Hey-o, squiders. The summer camps continue to be a disaster and somehow we’re two weeks out from school starting for the fall. Will I remember how much bunching all the summer camps sucks next winter when I am signing people up for summer camps? Probably not.
(In the next 24 hours, I need to go to work, take the bigger, mobile one to a doctor’s appointment, pack people for two separate Scout campouts, take the bigger, mobile one to the middle school for orientation and also probably fencing, and other administrative stuff which must include at least making dinner and doing laundry. Oh, and I haven’t done my critiques for the critique marathon. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.)
July’s prompt: Define your ideal audience. How you do or don’t write to them?
Hm. I feel like we’ve had a similar prompt before.
Ideal audience is something that eludes me from a marketing standpoint. You read marketing books, and they’re like, “Picture your ideal reader. Give them a name. How old are they? What do they do with their life? Where do they hang out? What other things do they like?”
And the theory is you’re like, yes, here is Helga, 36, married with children and living in Minnesota. Aside from my particular type of book she also likes knitting, gardening, and watching Star Trek re-runs. She jogs every morning at 5:30 am and survives on five cups of coffee a day. She can be found on knitting subreddits and a very specific Discord discussing why Jean-Luc and Beverly never got together.
And then once you, in theory, know where your ideal reader is hanging out, that’s where you advertise to, and, in theory, make a buttload of money because you have perfectly defined your reader and brought the book to them.
I feel like there are probably genres where this works great. If I’m writing a cozy mystery series that takes place at a Renaissance Festival, then I can approach Renfaire people, some of whom would probably be interested. Or, like, a sweet romance that takes place at a ski resort in the mountains. There’s definitely places where those two things would intersect.
But I feel like once you get more subjective, where you don’t have a distinct hobby or location or piece of media or something else to tie the marketing to, the whole thing kind of falls apart. If you write fast-paced thrillers set in, oh, Davenport, you could maybe interest the people of Davenport in said stories. But if you write said thrillers in a variety of places, with a variety of different characters, what do you do?
Lots of different people like thrillers. It’s not like only white men in their 50s like them, and even if that were true, you’re not going to find all white men in their 50s in the same place, doing the same thing.
Speculative fiction–fantasy, science fiction, paranormal-based horror–can have things you can tie into. But they also tend to be broad genres enjoyed by many different types of people. I mean, just look at the variety of people who like Star Trek. Or D&D. Or Star Wars. Or Stranger Things.
All this to say, when I try to do this exercise, I get a fat lot of nothing. Unless I assume my ideal reader is someone exactly like me (after all, I like my stories). But that doesn’t really seem to get me anywhere–I’m already hanging out in the spaces I hang out in, after all.
I think it’s kind of a silly exercise, but I’m glad it works for some people.
How about you, squider? Had any luck with this sort of thing?
