Should You Let Your Writing Audience Dictate Your Creative Decisions?

Different Definitions of Success

Of course, there are different definitions of success. If you’re creating for the sake of creating, forget your writing audience. If you want to publish traditionally, you might want to pay more attention to the market. If you’re self-publishing, you have creative control, but you will also want to keep an eye out on expectations. What your writing audience expects doesn’t go away just because they buy your KDP book.

If you want to be successful, it pays to pay attention to your potential writing audience and the industry at large. Knowing the game before stepping onto the playing field gives you an advantage. Keep an eye on what's trending, and consider it a possible opportunity to get a leg up if one of your ideas happens to align with what's popular. Being market aware gives you the potential to rise above the competition and reach your writing audience in a way that they want to be reached.

If you're a writer who turns a blind eye to the publishing trends and your potential writing audience, you may be taken aback when you attempt to submit your work. "What do you mean they're no longer publishing 3,000-page novels? I have devoted twenty years of my life to infusing my daughter's kindergarten artwork into this manuscript!" Well, a simple look around the bookstore would have provided a helpful redirect much earlier in the process.

If you had set foot in a bookstore, you would've had a crystal-clear glimpse of where the market is going in terms of length, tone, and writing audience. It's plain common sense that if you want to make a sale in today's publishing industry, you should be aware of trends and preferences for your specific writing audience.

But Don’t Let Writing Audience Dictate Everything

Although staying up-to-date on publishing trends can have its perks, it can also lead to becoming beholden to trends and forgetting about the originality of your own work. You have to remember that you are your own writing audience, first and foremost, and if you hate what you’re doing because you don’t feel the spark for it, that will show on the page. 

When that happens, your ideas may start to feel like copies of whatever is trending, and you may lose enthusiasm for your projects due to the pressure of always chasing after the latest idea instead of adding something new to the market. It's also important to remember that trends can quickly come and go, so it's best to stay true to yourself and your work—as long as you keep your writing audience at least somewhat in mind.

Taking into account the lag time, books coming out today were purchased by houses about two years ago. Publishers are already dictating writing audience tastes years into the future, whether you’re aware of it or not. There will always be books that capitalize on trends, and there will always be books that make the trends. Writing one of the latter will be tough, as trend forecasting is incredibly difficult work. But originality can impact the market instead of the other way around, as long as there’s a writing audience for the type of work you want to do. 

It’s wise to find a balance: be informed about book trends so you have a chance in the market, but don't be fixated on every little trend in the market. Some trending ideas will not apply to you or your writing audience anyway.

If you want to be a successful writer, you must keep true to your original ideas AND strive to make them the best they can be, while also maintaining realistic expectations. What kind of writer are you when it comes to gauging the publishing world? Do you let what your writing audience want dictate your work, or do you march to the beat of your own drum and then try to find a place for it? I posit that this doesn’t have to be a mutually exclusive decision—it’s a false dichotomy, but one that’s very fun to explore.