March 29, 2021
What Is an Intended Audience?
I often refer to “intended audience” in my posts, somewhat assuming we all know what it is. And it’s partly true that most of us have a vague idea. But the proverbial devil is in the details, and in this case understanding what an intended audience is – and why you should care as a writer – can make a hell (no pun intended) of a difference.
Let’s start with the vague idea most of us have about this concept that every author should know about. So, what is the intended audience of a book?
It’s the kind of reader expected to read the book.
And so, we might say that the intended audience of romance fiction is not really upper-class professors of philosophy – though, you never know – but, say, lower-middle-class, middle-aged women.
All this is extremely generic – we haven’t reached the… devil yet – and very superficial. It mostly revolves around marketing considerations, in the sense that it offers an estimate on who is likely to buy a given book.
But the most intriguing aspects of establishing an intended audience have to do with artistic considerations instead, and they are much more complex. Crucially, they are also the most useful for a writer to know, and that’s precisely what I’ll share with you in this post.
What Is an Intended Audience: Marketing and Genre
We saw in the introduction how, in its most superficial iteration, establishing a clear, predictable audience for a given book is a marketing element. I mean, if your goal as an author or publisher is to sell a book, you want to make sure you present the book in a way that its audience can find it.
Genre is a major element of marketing, and if you haven’t read my post on determining the genre of your novel, you might want to do so. The analysis on art vs marketing is important also for the present post.
In a nutshell, having an intended audience in mind goes hand-in-hand with having a genre. To say, for example, “I’m writing a crime-fiction novel” means that you’re writing a novel containing tropes, characters, and other narrative elements one expects to find in crime fiction.
However, here’s an important detail, which is similar in establishing both genre and an intended audience: They’re not set in stone; they’re continuums.
Writing in a Genre and for an Intended Audience Are Continuums
On the one end of this continuum, you have a narrative with a plot that is hopelessly unoriginal, with characters that are heavily stereotyped, and which is overall virtually identical to any other narrative of the same genre.
Think of pulp romance fiction. Independent women who love to hate to love arrogant men, and all that.
On the other end of this continuum, we have narratives that diverge so much from their genre (and what the intended audience expects), that they can barely be recognized as parts of this genre. Needless to say, the intended audience would have hard time positioning the book within any genre.
Now, if you’re perceptive, you surely notice a certain paradox. Let’s call it the intended audience paradox.
What Is the Intended Audience Paradox, and why You Should Care
The thing is, the closer we are to the first end of the continuum (easily established genre and audience), the lower the literary quality of the book but the easier it is to market.
At the same time, the closer we are to something that evades categorization, the higher the potential for high literary quality – not the quality itself – but the harder it becomes to market the book.
This is somewhat paradoxical, but true. Why that is goes beyond the scope of this post, but feel free to find some ideas in my posts on degrowth for writers, whether art should be free, or the dangers of pleasing your audience.
Therefore, unless you’re 0% artist (not caring about quality, doing it only for the money) or 100% artist (not caring about your audience, doing it only for the art), you’ll likely want to find the sweet spot.
Here’s where the creative aspect of having an intended audience enters the picture.
When Establishing an Audience Becomes Part of the Art
This is the crucial part of the whole thing. Not only in terms of the art itself, but – believe it or not – to some extent also in marketing terms.
If you are like most writers, you would ideally like to both respect yourself and your art, yet also create a novel that would be appreciated. In other words, you would like to find the sweet spot we talked about earlier.
To do that, you must approach the concept of the intended audience as a literary attribute, rather than a marketing one.
In plain terms, think of the intended audience as the people reading your story, while writing it. This doesn’t mean to “give the audience what they want”, rather the opposite: Tell the audience what they should want. The key here is internal consistency – which is much easier to get if you’re working with concepts.
Want an even simpler way of defining the intended audience in terms of artistry? The intended audience of your novel is the people who should like your book.
Hierarchies and Priorities
The subtle but crucial difference between audience-as-marketing and audience-as-art lies in the hierarchy. When looking at creative aspects of intended audiences, you don’t shape your book according to people who would likely buy it. Instead, focus on what you like.
In a sense, the primary intended audience is you. You are your first reader, writing stuff you would like to read. You give yourself the tropes you would like to read, you give yourself the plot you think fits best.
Writers are first and foremost readers. In a way, this approach allows you to create your intended audience, rather than simply find a ready one.
An Intended Audience Is merely that: Intended
That is to say, sometimes books escape our control. Certainly creatively, and sometimes in terms of meaning. We begin one way, and then end up with something else.
The closer you try to emulate “what readers like” for your given genre, the more likely you are to find an audience. Sadly, you’re also more likely to create a lackluster story, one you don’t even like yourself.
On the other end of the continuum, we have highly experimental fiction, that doesn’t quite fit in anyone’s mind except – maybe – its author’s. You likely don’t aim for that, either.
Finding the sweet spot is a matter of priorities, in the end. Start by writing what you want to read, as few things are more frustrating than disliking your work.
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There are two sets of readers: those who leave reviews (and a few hints as to who they are), and those who read but never rate or review. Of the first group, I am especially happy to have found a set of older men – they are in the target demographic because there are ways in my system to make a novel a good read for both men and women, and having men leave fulsome comments means I have reached them.
Older women have also read and commented, but a surprise group has been younger women who are very well read in the classics, including the standards: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights… At that age, this would have been a book I loved, so it’s not completely unexpected.
My biggest problem in marketing (sorry if I’m repeating myself) is reaching those who would like my writing but only read traditionally-published novels supposedly vetted by that process and then recommended by reviewers who also only read traditional novels. Breaking into this group – who are convinced everything produced by self-publishers must be utter rubbish because otherwise they would have found a publisher – is very difficult. I haven’t managed it yet – probably need to spend the money for a Kirkus review (which may still be downgraded by a reader because it’s known that indies can buy these), because it carries extraordinary weight, still, with some of that audience.
Most readers read and move on, many complaining that they can’t find ‘books I like,’ and unwilling to do much about that. As a result, they read a string of unsuitable books and think that is their fate. Because, after all, a book is a finished thing and there isn’t much else you can do about it.
I know how many minorities I’m a member of – one of these days there will be an opportunity and I hope to be able to grasp and ride it precisely because I am in that minority – but it hasn’t happened yet, and I need to concentrate on finishing the work so that a reader who likes the first book of the trilogy has somewhere to continue.
If I were well, and had normal energy, I would be ferociously marketing at the same time I write, but it’s not possible for me. And a few experiences with mass marketing of the supposedly targeted variety has led only to several of my reviews being completely unrelated to the novel, written by people who never should have attempted it had they paid any attention to the cover or description. If you are not reasonably well educated and very well read, you won’t like my writing.
I can relate to much of what you say, having being there myself in the past.
In recent years, however, I decided to decouple my writing from marketing. I still welcome readers, but I do very little to promote my books – almost nothing outside the current blog. There are huge minuses from a marketing perspective, but also huge pluses from an artistic one: There are 2-3 people who almost totally get what my books are about, and it’s an extremely rewarding feeling.
It goes without saying that there is no right and wrong. Each decision – market fiercely, not at all, and everything in between – comes with its own drawbacks.
Thanks for your comment!
I’m writing for a mainstream audience, not a literary one (not having the credentials nor the desire for that). I want to be given a chance by the readers who love the books I do, an eclectic mix that includes Dune, The Thorn Birds, On The Beach, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, many Dickens novels, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Lord of the Rings – well-written novels that have the capacity to reach a reader’s emotional core and twist it.
The barrier is that I was pretty sure Pride’s Children would not appeal to agents and traditional publishers (limited catalog space, ‘good – but not for us’), nor I survive that process, so I didn’t pursue that path. But most of my easy readers are behind that barrier, mostly because of the reputation of genre indie writers as being, shall we say?, more interested in quantity.
We’ll see if I can overcome the obstacles – but the biggest one confronting someone like me is finishing the work. And that has to come first.
One of my greatest difficulties is to imagine who the ideal reader of my book would be. I don’t even mean an empirical reader, that is, someone I know personally, I mean a short list of reading preferences. I recognize this difficulty because I myself cannot determine my own reading profile, my preferences fluctuate greatly over time, varying according to my life context.
All I can clearly determine is that I don’t like Boring Adult Literature (BAL), a term coined by a friend of mine, a journalist, who has been following the takeover of the Brazilian publishing market by Anglophone publishers and the translation and injection into the market of Anglophone literary fiction.
The problem with BAL is that it defines itself by being considered superior, better, of higher quality, but in the vast majority of cases they are writers of very little imagination whose fiction consists basically of a semi-psychological, semi-sociological essayism. Maybe it’s a remnant of 19th century realism with its strong ideological criticism, but the world is not the same, and it becomes impossible to do the same with the literature that was once done.
The global unity, that is, the Eurocentrism of literature, that allowed a Madame Bovary to be a symbol of all women has disappeared. Better: it has crumbled. The world is shattered, no longer one, but a world made of many worlds. This fundamental disunity, this loss of a total, totalizing, all-encompassing reference, is crucial to the new avenues of literature, to the ability to narrate local stories that touch globally, to speak something that we believe makes sense only to us and, surprise surprise, we discover that it makes sense far beyond the reach of our arms.
It’s a legitimate concern. I believe the most important step, as I explain in the post, is to begin by understanding your primary ideal reader: yourself. From an artistic perspective, that’s all it takes: write something you like, and that’s the end of it. That’s what I do, I aim to please only myself; if there are readers who like what I write, great for them.
From a marketing perspective, however, things are trickier. It’s no longer enough to only think about what you like, but also balance it (I’m tempted to say “water it down” here) with the expectations of a more general – or rather generic; in terms of genre – audience.
When we write having an audience in mind, that is, an audience other than ourselves, that’s by definition a compromise. Authors who don’t recognize this fool themselves. Some can live with that compromise; I can’t. Which means, I end up writing novels that I generally really like reading, and which can’t be easily sold to a general audience.
As for BAL, I totally hear you. It’s directly related to what I just said above. Your reference to 19th century realism is an apt one, with one interesting difference, I’d argue: The 19th century realism you referred to willingly assumed the (reading) world ended where the author’s influence did. Charles Dickens’s works, to name one example, don’t really escape the confines of England (let alone Europe). Conversely, today publishers (and the authors who blindly follow the paradigm) willingly assume there are no borders when it comes to literature, with the results you describe: one-size-fits-all solutions, Eurocentricm, etc.
In that sense, I’d argue that the world isn’t quite shattered, but rather the glue we used to put together the pieces has started to peel off!