By
JOHN SCHERBER
In Search of
Your Target Reader
You write a letter to your daughter,
a college freshman in Iowa in her first year of living away from home, and next
you write one to your father, a retired barber living in Prescott, Arizona. You
mistakenly switch the letters in the envelopes, and by the time you realize
that might have happened, they are already on their way. If the news they carry
is much the same, why is this a problem?
The answer is
that we approach different people with different styles of communication. You
have not written the same letter to both your family members, even though each
one contains an essentially similar packet of news. The reason is that in your
approach to different people in your family, you are presenting different aspects of yourself, and it’s
discoverable in your voice on the page.
The book you
are about to write raises the same issue. In directing it to the world at large
it will reach no one. It needs to be addressed to a particular person I think
of as the Target Reader. Just as with the letters you wrote, before you put a
word on the screen of your laptop, you must know who that Target Reader is. Maintaining
the image of this person before you as you write will keep your voice and tone
moving along the same path. But how do you discover that reader’s identity?
First, it is a
person with a similar interest in your subject, so to that extent you look
somewhat alike, since your interest is leading you to write the book. Unless
the subject of your book has a strong masculine appeal, like carpentry or
hunting, your target reader is slightly more likely to be a woman, just because
slightly more women are readers than men.
For an example,
let’s take the first book in my mystery series, Twenty Centavos. Women and men love mysteries about equally, and we
also know they love a series they can settle into. Because the detective
character first appears as a painter, and on that basis invited into the
investigation because he might see things differently than the police, the
target reader (TR) may also have an interest in painting, either for the
finished canvas or the process itself. The mystery is centered on counterfeit
Mayan ceramics, so the TR may have an interest in that as well, but is more
likely to be interested in antiquities or ancient cultures in general and is
willing to learn a bit about the Mayan material in particular.
The mystery is
set in colonial México, so it appeals to those who like exotic locations,
travel, or expat lifestyles.
As I look at
this list, all of these points apply to me, both as reader and writer, so it’s
no exaggeration to say the TR looks something like the author. And don’t most
authors write for themselves first?
These are all points
of interest, and you should continue to keep your TR in mind as you also plan
how to promote this book once it’s published. Because whether it’s published by
New York or by your own hand, you will do all
the promotion yourself and it’s helpful to have been thinking all along how to
reach out to her, your TR, and persuade her that she needs to buy and read this
book.
Once completed and published, your
task will become to make it discoverable to her and everyone else who shares
her likes and interests. Some ways to do this do not involve advertising or
direct promotion. One way is to go where she goes on the Internet, and place
the book in her path. You will therefore give it a title that reflects popular
search words. For example, if it’s a murder mystery that concerns a series of
killings near a pond in Central Park, and the only witness is a bird watcher
who sees the first crime through binoculars from her 10th floor
Fifth Avenue apartment, you will not title the book, The Pond Murders, because who Googles the word pond? In your savvy way, you will call it The Audubon Murders, because Audubon is a common Internet search
word, and any birdwatcher who loves mysteries will discover it and likely buy
your book.
Once she has it in her hands, the
effort you made of writing the book to her will pay off. Your TR will see that
in the telling of this story, your voice will be clear and unique. Your
language will be focused, exact, and on point. Your characters, even the
villains, will be relatable. Which means that she can see some of herself in
all of them, even as she traces her own interests in the story. If you can
manage some humor without seeming silly or self-conscious, go ahead, because
she will love it when make her laugh out loud in the middle of a paragraph.
Within a few pages she will understand the authority with which you work. You
may not be a character on the page, but your individual vision is clear in
every aspect. She will understand that you have taken no shortcuts and followed
no formulas. Your plot is character driven, in the sense that once you have
assembled four or five fully rounded people in the story, they will act and
interact according to their own needs and desires, and they will proceed
through swamp and jungle until they reach a resolution that, while it was never
visible until the end, still resonates with a compelling reality. Indeed, once
she sees it, she will realize it was inevitable all along.
In the end,
captivated by your language and your range of connections with her fields of
interest, she will prove the relationship between reader and writer goes both
ways, and you will become her TW, her Target Writer.
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