to ask those questions and get an answer (even if it’s an imaginary answer) is invaluable as you develop your story and craft scenes.
Let’s break this rule down into three one parts: 1) One person; 2) Who is real; 3) Who is not yourself.
Choose One Person
You must choose only one person.
Oftentimes we approach something like “defining an audience,” we begin to think in demographics. We might say something like, “my primary audience is 24-30 year old college educated white women.”
Tell me, what do 24-30 year old college educated white women like? You might answer something like “Starbucks” or “Instagram” and that’s true only in a vague sort of way. Realistically, thinking about a group like this will tell us more about your prejudices about the group than it will expose any helpful truth for your book project.
By the same token, what do 24-30 year old college educated white women find offensive? What do they find funny? Who knows?!
This is a huge group of people, and it’s not homogenous. Lots of different answers could be true. In that group, there are women who use profanity and those that don’t. There are women who stay at home to raise their kids and women who go to work every day. There are Democrats and Republicans, libertarians and communists.
As an author, choosing to write a book for a demographic has limited value, at best.
So why do we do that? Why do we start with demographics? I believe it’s because that’s what we’ve seen large corporations do.
Demographic categories work for corporate entities and political campaigns because they can follow that up with tons of market research. After CocaCola decides they want to sell more Coke Zero to middle-aged black men, they’ll spend tens of thousands of dollars on market research to identify a few core commonalities among that target.
When a political candidate sees that they’re trailing among female Hispanic voters, they’ll spend tens of thousands of dollars on polling and research to find a few talking points that they can draw out.
As authors, we could spend a lot of money on market research to find a sort of average position for this or that, but we don’t have that kind of time or budget, and those answers would still only be so helpful.
A politician or a corporation is trying to vaguely appeal to a large group of people in a kind of general way. We’re trying to touch someone’s heart, so we’re going to have to get more specific than that.
We need to know way more than just their top three political issues, we need to know their sense of humor, what outrages them on a microscopic level, and what they picture when someone says the word “living room” among a thousand other things. Can you imagine the expense of that kind of market research?
It’s nearly impossible to determine those kinds of things about a group, but when you choose one person, you can ask those important questions.
When you do that, you’re not limiting your audience. You will expand it.
When you think about your friend Susan and you write it to her sense of humor, you’re going to write a book for people who think farts are funny and border collies are annoying. You’re going to write a book for people who think that classic corvettes are cooler than lamborghinis, and that politics are stupid until somebody starts talking about school board policy.
Ironically, that’s a huge group of people
Susan is incredibly unique. She’s the only one like her. But in a global marketplace with hundreds of millions of readers, there are 1,000 people in the world who are exactly like her, and there are 10,000 people that are super similar, and there are 100,000 people who are very very close. And that’s enough to move a book.
If you aim for the group, you’ll never hit the one. But if you aim for the one, surprisingly, you’ll usually hit the group.
Choose a person who is real
Choose someone you actually know to be your target reader.
Years ago, when I started teaching this, I encouraged people to make someone up. We’d walk through a character exercise to develop a fictional “target reader.”
Unfortunately, no matter how much you develop that fiction target reader, they’re never complete. They’re never real. You could spend hours thinking about them and creating them, but there will still be gaps.
And gaps mean just making it up. And that defeats the point.
Choosing a real person is going to achieve the highest consistency, and the least wiggle room as you consider what you’re writing.
If I choose to write something for my friend Trent, he’s a real person. Even if they don’t know all of the answers to my questions about my story and the content, those answers do exist. I can extrapolate based on real things that I do know to make a good guess, just like when we hang out I can make a joke with a high degree of certainty that he’ll laugh. I don’t have to poll his interests first, I know enough about him to reasonably extrapolate what he’ll like or what he’ll find offensive.
As a bonus, if I really needed to know something, I could call him. Hey Trent, would you find this type of joke funny? Would you find this part of the story offensive? Do you find people who chew bubblegum relatable?
Choosing a real person will save you a lot of time and trouble, and your target will be far more clear.
And if you don’t know anyone in your target audience, that’s a problem. How can you write for an audience if you know literally zero people in that audience? Making up a fictional target reader wouldn’t do you any good anyways—what would you base it on? It would just be an amalgamation of stereotypes you’ve seen from other media, and that won’t serve you (or your audience).
Either change your target to an audience that you actually know something about, or take the time to get to know someone in your target audience.
Choose a Person who is not yourself
The most common objection I hear to this counsel is, “I write for myself.”
If YOU are writing for YOU, then don’t be surprised when YOU are your only reader.
What’s the purpose of your writing? If you just want to engage with the art form for the sake of art and expression, that’s fine. By you for you is fine—if nobody else likes it, too bad for them. That’s legitimate, and I mean that.
But if your goal is for other people to read this book and maybe even pay money for it, we need to consider those readers out in the marketplace.
If I cook for myself, I just make whatever I want exactly how I want it. But if I’m cooking a meal for my wife that I really want her to enjoy, I need to remember that she doesn’t like green olives, and she likes things a little spicy but not too spicy.
Is your book just for you to enjoy, or is it for others?
If the book is for others, then we need need objective counsel. We need to think about what someone else would like, even if their counsel is imaginary in our head.
When we write for ourselves, our work becomes very self-serving. You see, writers are naturally gluttons when it comes to our own writing.
Imagine if you went on a diet to lose weight, but when you encountered any opportunity to eat food the only question you asked was, “Do I like this?” Well you would eat everything.
This is exactly the same for your writing. When you’re writing, you’re at the content buffet. You can put as much of anything you want in your book. Literally, it’s all yours, and it doesn’t cost you anything. If your filter is only your own taste, it’s so easy to lose the healthy balance that will make your story thrive.
When you’re on a diet, you should really ask, “Would me healthy friend eat that?”
Let’s apply the same sensibility to your book.
Let me say it again: if you write for yourself, don’t be surprised when you are your only reader.
Write for one person, who is real, and who is not yourself
Keep that one reader in mind as you write.
I love to give gifts, it’s probably my primary love language. The cool thing about gifts is that a great gift is part giver and part recipient. It reflects great consideration for the recipient, but it’s also an expression of the giver’s values.
If I give somebody a kitchen gadget, I’m saying, “I liked this, and because I know you, I think you would like it, too.”
Of course your values will have a huge impact on the book you’re writing, and they should. You’re the author! But you’re giving a gift to someone, so it should reflect their values as well.
The Hunger Games was a successful book because Suzanne Collins wrote a sci-fi book for a teenage girl who doesn’t know any sci-fi jargon. I would bet good money that Collins had a specific person in mind. With that person in mind, she could ask questions like, “Has [person] seen this worldbuilding element in other books and movies, or do I need to explain what it is?”
The way the world was explained wasn’t based on what Suzanne Collins knew! It was based on what her target reader knew.
I like shooting sports. I’m not a hunter, but I like to go to the shooting range. In shooting, there’s a phrase that we use, “aim small, miss small.”
It’s an instruction to aim for the smallest target possible.
Soldiers don’t aim for the other soldier. They aim for the second button on the enemy’s coat. If they aim for the soldier and miss, the shot is no good. If they aim for the button and miss, there’s a good chance they still hit their mark.
I don’t shoot at people, or even paper silhouettes of people. It’s an ethical line of mine. But if I hang up a 24” x 24” target paper, and I aim for the paper. Well a bad shot is off the paper.
What if I aim for the smallest circle on the target?
What if I aim for the piece of dust inside of the smallest circle on the target? I’ll make a better shot. Even if that piece of dust is imaginary.
The same principle holds true for your writing. Aim small, miss small.
If you aim your story and your content decisions at a group of readers, there’s a good chance you won’t really hit anyone.
But if you write a book that will just absolutely tickle one particular person in the world, just one specific individual, then there’s an incredible chance that you’ll hit the group.
Develop and write your story for one person, who is real, and who is not yourself. Keep that person in mind as you write, and watch how it improves your storytelling.
So who are you writing to?
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