Meeting Your Audience

I don't have any readers right now, but one day I would hope to be like Stephenie Meyer. She is cherished by her readers...

One word of advice - never make an assumption about your reader. When I had a bi weekly column I once published a story about the problem with family time and kids involved in everything, most of our family meal time had gone to baseball practice and a franchise burger. I figured much of my audience was in the same boat.

I got a basket of letters from folks telling me I was a bad father because they made sure that their family ate dinner together - even if ball practice was scheduled.

My thoughts

dub

I have met some of my readers, but they were more surprised at me than I was at them.

Some of them thought I was a gay man, a teen African American girl and a super model. Uh, I'm a middle-aged married woman with a limp. But people picture you based on your stories and sometimes your attitude and style.

I thought most of my readers would be average - just like me, dub! - but they turned out to be a real mixed crew. Many of my gritty-violent-crime story fans were nice middle-aged ladies like me, but my science fiction fans were young boys and I was surprised to see that I had quite a few fans in the gay community. I guess there's no "average reader" - lots of different people read. I am always interested to meet the ones who have read my stuff.

I write things I and some of my friends/loved ones would like to read, but I don't make assumptions about my readers. I seriously don't have a clue what my readers are like.

Unfortunately, the only readers I have in my target market right now are my 11-year-old cousin and the girls in her class she's been passing out bits of my manuscript to. They love my book, so I love them (I mean, I'd love my cousin anyway, but... well, ok, this is a sad post!).

My beta readers though, they're not so forgiving.

Anyway, I hope to one day be able to intelligently comment on a vast and varied readership!

popmuze said:

But what happens when you come face to face with your actual audience of readers and find out they are nothing like what you imagined?

Click to expand...

Kind of related... the same thing happens to me when I meet people in real life that I've been talking to or playing with in WoW (World of Warcraft, an online game for you old folks!).

It's a little different because you talk to these people on a daily basis, both in text and through voice chat programs (I doubt anyone does that with their readers), but you get a mental picture in your head of what these people might look like based on your experiences with them. Then when you meet them you're like... oh! So that's what they look like, and it's never what you expected.

It is fun trying to guess though!

I haven't published fiction, only nonfiction, so this may not be quite the same thing. But my happiest moments as an author have come when I give lectures and people hang around afterward to ask questions or tell me how much my work has meant to them. My first book was about the potato's influence on social history, and someone whose forbears came from Ireland said she was very moved by what I'd written. There's nothing like hearing comments like that; by comparison, reviewers mean nothing.

Nobody's ever told me that they envisioned me looking or behaving differently from the way I am based on my writing, but for all I know, they had wild ideas about me. Be interesting to find out, though.

I write for a teen magazine. I get to meet my readers quite often... I make a point of it, so I don't end up sounding like their parents

It was out back of a warehouse, late one night in January, 28 below, darker than Dick Cheney's heart. Nobody showed up.

caw

I talked to an author of some "Sweet Valley High"-type novels, & she expressed confusion that so many of her readers seemed to be mid-twnties straight males.