What do we mean when we say it’s important that you know your audience as a writer?

This was something that I wrestled with as a younger writer– my audience was, obviously, whoever wanted to read my work! I wanted my stuff to attract as many readers as possible, so it didn’t make sense to put restrictions on who I thought my readers should be. However, I was also missing a few crucial points: what did I expect my readers to know? What were my readers coming to my work and hoping to find? Without knowing that, it’s hard to know where I was confusing people or disappointing them.

In short, I had little sense of what my readers’ expectations would be, precisely because I hadn’t defined very well who they were. I don’t mean that you have to have a super narrow focus if you don’t want to, but it’s important to know at least some baselines about the kind of people you imagine reading your work.

One important thing that this is going to impact is what I call the “barrier to entry” to your work. Think about it like a physics problem: in some cases, there’s a certain amount of potential energy that an object needs to overcome to be acted on or move. If a reader doesn’t come at your book with a certain amount of that potential energy, then they may not choose to continue reading.

Our knee-jerk reaction in this moment may be to say “oh no, what a terrible thing! I definitely need to make sure I always have a low barrier to entry with my work!” Understandable– we love accessible literature– but not always necessary.

Consider texts where the author is fluent in multiple languages, or makes pithy little asides in French or Latin. Do you need to know French or Latin to still be able to understand the story and enjoy the characters? No, definitely not. But if you want to get all the jokes and have a fuller reading experience, that’s certainly helpful knowledge to bring to the book. That’s helping you determine who your audience is.

A broad audience can also be detrimental to your work; it’s like trying to be the kid in class who appeals to everyone. To be likeable universally generally means being very bland. Even the things that seem to have wide appeal (like blockbuster franchises like Divergent, the Hunger Games, etc) don’t appeal to absolutely every person. For one, in both of those fandoms, you need to either like or be willing to read books about post-apocalyptic or dystopian young adults.

A narrow audience can also build a zealous fanbase. One of my very favorite reads of the last few years has been Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb books. To get into the series, you probably like necromancy (again, a narrowing of the audience) and are fascinated with the idea of this in a space setting. You like appreciate a more complex plot and deep characters. Muir makes a lot of asides and jokes that center on memes or current internet culture– if you’re not chronically online, you may miss some (just as readers from the 1920s who didn’t have Latin or French might miss out on some funny Dorothy L. Sayers moments), but it’s not going to impede your understanding of the work. It’s just something that enables you to more fully enjoy it.

That said, there is a cost associated with knowing you’re missing out on joke after joke. In the case of another, unknown-to-you language popping up frequently through the text, you might google expressions or translate lines for a little bit (if the author doesn’t do it for you), but after a while you may decide that this is a little too much. Maybe it’s interrupting your reading process a few too many times to always pause and look things up. Maybe you stop looking stuff up, or maybe you stop reading.

Again, this isn’t necessarily bad (or good). It’s just observing what choices we might want to make when writing for a particular audience. If you’re writing for an audience that you can assume is mostly bilingual, then it may not make sense to translate everything in the secondary language! Where you meet your reader– how much help you give them, what you expect from them– is going to determine your audience as much as your content.

Will adding in translations or footnotes make your readers who already know the language feel stymied or too slowed down? This is another important choice to consider. A few writers I’ve worked with choose not to translate some languages, relying on readers to get the gist of a passage from context.

Ultimately, how you choose to write for your audience is up to you! It may sound a little weird to ideate imaginary people or think about what readers for a book you haven’t even written yet might look like, knowing who you’re speaking to can help you make decisions better about what you want a book to look like.

Here are some questions that I might suggest asking yourself before a project, maybe to help hone in on who you’re writing for:

What kind of jokes does my audience laugh at? What do they understand? Can you make funny jokes across languages? Are you writing for an audience that loves a well-placed meme? Is the currency of humor puns or visual gags?

What do you expect your readers to come into your book already knowing? You’re going to expect them to come in with something, even if you don’t think you do. If you’re writing a portal fantasy, for example, are you writing for readers who have already read other books like yours? How much do you need to dwell on the how’s and why’s of what’s happened? If you’re writing a historical, how much background information about the event or time period do you need your readers to know and how much are you okay filtering in? In a fantasy series, what do you expect your reader to remember from previous books? Are you relying on them to remember complex lineages and subtly dropped hints you left, or do you prefer to rehash all the important information at the start of each book/as it’s needed?

Why is my reader coming to my book specifically? This is more about your particular writing style. Why have they picked up your book instead of all the other ones in the genre or on the shelf? Maybe that answer is “because I do slow-burn romance really well and they love that stuff!” or maybe it’s “because my worldbuilding is so unique that they can really see themselves there”. Whatever you feel sets you apart from other books in your intended genre– i.e. whatever the thing is that readers would seek you out for– focus on that!

What might annoy readers about my writing? Normally I like to keep it positive, but this is also something that’s important to consider as well. Do you have any crutch words that you lean on? Any phrases that keep coming up over and over? Do you find that maybe the way you move action forward is usually by having an outside character inform the heroine of something versus her shaking things up herself? Think about what your reader might want to experience: they’re coming to your book to be entertained and to root for your characters. Where might you be getting in the way of that?

All this being said, don’t feel like you have to only do things that you feel your audience would like. Sometimes you have to make up stuff or do new things that your audience doesn’t even know they’re going to love. You should definitely do that! At the end of the day, you too are part of your own audience (or at least, I hope you are, because you’ll enjoy the process of writing and revisions a lot more if you are).

It’s more than okay to write things that you love and are enchanted by, even if they’re not strictly in the realm of “what my intended audience expects”. Surprise and delight them.

As usual, if you liked this and you’d like to support my habit of chatting about craft, you can buy me a coffee below. Or, if you’re looking for a freelance editor for you fiction needs, I also offer editing services over at Constellation Editorial.