Who, exactly, is the audience for your book? There’s a lot of psycho-babble out there about how go about identifying your audience(s). What’s trendy right now is creating an avatar for your Ideal Reader complete with his/her/their own profile.
I get it, you need to know something about your Ideal Reader(s) so you can make sure your book will appeal to whoever they are wherever they are. That, in turn, will create sales and fans.
And let’s face it: If you tell an agent or an editor that your Ideal Reader is, say, all women in the United States, you can kiss that book deal goodbye.
My beef with this Ideal Reader/avatar fixation is the abundance of conflicting information on how to create your Ideal Reader. Let’s take a look at some of the conventional wisdom.
Don’t you dare use demographic information!
That’s common advice, but then the same expert will later cite an example like “working women between 30 and 45 who’ve experienced divorce and earn over $100,000 a year” as a great audience/Ideal Reader. Well, that seems pretty demographic to me.
Give your Ideal Reader a name and personality
I hear this one a lot. Thomas Umstattd Jr. at Author Media (an expert every author should follow!) calls this writing for your Timothy. That’s all well and good, but what if you have more than one possible audience? Does that mean you have to create Timothy, Belinda, and Fluffy the Cat? You could really go down a rabbit hole with this. And is that really a good use of your time?
Never say a family member is your Ideal Reader
I heard this advice recently, and then a few minutes later, the expert mentioned an author who wrote a successful book for – I kid you not – his 10-year-old daughter, as if that was a brilliant audience.
Never say your Ideal Reader is “just like me”
Many Ideal Reader experts are dead-set against “just like me.” I call B.S.
Ultimately, every author writes for their doppelganger, whether they want to admit it or not. Otherwise, why on earth would they want to spend so much time in the world of their own creation?
I can attest to that. I’m writing a novel about the world’s greatest all-female rock band. After much fretting over identifying my Ideal Reader, it finally dawned on me recently that she does look a LOT like me (well, okay, maybe she don’t need to lose 30 pounds, whatever).
Basically, she’s a woman of – ahem! – a certain age who grew up glued to the radio and perhaps occasionally belted out favorite songs in in the car or in front of her bedroom mirror with a hairbrush microphone, dreaming of being Stevie, Linda, Ann, Carly, or Joni.
I’m perfectly fine with my ideal reader being just like me. But I think I’ll name her Stevie Junior.
For more on defining your Ideal Reader, check out:
- How to Find Your Readers, by Thomas Umstattd Jr. at Author Media
- Define Your Ideal Reader, by Kevin Tumlinson at Draft2Digital
- The Ultimate Guide to Finding the Right Readers for Your Book, by the AskALLI Team at the Alliance for Independent Authors.
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