Don't Care What. Who Do You Write For?

From the amazing Branded in the 80s blog, the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. I hope blogger Shawn will be my peep.


Elaine posted this week about the ever-shifting definitions within genres. As I see it, shelving arrangements are as much fashion as fact, and I know writers who have to check 2 or 3 sections to find themselves. But the purpose of knowing your market as a writer is to help you explain it to agents and editors and readers, to help you hit the bullseye of your story goal better. And I find keeping up with the slapdash scorecards of Hot and Not subgenres only make me confused and dispirited.

When I use the term story goal, I don't mean anything tremendously formal, just the way you'd like readers to feel at the end. Should they love/hate the protagonist, be pleasantly spent from the thrill ride or the laughs, feel like they've just left a bowling alley full of entertaining regulars, have a brooding sense of tragic reality or of difficult justice done? I think once you're far enough in a manuscript, you ought to know what overall effect you hope to achieve, so your editing passes can refine and amplify it. But who is it you're trying to affect?

The category I'm finding most persistently useful as a career-oriented fiction writer is target readership. Who are my people and who else do they read? If I capture that, the publishing types can encode it into whatever slot for the catalog, because by the time I start calling myself "fill-in-the-blank-lit" in a query, that label may be so February. Laura recently posted about finding unusual new ways to reach potential readers. Knowing who readers are means you can better locate them outside the bookstore and library, and better understand how certain agents or publishing approaches may help you reach them. Addressing the crucial question of readership, however, means addressing one of the most common and infuriating assumptions I hear again and again from other aspirants.

Aspiring Writer's Conceit #1: I am writing for all ages, both and mixed genders, all strata of society and anarchy, a tale that translated into every language on the planet can bring enjoyment and enrichment to any intelligent, sentient being of any species currently known or unknown.

Oh sure, we can't assemble five people to agree on the proper preparation and condiments for a hot dog, but I'll say Amen to your lofty claim if you'll do the same for me. Okay, now may we at least admit that establishing our inevitable, global readership requires a beachhead? First, the readers of Ed McBain's police procedurals, for example, then the world.

For my latest project, I've confessed my peeps (with visual evidence) in this post. When I'm standing near people in a line or on the subway, the clothes they're wearing and the media or products they're carrying or discussing tell me whether they're my potential readers. Some of these folks (sadly) enjoy less of the printed prose for leisure than other media. No matter, I still think they're awesome, so I have a comic book and will have a web comic as a portal to my created world. I hope it may lead some of the more prose-phobic to try out a novel of mine someday as well as adding facets and bonus content for those finding the book first. My target readers are probably 18-54, significantly male though I'm not (tricky), and geeks of some niche who like modern technology, games, mysterious histories, and having their brains tickled. They enjoy the absurd and fantastic as a way to play with real-world dilemmas and existential concepts. Robots versus ancient ghosts in an Apocalypse with banana peels.

So, are your peeps buying recyclables or scrapbooking, volunteering at animal shelters or attending concerts, watching Judge Judy or reading biographies in the bathtub? Are they of a certain age or gender? Do they read 2 hardcovers a month or 4 paperbacks a week? Who are their current favorite authors? I'm going on a limb as an unproven quantity here, and welcome any feedback from authors farther down their professional paths. I've spent a lot of time imagining my protagonists and plot, but I believe it's also important to spend time imagining what their consumers might be like. Who are they and what do they value in their reading experience? Then, it'll be more obvious to the many people a writer like me must convince between invention and publication how my final manuscript will delight that readership as well as myself.