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Defining the Target Audience for Your Fiction

Posted on November 21, 2012 in Fiction Writing, Marketing, Publishing

So you’re writing a novel and your critique buddies want to know who your “target audience” is. What do you tell them?

Nee posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hello Randy,

I am a newbie at the writing. A new “writer” friend insists I must know my audience and for whom I am writing BEFORE I start my story – so I will know what those readers will be expecting/anticipating in my story.

HOW can I know this concept? Right now, I’m writing a fictional piece because I’m having fun telling a simple Baby-Boomer character story. I ain’t got no clue who all’s my “audience.”

Can you shed me some light on this particular?

Randy sez: Yes, it’ important to know the target audience for that novel you’re writing.

No, that doesn’t mean you need to have detailed demographic information about your target audience.

John Locke wrote a book on marketing that had some nice thoughts on defining your target audience. What I took away from his book is that the author only needs to know what emotional needs the book is going to fill.

Locke’s fiction features a psychopathic assassin named Donovan Creed. Donovan works for the government but takes private contracts on the side. If you took Donovan Creed at all seriously, you’d hate the guy. But John Locke’s readers don’t take Donovan Creed seriously. Donovan Creed is a fantasy.

Locke says that his male readers would like to BE Donovan Creed.

Whereas his female readers would like to DATE Donovan Creed (although they recognize that he wouldn’t make good marriage material).

Now it should be obvious that almost nobody would really like to be Donovan Creed and almost nobody would really want to date him. Fantasies don’t have to make sense.

John Locke knows the fantasies that Donovan Creed drives in the minds of his readers.

So when you sit down to define your target audience, you need to know what emotional buttons you’re planning to push in your readers. That should start with the emotional buttons that your fiction pushes in you.

My own fiction is driven by the fact that I’d like to be Sherlock Holmes. And Albert Einstein. And Indiana Jones. All at the same time.

No, that isn’t rational. I know perfectly well that I can’t literally be any of those guys. Much less all of them at the same time.

But each of those names pushes certain emotional hot buttons in me. Those emotive buttons drive my fiction. I assume that those are also hot buttons for people who like my books. So in that sense, my target audience is composed of people who want to be Sherlock, be Einstein, and be Indy, all at the same time.

There’s more to defining your target audience, of course. Part of the game is to define your category. And to know the rules and standard operating procedures for that category.

That’s most true in the most sharply defined categories, such as romance, mystery, fantasy, and science fiction. Each of these has a large number of subcategories. If you write in any of these subcategories, then you really need to read a lot in that subcategory so you know what’s been done and what your reader’s expecting.

The good news here is that you don’t have to do a poll to find out the age, gender, economic status, and favorite ice cream of your target audience. Most writers have fans all across the spectrum. But those fans are fans because they’re responding to the emotional hot buttons that the author is pushing.

One last comment: When I talk about hot buttons, I’m of course not implying that you should be calculating or mechanical about your target audience. Write the sort of fiction that appeals to you. Figure out why it appeals to you. Your target audience will be the people who also find that appealing.

Recently I hired a graphic artist to create the cover for my next e-book. I love that cover. (Not going to show it here–I’ll save that for when we get closer to release of the book.)

I showed the cover to one of my friends. She said, “Wow! I love that cover! Who’s the target audience?”

I said, “The target audience is the set of people who like this cover.”

She thought I was joking, but I wasn’t. The cover hits a lot of hot buttons for me. I expect it’ll hit those same buttons for readers. And I expect they’ll like the book. And no, I really can’t say any more about it just yet.

That’s all for today. My US readers will be celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow. Happy Turkey Day!

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

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Should You Self-publish Your Novel?

Posted on October 11, 2012 in Books, Fiction Writing, Marketing, Publishing

Writers these days have two roads to fame and glory — self-publish or go with a traditional publisher. How do you decide which road to take? Will self-publishing ruin your reputation? Will traditional publishers cheat you out of your hard-earned money?

Despan posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I need help and advise.

I was planning to self publish, hoping to evaluate the performance of the book in terms of sales and readership before trying to use the traditional publishers. then while i was doing my research, i realised that you have traveled both routes – published by traditional publishers – Zondervan and also by Bookbaby (self-publishing.) I would like to be advised on the best route for a beginner like me.

I would be happy to be assisted please.

Thank you and God bless you and your team

Randy sez: You’ve put your finger on the question that many writers are asking these days, Despan.

I should clarify one point, however. I’ve published with several traditional publishers, but my self-publishing has been with Amazon/Barnes&Noble/Smashwords/Apple, rather than with Book Baby. I have nothing against Book Baby, but I haven’t worked with them. The two books that I’ve self-published have been second editions of books that were originally published with traditional publishers.

A large number of my published author friends have done exactly what I’ve done with their out-of-print novels — they’ve edited them, paid a graphic designer to create cover art, packaged it up as an e-book, and posted it for sale on the major online retailers.

Some of my author friends report no luck with these ventures. Some of them report very good results. I’d classify my results so far as fairly good. I think that as I release more e-books, they’ll all do better. One of the best ways to promote an e-book is with another e-book (since all your books should list all the others).

In the case of out-of-print novels, it’s a no-brainer to self-publish it. The cost is pretty minimal. The potential revenue is huge. Few traditional publishers are willing to republish your out-of-print novel, so that’s rarely an option.

But what if you’ve got a novel that has not yet been published? Should you self-publish it or go with a traditional publisher?

I suppose the answer to that depends on your goals.

If the main thing you want is to see your name on the cover of a book and you really don’t care if it earns any money, then your quickest way to get there is to self-publish it.

If the main thing you want is to get the ego boost that comes from being validated by a traditional publisher, then you can rule out self-publishing. You have to go with a traditional publisher.

Being a selfish guy, my main priority is to earn the most money for each book.

Let’s all remember, of course, that publishing a book is a very low-probability way to earn a lot of money. So let’s be clear on this — I didn’t decide to become a writer for the money. I became a writer because writing is in my blood and I can’t help myself. Having made that decision to become a writer, I want to maximize the money that I’ll earn. It just seems dumb to make decisions that would minimize my earnings.

I hope we’re clear on that, but just in case we’re not, I’ll repeat it. Writing will probably not make you rich. But if you know that and still want to be a writer, you should at least try to earn the most you can from it.

Here is my #1 piece of advice on self-publishing: Never self-publish a book unless you believe that it’s good enough that you could sell it to a traditional publisher.

Why? Because if your book is so bad that you couldn’t ever hope to sell it to any traditional publisher on the planet, that probably means that readers are going to hate it. Yes, there are a few rare exceptions to this, but mostly it’s true. Would you read a book that every traditional publisher thought was terrible? I didn’t think so. Treat readers the way you want to be treated.

So let’s assume that you’ve got a manuscript and you’re pretty sure it’s good enough to sell to a traditional publisher. How do you proceed?

That leads to my #2 piece of advice on self-publishing: Never self-publish a book unless you believe that you could market it at least 20% as well as a traditional publisher.

The reason for that rule is simple. Traditional publishers typically pay royalty rates of 25% of net revenues on e-books. Your agent will take 15% of that 25%, leaving you with about 21% of net revenues. I rounded that 21% down to 20% for simplicity. So if your publisher can sell 10,000 copies of your novel, then you only need to sell about 2,100 self-published copies at that same price point to generate the same amount of revenue. Of course, you might lower the price and then you’d need to move more copies, but you get the picture.

What if you know you’re horrible at marketing? I’d say in that case you’ve got no choice but to go with a traditional publisher. Of course, most traditional publishers these days expect their authors to do the lion’s share of the marketing. So being horrible at marketing is a bad idea these days. Don’t be horrible at marketing. Learn how to be an effective marketer.

What if you know your book could never sell to a traditional publisher? I’d say in that case you should work on your craft. Writing a novel is easy. Writing a good novel is hard. Give yourself the time and training to become excellent. You wouldn’t try to become a brain surgeon with 50 hours of training. Nor a fighter pilot. Nor a chess grandmaster.

Learning to write fiction well takes hundreds or thousands of hours of work. That may sound like bad news, but the flip side is that it’s also bad news for all those other wannabes you’re competing with. If you put in the time and they don’t, then who’s going to win?

I have a few other bits of advice if you want to self-publish your novel:

Get your novel edited by a professional freelance editor. I believe that no novelist on the planet should be his own editor. You need an objective hard-eyed critique of your fiction. I don’t do freelance editing, by the way, so please nobody ask me what my rates are because I’m not available at any price. And yes, I follow this advice myself. I always hire talented editors to critique my work.
Pay a graphic designer to create the cover art for your book. Very few authors have graphic design skills. Find somebody who does.
Don’t spend massive amounts of time and money trying to do social marketing. This is merely my opinion. I’m aware that the vast majority of writers believe that social media will take us all to nirvana. Being a numbers guy, I’m skeptical. But I don’t have time to elaborate here. I often teach marketing at conferences, and it takes a few hours to lay out my vision of how to do marketing right. Social media is a small sliver of that, and should not suck huge amounts of time out of your life.

Well, Despan, I hope that helps. I talk to editors and agents all the time, and if I can distill what they tell me down to one thing, it’s this: “Be a brilliant writer.”

Easy to say. Horribly hard to do. But if you become a brilliant writer, you have a lot better chance of succeeding in the wild and crazy world of publishing. There is no certainty, ever. But brilliant writers have the odds in their favor.

Good luck!

6 Comments

Defining the Target Audience for Your Novel

Posted on July 11, 2012 in Fiction Writing, Marketing

How do you define the target audience for your novel? After all, you want everybody to read your book, right?

Rory posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hey Randy,

I’m currently reading your “Writing Fiction for Dummies” book, and I’ve come across something which I’m having trouble dealing with.

I’m trying to find out who my ideal reader is, and I just don’t know. I try and relate it to what I like to write, for instance: I want to write a story in an action/adventure genre, with deep characters and an exciting and twisted plot, with a fantastical and/or sci-fi storyworld (Or at least elements of them added to our own world).

The problem is, I don’t know what my target audience is, I mean of course they’ll enjoy what I’ve mentioned above, but actually defining that group of people is what I’m finding hard.

Would they be like me? My interests, my view on life and the world, my kind of lifestyle and personality etc. Or would they be completely different?

Also as a side note, will your target audience and what you want to write stay the same for every novel and story you write or will that change? I have a few different ideas for novels which I really want to write, but as they may focus on the same idea as mentioned above, they do change in how involved the storyworld is and the theme etc.

If you could help me out I’d really appreciate it.

Randy sez: Let’s tackle the easy question first, which is whether your target audience will be different for different books. The answer is “Yes, but hopefully not very much.”

I like to distinguish between the General Target Audience (people who would be interested in your fiction as a whole) and your Specific Target Audience for each book (people who would be interested in that particular book).

You should expect that there is a lot of overlap between these two target audiences, but they generally aren’t identical.

As an example, the General Target Audience for this web site is “anyone who wants to write a novel”. My wildly popular Snowflake method page on this site has a smaller Specific Target Audience, “anyone who wants to plan their novel before they write it.”

Snowflakers are a subset of the people who want to write a novel. They’re a large subset, but there are plenty of novelists who prefer a seat-of-the-pants approach to writing their first draft (or an edit-as-you-go approach, or a detailed synopsis, or some other system).

Many novelists can define their General Target Audience in terms of the category and voice that their target readers prefer. Stephen King’s General Target Audience likes horror written with strong characters but without the stylistic trappings of a literary novel. This is a pretty big audience, but it obviously doesn’t include everyone. No book will appeal to everyone.

Sometimes, it’s relevant to narrow a target audience down further with demographic information, such as age, gender, income levels, or viewpoints on religion or politics.

Romance writers typically target women readers and often specialize to a particular age group (“twenty-somethings” or “empty-nesters” or whatever).

Literary novelists presumably target readers with quite a lot of education and sophistication.

Authors of Amish fiction target conservative Christians who yearn for a simpler, more wholesome way of life.

Ayn Rand targeted readers with a strong libertarian bent.

None of these ways of defining a target reader is always right or always wrong. They make sense when they make sense.

I recently got the cover art for a forthcoming e-book that I’m bringing back into print. (It was published years ago and went out of print). I love this cover. I think it’s my best cover ever. It makes me want to tweak the book just a wee bit so it fully lives up to the promise of the cover. I showed it to some friends of mine. One of them told me that she likes it, but she wanted to know who the target audience is.

I said, “The target audience is people who like this cover.”

Sometimes that’s all you need.

Rory, in your case, it probably makes sense to define your target audience in terms of the category and style of writing they like. I would assume you are part of your own target audience, so it’ll make sense if they look a bit like you. But you probably don’t need to define your target audience in demographic terms. I’d guess that there are some people of all ages and some people from most of the common genders who’ll like your book. But there will be plenty of people who don’t care for your book at all, even though they outwardly look exactly like someone in your target audience.

So in your case, you might want to pick five or six authors who do particular things in the same way you’re trying to do them. For example, you might say, “My target audience is composed of people who loved Orson Scott Card’s book ENDER’S GAME because of the intense action scenes. They are people who loved the epic storyworld of Frank Herbert’s DUNE. They are people who…”

You want to be cautious when you define a target audience this way. The fact is that you aren’t Orson Scott Card or Frank Herbert. If you define your target audience in a book proposal, you need to make it clear that you are targeting readers who like a particular type of fiction, without giving the impression that you imagine yourself to be in the same league as the authors who write that fiction.

Agents and editors see too many proposals that say, “I write like John Grisham (or J.K. Rowling, or Nora Roberts, or whoever), only I’m way better.” A proposal like that almost guarantees a rejection. It’s a sign of an amateur. Don’t act like an amateur.

Always be aware that there are people who will hate your book. No writer on the planet ever wrote a book that appealed to everybody. J.K. Rowling and James Patterson and Stephen King have all sold boatloads of books, but there are readers out there who have looked at the work of each of these authors and said, “Not for me.”

The important thing is that you know what it is your target reader is looking for. Then you can write a book especially for that target reader. It doesn’t matter if your book offends everybody else. As long as it delights your target reader, you will always have a market for your novel.

6 Comments

What Kind of Training Do You Need to Publish a Novel?

Posted on June 20, 2012 in Craft, Fiction Writing, Marketing, Publishing

So you’re writing a novel but you don’t have a degree in English literature. Are you out in the cold? What kind of training do you need to get your novel published?

Elizabeth posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hi! My name is Elizabeth and I love your blog!

I am a first time writer working on the first book of a trilogy and my question is,
Do I have to take writing classes or be an English major to write a book?

I had an idea that came to me and have been writing it for over a year in between work and science classes. I only recently thought of trying to publish it but I am worried it won’t be good enough because I don’t have “academic” training but I really want to start pitching the book soon. (I almost completed the first draft).

Randy sez: I wasn’t an English major. I double-majored in math and physics and scratched through college in four years. The way I did that was by taking CLEP tests to get out of as many humanities courses as possible. So I wound up taking only one history class and one English class total.

My lack of training in history and English in college has never stopped me from writing historical suspense novels. The reason is simple:

Education is about learning how to learn. My training in math and physics taught me how to think and how to learn what I need.

So the short answer is “No, you don’t need to have a degree in English literature to write a novel.”

There is a longer answer that is not quite so cheerful. No matter what degree you have or don’t have, you need to learn the craft of fiction writing. And these days, because publishers only market the winners, you also need to learn how to market yourself effectively so that your publisher will perceive you as enough of a winner to put some marketing money behind you. And (because we all have limited time, energy, and money), you need a bit of organizational skill to get it all done.

So you do need to learn, somehow or another, quite a lot about craft, marketing, and organization.

Now would be a great time for me to make a self-serving comment about why I created this web site. After publishing several novels, winning a bunch of awards, and teaching at a fair number of conferences, I woke up one day and realized that I knew a lot of stuff that other writers thought was immensely valuable.

OK, that’s a bit of a fib there. I didn’t wake up and realize that. My friend Marcia Ramsland told me that every month for six straight months, until I finally realized she was right. That’s when I decided to create this site — to teach how it’s done, as best I can. I don’t know everything, but I do know quite a lot. I hear all the time from people who say my teaching is helpful.

Now if I can be REALLY self-serving, I’ll add one more thing. Quite a lot of what I know is packed into my book WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES. There is a limit to what you can put in 384 pages, but I did the best I could. The book is the #1 book in the fiction writing reference section on Amazon, and also has the highest customer ratings of any book in that section.

Gack, that’s probably enough self-advertisement for about a year. My main point here is that there is a lot to know about writing fiction, but you typically don’t learn it in school. You learn the craft in three ways:

Writing fiction
Getting critiqued
Studying the theory from excellent books and teachers

I will note that there are plenty of excellent schools with Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degrees, where you can do all of the above. I know a number of writers who hold MFA degrees, and I think getting an MFA is a fine way to learn the craft. It’s not the cheapest way, but it works perfectly well.

However, most working novelists I know don’t have an MFA and have done just fine. And I gather that MFA programs focus on craft but generally don’t teach you much about marketing and organizational skills. So even if you were to get formal training in the craft, you’d still need to learn some things on your own.

So Elizabeth, there are many roads to publishing nirvana. A formal education is one way to get there. An informal education is another. Pick the road that suits you best.

Remember also that getting published requires talent, training, and time. If you don’t have at least some talent, no amount of training or time will get you there. If you do have the talent, you still MUST get the training and you MUST put in the time.

Every year, hundreds of aspiring authors get published by traditional royalty-paying publishers. You can too, if you have the talent, get the training, and put in the time.

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