Sizing Up Your Audience

By Elaine L. Orr

Authors think about their audiences from several perspectives. Yes, we want a lot of readers. But we have to write (and market) to a type of reader or our fans will be limited to friends and family. 

That doesn't mean we only write to please readers. But we have to decide who those readers are as we start a book. Then we can write something that we, and they, like. 

Audiences can be stratified by age, interests (including hobbies), sex, marital status, occupation, residence, and more. Picking an audience is important, affecting everything from vocabulary to book length to types of sexual interactions. Unless you're writing for pleasure and not income, you need to target a given audience.

You aren't writing to readers' characteristics, you're writing to their interests or preferences. In mysteries, is a lot of violence okay? Do they want fast-paced action or prefer to focus on background and/or the sleuth's internal thought processes? Do they want to escape the real world or read about crimes that sound like something that could be on the news each night? 

I believe a fiction author writes more easily if something interests them. That's possibly why many mysteries deal with a sleuth's occupation or hobbies. I was an economics minor, so one of my sleuths is a real estate appraiser and pays attention to business interests and community development. (Plus you can find bodies when appraising houses.)

On the other hand, I like to garden so another sleuth is a gardener. I've spent a lot of time on genealogy research that I could have spent writing, so I finally made a sleuth a family historian. In both professions you dig up stuff. (Lame joke.)

There are writers whose writing is so diverse they use pen names -- that's generally because the audiences for the two types of writing can be very different. The person who picks up a cozy mystery (no on-stage violence, usually small towns, and amateur sleuth) might not like a faced paced international thriller whose hero kills people in varied ways, which may be described in detail. That reader could be really annoyed to pay for a book from a cozy author that's not at all like that genre.

Yes, they can read the book blurb carefully, but if a reader likes an author they may automatically buy anything they see. (That's the hope!)

There are authors who appeal to diverse audiences. I'm thinking of how Kirkus Reviews characterizes author Carolyn Haines. “Stephanie Plum meets the Ya-Ya Sisterhood...featuring sassy Southern private investigator Sarah Booth Delaney." Haines also write's other series under her name, including Pluto's Snitch books, but uses a pen name (Caroline Burnes) for a romantic suspense series Harlequin publishes and R.B. Chesterton for some stand-alone thrillers.

If we don't use separate series by pen name, how do let readers know they may like some of our books better than others? I'm not talking so much about advertising as describing a book accurately so readers know what they're getting.

I try to write the blurb soon after I start writing the book. It keeps me from meandering as I write, but it also helps me know what more I need to tell prospective readers. I ask members of my critique group for comments, and revise the blurb as I write more. I generally don't look at it for weeks before publication, so I have a cold eye review. 

With electronic sales (which includes paperbacks advertised on retail websites) the keywords matter, and it's up to the author to use the right ones. I look at what authors who write similar books use, and I hope they feel free to consider mine. What you can't do (really) is use keywords bestselling authors use if those descriptive terms don't truly apply to your book.

I sometimes put "Cozy Mysteries With..." in the Amazon search box. There's a fairly new category -- Cozy Mysteries With a Little Paranormal Help. This describes my family history series perfectly. There's a ghost, but he's more a character than a spooky element. The new phrase is not an option for categories to select when entering or updating the book, but I now have it in each of the books' keywords. Great.

On the other hand, I found Appraisal for Murder (first Jolie Gentil book) on the site and looked at the book rankings (just below Product Details). All of the terms were related to real estate! None for cozy mysteries. I went to that book's KDP page and changed some keywords and (since I had not updated categories recently for this 2011 book) changed some of those.

It would be more fun just to keep writing and not think about how to describe books, but in this age of search engine optimization (SEO) it's essential to stay current.

It also helps you describe your books and think about ideas for future ones.

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