Identify your audience
After crafting a terrific story, one of the most important steps you can take to ensure your success is to identify your audience. It helps in two key ways. In this post, we’ll look at how it helps focus your writing. Next time, we’ll discuss how it helps focus your marketing.
Identifying your audience will focus your writing.
Imagine for a moment … shelves and display tables stacked with gleaming copies of your latest epic … Now, who stops at the table and picks up a copy? That’s your reader. That’s who you need to focus on. Yes, it may be mostly a function of genre, but not always. For example, YA for girls is much different than YA for boys. Identify your reader, your audience as completely and specifically as you can, with regard to things like age, gender, profession, interests, and life experiences. The more information you have on them, the better.
My audience is primarily women around my age, usually married and usually with kids. That doesn’t mean I don’t have men who read and enjoy my books because I do. And it doesn’t mean there aren’t twenty-year-old readers either. But the vast majority fall into 40-ish wife/mother demographic.
So how does knowing this help focus my writing? If you know who your readers are and what they want, you won’t waste time chasing rabbits. Let me give you an example. I have a character who is a building contractor. For my audience, I’m not going to write intricate details of the construction business. I’ll probably research it, but I won’t write it. However, I will write lots of intense dialogue between the contractor and his son. I’ll include lots of internals so you know where both characters are coming from and I’ll cover all sorts of family and relationship tensions. My readers are after less action and detail, and more character interaction.
How do you discover what your audience is after? Find readers who fit your profile, let them read your stuff, and then listen to their feedback. This is important no matter where you are on your publication journey. Feedback from readers is worth its weight in gold. Note what they like and connect with, and what they dislike or ignore. In addition to helping you hone your content and style, they may spark a future project. By listening to my readers, I found out they really liked a character I killed off in my first book. (Whoops.) Even though he’s dead, I know they’ll be on board for a future book featuring that character detailing his early life.
By taking the time to get to know my audience, I’ve been able to build a solid, devoted reader base, which in turn, will help lead to sustained success.
Have you identified your audience?
Paula Wiseman is an award-winning author. Paula has published five books with MindStir Media — all of them have spent time on Amazon.com bestseller lists. Her sixth book, Sanction, will be released later this year. She also had the honor of appearing on Lifetime TV’s “The Balancing Act,” where she discussed her books. Learn more about Paula Wiseman at her website/blog: www.paulawiseman.com
