Simple question, but do you have a target audience in mind? It's something I expect publishers want to know, even if you claim to write for yourself. Please paint a picture of your reader, here is mine... He is a cool geek, wears heavy rimmed specs, reads poetry secretly, and favourite film is fight club. His girl friend likes zombies and plays guitar. He works in accounts/estate agent, likes pop art and dislikes brands.
I guess it would have to be the hot girl in a bikini that I have on my desktop background that I see a fraction of when I'm writing.
Thanks for the contributions. I thought it would be a fun writing exercise and a chance to express your work in a different way. Clearly I am wrong. :/
I was writing a description, but found I was just describing myself while acting like it was someone else. I believe we all write to a particular audience, but that audience is filled with people with similar traits to ourselves. My targeted readers are people who share my interests and ideals. Writing for an audience that wouldn't include yourself seems like an unnecessary complication. You then have to think from a perspective that doesn't match your own.
I have been consistently surprised at who likes my writing and who doesn't. You won't actually know your target audience till you try out a finished draft on some betas. Some people whom I thought would hate the story actually said they loved it, galloped through it in a couple of days, and wanted to talk about it at length. (That's the reaction you can't fake. If people want to discuss your characters and 'what happened' in great detail, and maybe even come up with their own take on events, then that's your audience. Those are the folks you've hooked.) Some people whom I thought would be attracted to the story seemed pleasant, but indifferent, and some of them didn't even bother to read it at all—or took ages and ages to plow through it as a favour to me. So there you go. It has nothing to do with who your good friends are. It's down to what do they like to read, and what draws them in. I did pay attention to any feedback I got, positive or negative. A lot of the negative feedback was incredibly helpful, and I feel I have a much stronger story now, because of it. However, if a person enjoys your story first time, faults and all—they are your target audience. When I write, I do always have a specific person in mind that I'm "telling" the story to. It helps fix the tone. (Fortunately, the person I wrote my novel 'for' does like it a lot. She got done reading it, and said it was her favourite book. And no, she didn't know it was her I had in mind when I wrote it. So that was a relief!)
What got me interested in writing fiction was trying to choose my favorite work of fiction and then realizing "if you want something done right, then do it yourself." So a picture of my reader would be a picture of me. Not a pretty picture, I am afraid.
An inquisitive monkey that hits all the right buttons on his Ipad at the zoo. Seriously, anyone whose willing. Why limit myself.
I'm not sure I have a particular audience in mind as I write although my friend tells me I write for the "mommy porn" market. Saying that, I have had guys read my book and enjoy it. I supposed, if I'm being honest, my target audience is anyone over the age of 18 who is willing to give it a go!
People who think stingrays are gorgeous animals. It's not that the story has a single stingray in it, but the probability of a stingray admirer liking the story is higher than that of a person who is indifferent -- or dislikes them.
