One of the things I often hear from writers is either “I don’t have an audience”/“I don’t know who my audience is,” OR, swinging to the opposite end of the spectrum, a variation of “everyone (i.e. anyone who reads) is my audience.”
For both cases, my response is the same: you need to get very specific rather than as broad as you currently are.
So here are three questions I want you to consider that will help you figure out the best ways to engage your audience and get them invested in you and your books!
1) Who is your audience?
I need you to get suuuuper specific here. Where are they from? How old are they? What kinds of books do they read? Where do they buy their books? What do they care about?
If you haven’t already, you can download my Ideal Reader Profile for more questions to ask to get a picture of who your ideal reader is. Your ideal reader is just a way to aggregate all of these qualities into one avatar (you can give them a name if you like)—then you can ask yourself when you’re creating social media posts or even writing your book “is this what [Ideal Reader] would like?” Don’t worry, this will not exclude people who don’t match every single aspect of your ideal reader—even if they don’t, there will be enough commonalities that you’ll still be able to capture more than just your ideal readers.
Think of it like a dart board: your ideal reader is the bullseye, but you’re still scoring points if you’re hitting elsewhere on the dartboard. (Or at least, this is my understanding of how you play darts—let’s go with it, k?)
How do you find out all this stuff about your ideal reader? Your social media analytics will show you some basic demographic information, but honestly, the easiest way is to just ask! This is actually a very easy newsletter post, if you struggle to come up with them—your post can be all about you asking to know more about them! Create a questionnaire in a Google form, make it super simple for them to answer (multiple-choice questions rather than asking for long-form responses, where possible), and maybe give them an incentive to complete the form, like a draw for a signed book. And boom, two birds with one stone.
2) Where is your audience?
Hopefully, one of your answers to this is “on your newsletter list,” because that’s the most valuable platform you have when it comes to speaking directly to your readers. If you don’t already have a newsletter, start NOW. If you’ve been neglecting your newsletter for a while, that happens, but it’s time to re-start it and warm your list up again (before you ask for them to complete your questionnaire)—you might lose some subscribers when you start again, but don't worry too much about that. Here is my list of newsletter ideas if you need some.
Where else are they? This is why it helps to know demographics and other details about your readers. You might think you’re writing for an audience in their 30s and are posting on TikTok trying to capture them, but your research might tell you that actually most of your audience is in the 50s—in which case, Facebook might be more where they’re at. Some distinctions might be more subtle, and maybe it’s unclear whether more of your audience is on Instagram or TikTok, and you’ll need the research to clarify. Once you know where they are, you can start adjusting your posts to meet them where they’re at.
Of course you can be on multiple social media platforms at a time and reuse your content across platforms—but it’s easiest to concentrate on one to start. For example, I started out thinking most of my audience was on Facebook, but once I understood better where they actually were, I made IG my primary. I now focus on creating content for IG that I will repost a week later on Facebook while making it look like I designed it for FB (no hashtags, for example). If you have TikTok as your main platform but also post on IG, make sure you remove the TikTok watermark when you repost it on IG so it doesn’t look like you just copy-pasted and so that IG won’t penalize you for using TikTok context (or vice versa if IG is your main).
3) How do you talk to them?
Now that you know who they are and where they are, you can figure out what to say to them! If your ideal reader is similar to you, that makes life a lot easier—you already know what they’re into and what they care about, and you’re on each other’s level. But if not, this is going to require a little bit of extra work.
So, if your ideal reader lives in a different country than you, you might want to know more about their slang or their culture to talk to them in a way that feels relatable for them. Or if your ideal reader is older or younger than you, know the things that they’re going through as a person that age. If your reader is in their 20s and you’re in your 40s, it’s not as easy as thinking about what life was like for you in your 20s—so what are Gen Z’s current concerns and preoccupations and cultural touchstones that you can talk about? (Ideally without being cringey to them.) What memes or songs or shows are they consuming, and how can you show them that you can engage with those things too?
For me, my ideal audience is actually a bit younger than me, by 5-10 years or so—not a huge difference, but in terms of micro generations, enough that there are certain things that will hit different for me as a Xennial cusper than for my millennial audience. (A very silly example: I saw a Reel about Popples that I considered adding to my IG Stories, but ultimately didn’t because I didn’t think a lot of my millennials would know/remember them.)
Meanwhile, I have a client whose readers are women about 20 years older than her, so she buys magazines that women that age would read to understand them and what their current concerns are—from there, she can craft content more specifically for them, and they’ll feel like she gets them. That can engender a lot of loyalty that’s super valuable when you’re selling a book—they’ll care about you because you care about them.
Do you already know your target audience? Are you speaking to them in a way that makes them feel seen and understood?
(Also, if you are a millennial or younger, did you know what a Popple was?)
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