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Adapting to Your Audience In Writing: a Bad Idea

April 4, 2022

creativity, fiction, intended audience, literature, writing

“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.

Adapting to your audience is easy if that is an abstract **intended** audience (existing in your head), because the audience is then a homogeneous, controllable – by you – entity. Hardly the case in real life

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What Is an Intended Audience?

March 29, 2021

Writing

art, book, intended audience, literature, marketing, publishing, writing

5 comments

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.

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