Imagine Me Imagining You

In an earlier blog, a book review as it happens, I mentioned that I created a mental image of the sort of people that I think buy my books. It helps me if I have them in mind when I’m writing, because I can tailor my writing style to them.
 
There is nothing new in taking this sort of approach. In marketing terms, it is P for people, which means understanding the sort of people who are going to buy a product.
 
If you are creating fashions that appeal to women in their late teens to early twenties, for example, it is important to know what sort of styles, colours and fabrics those consumers are attracted to. It will be totally different to those that appeal to women in their 50s and 60s.

​Get it right and you sell lots of product, get it wrong and you are left with thousands of items unsold – and a reputation for being a brand that is out of touch.

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Know your audience!

I could give loads of examples of how manufacturers adopt this approach, but I would quickly bore you and I have no desire to do that. But market research plays a huge part in developing a product, just to find out what the buying public finds attractive and what they don’t. Pretty much every product has its “ideal” consumer.
 
And, at the most basic level, a book is just another product, so knowing your audience, or consumer, is important to authors for the same reason.
 
If you use a lot of modern slang in your writing, you are not going to write a book that appeals to readers for whom such slang is as alien as a foreign language. But there is more to it than that.

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Sci-fi audience

Certain types of fiction attract different types of reader.
 
Research was carried out into readers of sci-fi and fantasy, collectively known as SFF. It was discovered that there is a strong correlation between people who take an interest in science and those who read SFF.
 
The findings report that SFF readers start at a young age, typically under 20. They read more than the average number of books per month. Boys have a higher preference for sci-fi and girls have a preference for fantasy, though both are likely to read either. And perhaps most importantly, the study found that SFF readers have a higher level of educational achievement compared to other reading genres.
 
The most important take-away from that is educated readers usually have more sophisticated tastes. They won’t put up with poor quality writing.
 
So, if you are an author who writes in either of those genres, expect your readers to be well educated. They will have a good understanding of science and, for fantasy, they will probably have a good working knowledge of mythology, demonology etc

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"There are obvious age divides in some markets."

If you forget that, you might find your books don’t attract readers and you may also find that those that do sell don’t get good reviews.
 
Are you an SFF author? Did you know that? There are differences in other genres as well.
 
Unsurprisingly, women are bigger readers of romance, but they are also bigger readers of thrillers, which came as a bit of a surprise to this author. Also, thriller and crime readers tend towards the older generations, with 35% being over 65, but less than 5% being under 30.
 
So, in terms of the language used in thrillers and crime novels, it is best to stay away from modern idioms and slang if you want to reach the largest audience.
 
There are obvious age divides in some markets. “Young adult” is such a market. Those readers will be well versed in modern slang. So much so that in three year’s time, a whole new audience will have emerged who can’t relate to the language that was used just a few years earlier.

Age gap

This means that YA fiction dates very quickly, unless the author is very careful in their choice of language. It has to be “young” enough to appeal to that age group, but also won’t go out of date too quickly and result in poor sales in a few years’ time.
 
YA readers outgrow the genre quite quickly, looking for new authors that appeal to their developing maturity, so there is no longevity, the way there is in other genres. Capture the attention of a thriller reader at 30 and you pretty much have their attention for the rest of their life. Capture a YA reader at 13 and you’ve probably lost them by 18.
 
So, the YA author has to keep looking for the next audience, not just for their new books, but also for their existing books.
 
Personally, I would avoid writing YA for that very reason, because the marketing effort is never ending. It also means that output has to be higher to satisfy the existing audience before they outgrow the genre.

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Children's author David Walliams

This same problem also applies to writers of children’s books.

​If Mum or Dad were fans 15 to 20 years earlier, then they may buy the books for their children, but otherwise the author has to rely on a lot of peer influence to make their books popular.
 
My grandson reads the books his school friends read, not the ones his parents want him to read.

​For example, The Chronicles of Narnia collection, by C S Lewis, rank only 5,600 on Amazon, but the latest David Walliams book is ranked at 13. In 20 years time you can say “David Walliams” and the children won’t reply “Yeah, I read his books”, as they do now, they’ll reply “Who?”. The author of the books they will be reading is probably still at school him or her self right now.
 
So, who is your generic reader? Are they male, female or both? What age are they? What sort of educational levels have they achieved, or will they achieve? What are their hobbies and interests? What language will they relate to and what will make them throw your book at the wall?
 
It isn’t always easy to answer those sorts of questions, but you can start close to home. Do you write the sorts of books that you also like to read? If so, then you probably conform to the norm for your genre except for, perhaps, gender. Just because you are male (or female) it doesn’t mean that only men (or women) will like your books, because some genres have cross gender appeal. Others, however, don’t.

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Some men won’t buy books with a female protagonist and some women won’t buy books with a male protagonist, because they can’t identify with them. Others have no problem with either.

And if there are gender issues that limit your audience size, then you can bet your life that there are also further limiting factors, such as sexual preferences. Will a book with strong LGBTQ+ content have a wide appeal amongst heterosexual audiences? It's more like to be read by a niche audience and niche markets are unlikely to result in fame and fortune (if those are your goals).
 
Ultimately this is important not just in terms of who will buy your books, but also how you market your work. There is no point in directing your limited advertising budget towards the wrong audience, or one that is heavily biased in terms of gender, age, educational achievement or any other characteristic.

It also matters when it comes to where you promote your work. If you are a writer of children's books or YA, don't bother with Twitter or Facebook, because your readers are all on Tik-Tok. As for the older generations, the older they are, the less likely they are to be on social media in the first place.

Reader loyalty doesn’t come about by accident. It comes about because you understand your readers and your readers understand your books.

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