Updated November 4, 2024.
Knowing your target audience or ideal reader—today’s term is avatar—is important in many ways. As the term implies, you are aiming at a target, so knowing as much as you can about it will enable you to hit the bull’s-eye.
Often the message you hope to convey through your fiction or nonfiction dictates a lot about who the audience is. For example, I wrote Carried by Grace because I wanted to help women…who were Christian…with children…who had been sexually abused. Additionally, I narrowed the age range to mothers who were 28 to 40.
Before you start to write, gain as much clarity about your ideal reader as possible, all the way down to their needs and struggles (this is critical if you blog). People read to meet a need in their life. What need are you meeting?
Questions to Ask to Determine Your Ideal Reader
More questions exist than are feasible to list in this blog, but here are some to get you started.
- Gender
- Approximate age
- Education
- Marital status
- Number of dependents
- Lives (in the city, suburbs, rural)
- What does your reader dream about?
- What problem does he/she seek to solve?
- What scares him/her?
- What excites him/her?
You get the gist; take it from here.
How this steers your writing
Affects the language you choose, fiction or nonfiction
- Are you writing to reach children or adults?
- Are you seeking to encourage or inspire believers?
- Are you trying to reach stay-at-home moms or career women?
- Are you speaking to a specific sex and age group?
- Is your audience highly educated?
A reader must understand your words in order to understand message. You’ll use different words in writing to different audiences.
Determines aspects of your fictional characters
- Does your genre appeal primarily to men or to women? Should the main character be a man or a woman?
- Are your major and minor characters 20-something, over 50, or everything from 1 to 99?
- Is your main character a dog lover who carries her Yorkie everywhere she goes, a coffee fiend, a cowboy?
Will a book with nothing but 20-somethings appeal to a reader over 50? Possibly. Genre will also have an impact. Remember, it’s important for your reader to bond with your main character.
Guides your word count
- Are you writing for children, young adults, adults?
- Some genres such as Love Inspired (which has a very specific audience), require a specific word count
Each of the above mentioned items affects who your book will appeal to. The more you know about your ideal readers—their struggles, their needs, and how you can meet that need—the better you can write a book that will appeal to those particular readers.
Are you writing at, above, or below your ideal reader’s reading level? You can check the reading level of your text quickly in MS Word through the editor tool on the review tab. Under the results you get with the editor, you’ll find document stats under the insights bar. Click on the document stats and you’ll get your results. This will help you know if your writing is the correct reading level for your audience.
If you don’t use MS Word, you can do a search on “readability tools” to find several options.
This should help you to know as much as you can about your ideal reader before you start writing. And will save time on the editing side of your work as well.
This was super insightful. Ideal reader always sounded confusing but this paints a clear picture. Thank you 🙏🏾
You’re welcome.
“People read to meet a need in their life.” I need to remember that and also learn more about my ideal reader. Some great advice here. Thanks Deb.
A reader’s need can often be as simple as to be entertained. To escape from the daily real life struggles was a common answer in a recent survey a publisher did. But you can see how that would affect what you write, if your main purpose is to meet that reader’s need for entertainment.