Who Is Your Ideal Reader?

By Barbara Samuel

Do you know who your reader is?  Not just “the book club crowd” or “businessmen who travel” or “readers of the New Yorker,” but your true core.  Not just “women’s fiction”, either, but the specific, particular readers who love your particular kind of story. 

This discussion came up years ago on an email loop I frequented, and one of the writers said something that stuck with me.  She is a Brown graduate with an MFA, a bluestocking Jewish woman who grew up in NYC and Long Island who staged plays in college with some success, then moved to Boston and started writing category romances and raising children.  Fearsomely bright.  She said that her core reader was a 30-something unmarried female lawyer in an East Coast city who only had time to read for pleasure for ten minutes before bed, and liked the intelligence in her romantic comedies.   Talk about clarity!

That discussion was one of the most illuminating I’ve ever had about writing and markets and voice—and indirectly led to a big change in my career direction. I’m bringing it to you today.  How do you know who your ideal reader is? How can you sort through the elements of genre, geography, culture, education, geography, and voice to discover your own #1 Best Reader?

First step: What is your genre? Obviously, we are all writing women’s fiction in one form or another, but we cover the range between literarish WF about sisters,  to Southern stories about families; between dark suspense to light comedy.  Knowing where you are on those continuums will help you target your reader. 

Obviously, genre is one of the cornerstones of discovering your reader, but it is actually a lesser cornerstone than a couple of others.  Despite the publishing wish to divide everything up neatly, a good percentage of readers are not one-genre ponies. They probably don’t read everything either, but will have a body of work they like to choose.   Look at your own tastes—I read commercial literary novels, but very few straight literary anything, even if touted madly by every review organ in the universe.  I love young adult novels of many forms, read tons of memoir and narrative non-fiction, scatterings of romance, and some science fiction. My mainstay is commercial women’s fiction, and I read a lot of it.  Also—this is important—I read almost exclusively women writers.  I don’t avoid male writers, but my tastes seem to center more on a female way of telling stories. 

What do you read? Start there. Who else reads what you read? Is your reader a man or a woman? Other than what you write, what other books are on his/her to be read pile?  

Next, geography, culture and social standing influence our tastes very strongly.  There are at least four clearly defined geographical areas in the US.  Two of them have their own special body of literary recognition—the Southern novel, which everyone recognizes, and the East Coast, whose tastes rule publishing. The other two are the Midwest, and the West (which many of you Eastern folks don’t even realize is a different place than the Midwest).  

The regional angle is important because it will influence the kind of story you tell, thus the reader you will most please.  Publishing is culturally East Coast, and a vast majority of literary writers have an East Coast focus.  In the East, social standing, education, and status are powerful markers.  Things like your neighborhood, your college credentials, your connections matter.

Not so much in the West.  What matters here is not your family or education or pedigree, but who you are now. People have always run to the west to reinvent themselves, so we value a big fail as much as a big success, and straightforwardness and a good story over family name.

In the South, family matters.  Cultural rules matter. Time matters.  Sarah Addison Allen explores these ideas thoroughly in a modern way.   In the Midwest (a landscape I don’t know very well), perhaps one of the primary stories is about hard work and the bedrock of society, but I am loathe to go too far into that because I don’t really know.  Maybe someone here can add to that part of the discussion. I see Susan Elizabeth Phillips writing against that backdrop.  Her work straddles the line between romance and women’s fiction, but I’d put her in our camp, wouldn’t you?

What is your geography? How has it shaped your work, your choice of genre, your ideas of what stories need to be told?  Where do your readers live?  

By the way, members of Author Central on Amazon can now access statistics about geographic readership. Your readers will not necessarily be limited to the setting of your stories, or even to your own background, but understanding the values of each region will help you understand your ideal reader.  

What position do you occupy within that cultural landscape?  What is your socio-economic status? Your ethnicity?  

These things shape your work and will influence your reader.  Many African American writers decry the separation of their titles into AA fiction shelves in bookstores, and complain that it keeps their work from being discovered by a larger audience (check out Carleen Brice’s White Readers Meet Black Writers) but the argument is that it helps target readers of like ethnicity who might be trying to find books by black writers.  

One of my challenges as a commercial fiction writer is the multitudes of ethnicities that make up my life. I’m an Irish American who grew up in heavily Hispanic/Native American neighborhoods in Colorado cities.  My favorite aunt is Jewish and lovingly gave us her culture, even as she and her husband, my uncle, became lifelong students of an Indian yogi. I married an African American man, bore mixed race children in a Hispanic/Italian city, and we all lived together happily there for twenty years.  One of my uncles has been  married to a man my entire life, though his mother sure wasn’t politically correct about it.  And, oh yeah, my partner now is English. His sibling is married to a Scot and they emigrated to New Zealand.

This is my world. My characters are naturally and simply of many backgrounds.  Which is, actually, one of the defining characteristics of the West.  This is life here.  Everyone has a multicultural history and connection, so much so that we don’t think about it.  I didn’t think about it, writing category romance in the 90’s, tapping into the magic realism that is Hispanic Catholicism and Native American lore of my childhood.  I didn’t think about it writing a medieval romance about Germany in the 14^th century between a Jewish medical student and a German noble.  I didn’t think about the fact that my interests might not be the same as my target audience. 

It wasn’t a great fit for romance, because you have to capture the heart of romance to be a big star there, and my lack of understanding of what that meant spelled doom for me. I think it did for a lot of romance writers, which is where the boom in women’s fiction came from.

How does your ethnic and religious background influence your work?  How does that make it a good fit in some markets, but not others?  As a romance writer, I was winning awards and getting a lot of good attention, but I wasn’t selling very well over the long haul. By the time the discussion of the ideal reader came up, I was ready to evaluate these questions.

To succeed in any area of writing, you have to reach the heart of your genre, capture the die-hard readers who never, ever read anything else. If that’s a hard SF or a dark literary novel or a thriller or whatever, you need know who that reader is.  In terms of women’s fiction, this means figuring out who reads your particular form of WF.  Where does she buy her books? Walmart? Bookstores? Target?

There is more than one heart of romance reader (despite the slurs, it’s a very very large readership), but I was only reaching one of them, the artist/bohemian/student.  I could not capture the heartland, and without it, I couldn’t make a big splash in romance.

I looked at the readers who did love my books, and evaluated whatever any of them said.  What I discovered was that they liked my dark storylines. They liked the characters. They liked the writing and the bits of magic realism, the music and the political stand, the issues.  Nobody really mentioned the romance.

My core reader in romance tended to be anywhere from 25 to 65, but on the hip side, artists and musicians and students. I found a following among librarians and academics.  My reader tended to be a city dweller, often with a demanding career and maybe some unconventional choices.  She read romances, but not every romance in a line, or every romance in an era, but as part of her body of reading.  She also tended to read upbeat literary novels, women’s fiction, and often had a taste for either fantasy, science fiction, or magic realism.  

So I reevaluated, stepped back and tried my hand at an emerging market, commercial women’s fiction.   Clearly, my reader would be a book club person, but she’d be the one who would say, “We’ve read three Oprah books and tragedies in a row. Can we have something a little lighter this time?”  

I have met many variations on my core reader.  (What often surprises me is that she’s often younger than I expect, and I try to keep that in mind.)  One who sticks with me is a tall Italian woman from Pueblo. She was an academic, well dressed in a modest way, and sharply intelligent. She read the book as a book club member, and loved it for one main reason.  “There was Jewel, her son left and Michael died and Malachi had taken off, as we knew he would, but at least she’d made peace with her father. Typical.  My heart was aching for Jewel!”  She paused, clearly emotional. “And then,” she said, “I turned the page, and there was more.”  

“Oh, right,” I said, “the happy ending, right?” 

Exactly.

Have you ever tried to puzzle out the demographics of your readership? Do you know who they are from your fan mail or the feedback from other places?  Can you write a sketch of your ideal reader?