Writing for an Audience
If you want to pursue traditional publication, you need to think about writing for an audience. Here are some thoughts on work that's billed as "completely unprecedented"; following writing trends; and writing for "everyone from 0 to 99."
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Writing for an Audience Video Transcript
Hello, this is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. Here today, I'm going to talk about writing for an audience.
Now, I touched upon it a little bit in another video on the publishing process. But I think that one of the big mental shifts that any writer makes is this idea of "I'm writing for myself. I'm writing to get this idea down on paper." And then, we transition at some point into "I'm writing for an audience. I want to share this with the readership. I want to share this with the world." And so, I do think that some awareness of the marketplace, some awareness of a category that you're writing in is really, really important when you are thinking about not just writing—"just writing," as if it’s that easy—but not just writing, but writing toward a goal of publishing or independently publishing, putting a book out in Kindle, whatever. When we make that transition, we also do, I think, have to start paying attention to our intended audience.
Now, there are a lot of categories in publishing. When I was an agent, I would get these pitches sometimes where the writer is like, "Nobody's doing anything like this. This is completely unprecedented..." As if it's a good thing? But the issue there is that for me, that speaks to more of a liability than an asset, actually if I have my agent head on, because if somebody's not actively doing something that this writer is doing, it could be because people have looked and there's just no market for it or people have tried and it didn't work out spectacularly. Because really, there can be a market for a lot of things. But if there's just nothing out there in the entire world like what you're doing, part of me might wonder why that is and there could be a reason. There very well could. It very well could be that you are a trailblazing genius, but it also could be that it has been tried and it failed or it has not even been attempted because the audience is very narrow. A lot of publishers want to sell as many books as possible and writers sort of join them in this goal. And if there's an audience of one, it could very well be a project that's better off being published independently so that one person can connect with the project, and they ride out into the sunset together.
But anyway, so there are a lot of categories and there are a lot of audiences for the categories. And I would try and see if your project fits into an established category before I start kind of going off on your own and blazing a new trail. And one thing to know about categories is there are expectations for pretty much every category like a business nonfiction book should introduce some actionable ideas for busy business leaders. We're not gonna get into really long, rambling personal anecdotes. We're gonna back ourselves up with data and research that sort of underscores the ideas that we're sharing. We're gonna have bullet points. We're gonna have kind of infographics breaking up the information. That's just what readers will expect, especially knowing your audience of kind of busy business leaders or people hoping to start a business. There are many different kind of subcategories within each category of potential audiences, people starting a third business, people who want to sell their business. There are books for all of these types of business people. All of those people are gonna be at a different point in their lives. They're gonna want different things. They're gonna need different things. They're gonna expect different things. And so a book written for those people aims to serve up what they expect.
It's a little broader in fiction, but fiction still does have categories. For example, science fiction is gonna have different expectations than a high fantasy. It's gonna have different expectations than magical realism, which is still technically fantasy but has sort of a very different aesthetic than a high fantasy story, for example. In children's books, we have a lot of categories and they're broken down pretty strictly by word count and kind of vocabulary levels, simply because children of different ages are gonna be reading those books. They have different abilities with language and abilities with independent reading.
So, all that is to say, if you go to a bookstore, it's not just a pile of books every which way. Remember stores? This is kind of coming off of the lockdown a little bit, so it's like "Remember going into an actual store?" But if you go into a bookstore, the point is, there is a shelf over here for your romance. There is a shelf over here for your erotica. Very related, but two very distinct flavors, right. There is a shelf for everything. And so, one of the things that I would highly recommend is that at least being aware of or putting some thought toward which shelf would my work fit on and what do the people who shop on that shelf expect. That's not to say you bend over, and just tick boxes, and deliver everything that a reader expects. You want to also tell an engaging story, tell your story, bring your creative vision to bear. But is there sort of a place where those two can communicate and coexist? That's what I would ask.
So be aware of the market. Don't chase trends. I like to record videos that are evergreen, that can be found in a number of years. Right now, it's 2020, and we are coming off of the COVID-19 lockdown, which maybe you've heard of or maybe it's still very fresh in your mind. And so, right now, I'm seeing a lot of writers who have come up with a virus pandemic dystopian story or if it's a children's book, a book that explains a virus pandemic for kids. So that's a trend, right. It's a very hot trend because we've all had a big global experience. It's all at the forefront of everybody's minds and so a lot of writers are sort of like, "Oh, yes. I will capitalize on this." Unfortunately, it is about two weeks after the lockdown in my state ended and publishers are already saying, "We have had it up to our gills with virus dystopias," because everybody started writing one at the beginning of lockdown, sent it off immediately. It takes more than a month or two to write a great novel, by the way.
Our inboxes are flooded with dystopia, and I think things are dark enough, where many people are turning completely away from dystopia like we kind of are living a dystopia right now, we want to read more escapist, hopeful, positive stuff. And so, inspiring stories with a redemption angle are actually what publishing is looking for. So the point there being, by the time you've heard of a trend and a light bulb goes off, and you're like, "Oh, it's a trend. I should hop on that." Then you take a couple of months or whatever to write the book. Again, a book cannot be written very, very well in a couple of months unless it's, you know, a very timely nonfiction that's just gonna be, you know, printed right away. By the time you sort of make your entry into the trend race, that horse may have already left the barn and publishing is gonna be on to a new trend. So it doesn't behoove you to just sit there and try to capture a trend, because it's a big gamble. By the time you create that project, it may be irrelevant already and then it will just look dated. It will be less desirable than just a regular project that's not trying to capitalize on a trend.
But the point is, writing for an audience... I think when we make that transition of "I'm writing, I'm writing, I'm writing for myself," to "I want this to hit other people, and catch readers, and be shared with an audience of greater than one," when we make that mental transition, I do think it behooves writers to be somewhat aware of the larger market place categories, audience expectations for genres and just keep that in mind. And write with that in mind because otherwise, you may have a miscommunication. You and your audience may be ships in the night until you sort of find some common ground where your project and the readership for that project can coexist.
The big fallacy... This is another thing I would hear in my slush pile all the time is "Everyone from 0 to 99 is gonna love my book... It's such a human story and we're all humans." I think the only company that has really managed to market to all 7 billion people on this planet is probably Coca-Cola or water and oxygen. They have a great PR department. But the fallacy is you don't want to find every person and you cannot find every person because nobody has been successful at marketing something to every single person on the planet. The truth is actually the opposite, which is you want to find your people, the people who will appreciate your brand of romance, or your brand of erotica, or your brand of business nonfiction. Those people are out there. We like to think of ourselves as very individual but there are tons of people out there. If you've ever been advertised to by Facebook, for example, those big companies are slicing down their ads by demographic and there are probably a lot of 30-something white women who read Brené Brown and so, those are the ads that I get because of demographic information. So there are many people sort of like us.
So if you write something that makes you come alive and makes your heart sing, chances are good that if you at least think about category and kind of tick some of the boxes of what readers expect from that category, you will find other people similar to you with similar tastes, and your work will make them come alive. So I do think that category and audience are a very important component of the conversation and that it is a really big fallacy that you're gonna write something that is going to be appealing to all readers. I think that desire is probably the number one thing to strike from your mind when you are thinking about writing for an audience. But otherwise, just know who you're writing for. Start there and see if it informs your craft and your storytelling going forward.
This has been Mary Kole with Good Story Company, and here's to a good story.
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