icon by Peg Ihinger
“Know your audience” is a piece of writing advice I hear a lot.
I have never really understood what people mean by it.
In almost every case, the explicitly stated reason behind giving the advice is that if one knows who one’s audience is, one can (and, it is heavily implied, should) give them more of what they want, thus increasing one’s success as measured by metrics such as sales numbers and overall income. Which, to me, boils down to marketing advice, not writing advice. And the ultimate truism about marketing that I was taught back in business school is this: “At least 80% of marketing is of no use whatsoever, but we don’t know which 80%, so we have to do all of it.”
Another major, major problem with “know your audience” as a useful bit of advice for fiction writers is that knowing who your audience is does not tell you what they want to read. Even knowing what your audience is demanding—what they want right now—does not tell you what they will want two to five years in the future when the book comes out, or even two or three months from now when the e-book shows up on Amazon. Also, what people say they want is necessarily based on what they have seen/experienced/read so far. Readers are not writers. They cannot ask specifically for something that they have never seen because it doesn’t exist yet.
This is why fans ask for “another book just like the last one” or “the next adventure of myfavoritecharacter.” Lois Bujold says that what readers really want is “a book by their favorite author writing at the top of his/her game.” I think she hit the nail on the head, but readers seldom articulate it that way.
Yet another issue is that different people like different kinds of stories. Some prefer character-centered fiction; some prefer plot-centered fiction. Some like angst and tragedy, while others want cheerful feel-good stories. Some like moral ambiguity and anti-heroes, and others prefer clear-cut good vs. evil. Furthermore, many people’s taste in stories changes over time. Markets change over time—genres go through a surge in popularity for five to ten years, then fall to a trickle of sales before stabilizing, only to repeat the cycle a few years later. Current events cause shifts in the types of stories that are most popular. And, of course, even readers of specific subgenre (“hardcore science fiction first contact political novels” for instance) aren’t a single, monolithic block. Different book reviews often cite the same facet of a story as a plus or a minus, depending on the reviewer’s taste.
But the main thing about “know your audience” that I find problematic is that it does nothing to encourage writers to write the books they want to write. It promotes the idea that all writers should prioritize getting their stories into the hands of the maximum number of readers. Several how-to books encourage writers to decide on an audience as the very first thing they do, before they even know what story they’re going to tell. (Like anything else, this works fine for some writers and/or some stories, but There Is No One True Way, and it really is not going to work for everyone. I doubt it will work even for a majority.)
Kept in perspective, the idea of knowing one’s audience in general can be useful. If I’m under contract to write a middle-school book, for instance, I know I have to pay more attention to things like vocabulary and certain types of content (not that I write a lot of graphic violence or sex anyway, but the principle remains) than I would have to pay if I were writing for adults. It doesn’t change the plotlines or theme or structure that I write, though. It’s a marketing decision about technical details, that’s all, and I do it because it saves me headache-inducing rewriting later on (when the children’s book editor politely asks if I can find a different term for “blockade” or find a way to define “ephemeral” in the text).
I gave up on trying to define “my audience” a long time ago. I personally find the “know your audience” rule to be paralyzing. I don’t know why other people like my work; I only know why I like (or don’t like) my work. So I write for an audience of one: myself. And I’m fortunate that the stories I want to tell are things other people also enjoy.
Because that’s the other side of the coin: a writer who sticks to the books they want to write may discover that what they want to write is a niche market, possibly one that’s too small to make a living from, or even one that doesn’t pay at all (e.g., fanfiction). They are then faced with the reality that they have a choice to make. They can write what they love, and accept that they’re probably never going to make much/any money from it, or they can try to write stories that are more mainstream (and some of them simply can’t do that, the same way I can’t write anything that doesn’t have magic in it. Yes, I’ve tried.)
When I was a kid, I once read an article that classified three typical kinds of writers:
– those who write to an audience of themselves
– those who write to an audience of a particular person, real or fictive, who is not themself
– those who write to an audience of a particular group or demographic
I’m clearly in the first camp, like you, though I like writing gift stories so can do camp 2 fine. I personally always take this advice as a reminder to be true to the camp I’m in. If I suddenly try to change audience to camp 3, my story will be inauthentic, but like I know very successful writers who clearly do not write for themselves and may never reread their own work for pleasure, so camp 3ers exist. I’m just not one.
Was that C. S. Lewis’s “Three Ways Of Writing For Children”?
Though, come to think of it, his were: writing for the demographic (bad), writing for a particular child (or children) to their taste and not worrying about other children (good), and writing a work where you conclude that the idea would best fit a children’s work.
No, it was an article in The Writer.
To refine further on my quote, and even more elusive, I think readers really want a story that will make them feel as… excited, cool, amused, moved, whichever, as the last one. But the writer can’t actually do that with a repeat if some of what delighted the reader was the prior story’s freshness. Cue diminishing returns.
I also suspect that what publishers really want is a story that will sell as well or better as the last, but, like the readers, can’t articulate something they’ve never seen before.
I also am apparently only capable of writing for myself, so I long ago decided it was useless to try anything else. Things grind pretty quickly to a halt otherwise.
I’ve always interpreted this advice as not necessarily writing what your audience wants, but writing so that your audience will understand you.
“Know your audience” is outstanding advice if you can and do know your audience. Back in my working days, the way I taught a class to noobs, the way I gave a “brown bag” to my peers, and the way I briefed a bunch of managers were all done in very different styles. (I prefer to be as approachable and informal as possible, but that’s not the way to go with managers, for example.)
For a perhaps more helpful example for writers, I remember coming home from school when I was a teenager, and being really frustrated. My mom asked what was up, and I said someone had been a, um, person of illegitimate birth. (Not my actual choice of words.) She said, “Don’t talk like that.” I said, “Mom, at my age, I can say words like that.” She said, “Of course you can, but I don’t like to hear them.”
Which brought me up short.
And even now, all these decades later, that’s why there’s almost no profanity in any of my fiction. Even though Mom’s been dead for decades.
It may be a minuscule part of my audience that would share her feelings, but I’m going with it.
In that case, well done to your mom! I don’t like to hear it, either. 🙂
Mom was awesome. 🙂
In one of CS Lewis’ essays on writing he talks about being approached for advice by someone who was writing a kids’ story about a wish-granting machine. He asked her why it was a machine and not, say, a genie. She said, that was what the market wanted. He asked, do you like it that way? and she replied, in very strong tones, that she LOATHED it.
He didn’t think he could help her, and I doubt anyone really could. You may be able to write stuff that is not exactly what you would have chosen to write, but I don’t think there are a whole lot of writers who will do good work if they loathe the material.
I have managed to finish several novels despite poor work discipline, and the key for me is that I really have to want to write this particular story. It’s almost, I need to find out what happens next! (Which I can’t get by telling to myself in my head, because I can’t hold a novel worth of detail in my head at once, so it’s flatter.)
“When my father died, on the plane from his funeral in the UK back to New York, still in shock, I got out my notebook and wrote a script. It was a good place to go, the place that script was, and I went there so deeply and so far that when we landed, Maddy had to tap me on the arm to remind me that I had to get off the plane now. (She says I looked up at her, puzzled, and said ‘But I want to find out what happens next.’)”
—Neil Gaiman
Hmmm. . . .
IIRC, there were two different essays. Three Ways of Writing for Children had the woman who put in stuff she didn’t like but she was resigned to giving the children what they liked. He also wrote about a Jungian analyst who described an aridity in her life, and how vehemently she reacted when asked if she liked fairy tales.
Writing is a performing art, although the writer is not the one performing. The writer choreographs the words, sentences, and scenes to produce a particular effect, and they create the magic that happens between the page and the reader.
Along with a number of other distractions, I am a professional singer/songwriter, and I learnt early on that if, when performing, you enjoy yourself, the audience too will enjoy themselves, even when performing a melancholy song. If I am pleased with how I’ve done something, it becomes far more likely the audience/readers will be pleased as well.
“Write what you want to read. You’ll have more fun doing it―and if all else fails, you’ll always have at least one loyal reader.”
―Scott McCloud, Making Comics
The fun part of a WIP is not that the final work will probably be a MA. It’s that the heroine and point of view character is about twelve and I have to fit that.
A bright, precocious twelve, who has been taught her duties since before she can remember, to be sure.
MG work. (grouse)