#ideal reader

English novelist, critic, and composer Anthony Burgess was born John Burgess Wilson in Manchester (1917). He was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor in the late 1950s and given a year to live. He wrote at a furious pace and produced five novels during that year. At the end of it, he didn't die; in fact, he lived for 30-plus more years, and produced 30 more books, including the one he's most famous for, A Clockwork Orange (1962). Eventually, lung cancer claimed him in 1993.

September 30, 2019, by Jane Friedman

Knowing their audience is key to authors’ success

The secret to selling a book is understanding its readers and how to deliver on their expectations. Though knowledge of readers is most often discussed in relation to nonfiction work, it also affects writers of literary fiction, even if they say they write for no one but themselves: in those cases, the artist becomes a readership of one, with expectations and aspirations for the art they produce. How the story is told, how challenging it will be, and what traditions it will draw upon—all these imply a particular readership who will evaluate the work accordingly.

So if you’re an author, your voice, approach, and attitude toward the writing are hard to separate from your expectations of the reader and the reader’s expectations of you or the text. It’s problematic if your idea of the reader changes as you write or changes once you decide to pitch and market the work—especially if it changes because you hope for a larger readership.

"The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and a failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read."

When You’re Still Looking Too The Honest Truth About Reader Avatars Here’s what no one tells you about finding your ideal reader: sometimes you’re both searching at the same time. For months, I’ve been getting advice to “create your reader avatar”, you know, give them a name, an age, favorite coffee order, weekend habits. But every time I sit down to sketch this imaginary person, I feel like…

#writing

Hey-o, squiders. The summer camps continue to be a disaster and somehow we’re two weeks out from school starting for the fall. Will I remember how much bunching all the summer camps sucks next winter when I am signing people up for summer camps? Probably not. (In the next 24 hours, I need to go to work, take the bigger, mobile one to a doctor’s appointment, pack people for two separate Scout…

How do you create a reader persona and know who you are writing for? Well, here's what I do. And I have been writing for over a decade.

Hey you! Yes, you there. Are you a new writer too? Well, here are some writing hacks which can help you find your target audience! Yes, yes, they work for fiction and content. What are they? Allons-y! Create a Persona Usually when we start writing, especially if it’s fiction, we have an idea of who we are writing for. Is this for the Divergent girlies? Perhaps, it is a Pacific Rim meets…

Good evening, squiders! It’s been an interesting week, hasn’t it? First things first, if you have Prolific Works, Hidden Worlds is part of a Hidden Magic promotion for the next month. Secondly, it seems like there’s drama over at Nano HQ. It is a sad state of humanity that we can’t have nice things, and eventually someone will come along and ruin anything. Someone on one of my writing Discords…

To Read or Not to Read Isn’t the Question. Will You Engage?

Are you my ‘Ideal Reader’? Are you my mother? In P.D. Eastman’s book with that title, a new-born bird asked that question to a kitten, a hen, a dog, a cow, a car, a boat, a plane, and a steam shovel. (After he survived the fall from a large tree and, upon landing, had the ability to walk and talk and name things.) To this little bird fresh from the egg, his mother was lost, and he set out on a…