“Adapt to your audience” is a sentence I’ve seen used by many so-called writing advisors. It’s a bad idea to begin with, for any artistic context. But adapting to your audience in writing is a truly awful idea, for reasons we’ll examine.
Let’s get some definitions out of the way first: What do we mean by “adapting to your audience”? This basically means to take readers’ feedback into consideration and alter the work accordingly.
For advance readers (that is, beta readers) this means modifying your novel to suit the (extrapolated) audience’s desires, even before publishing. Otherwise, it means taking feedback and reviews into consideration and “give people what they want” in the future.
Either option is awful. Let’s see why.
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