Who Is Your Audience?

As a WOW Blog tour organizer, I send possible authors a list of questions that includes “Who is your audience? The question helps us find the best blogs and people who will enjoy the book when organizing tours. Many authors have a specific audience in mind: women over 40, teachers, dog lovers, cozy mystery lovers. But then there are the answers that are just one word: readers.

I can understand this answer. It doesn’t seem wise to eliminate anyone when searching for people to enjoy your book. But look at it this way: fans of James Patterson and fans of Melody Carson are all readers. But if James Patterson marketed his book to fans of Melody Carson how many would want to read his book? And how many would actually enjoy it?

Although our first instinct might be to keep our pool of possible readers as large as possible, in the end it’s more effective to target smaller audiences that would truly want to read our book. That’s why you so often see book jacket blurbs or ads that include the line “fans of Author X will love this book”. These authors have identified their audience – they know who they are, what they enjoy, and most importantly what they are buying.

Identifying your audience isn’t just important after your book is written. It can help you during the writing process to know who this book will ultimately be for. Knowing your audience can help you make decisions about what music and pop culture figures to mention, whether your dating scenes should include kisses in the moonlight or booty call texts or if your dead body should be tastefully “off stage” or if you should dwell on wounds, manner of death and violence and a thousand other details. There are so many decisions to make when writing a book. Knowing your audience can help make a few of those decisions easier.

Have you thought about who your audience is? What will your book jacket read?

Jodi is a WOW Blog tour organizer, always looking for her next WOW author -- no matter who their audience is. Contact her at jodi@wow-womenonwriting.com. She hopes the book jacket blurb for her WIP will someday read "fans of Kristina McMorris will love this book". Her blog Words by Webb is at http://jodiwebb.com