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If you’ve been doing this author-ing thing for at least a few minutes, you’ve probably run into the advice: “know your target audience.” Whether you’re trying to write to market, setting up your social media, building a newsletter list, or choosing a cover design, this advice seems like it is constantly rearing its ugly head.
I have a few thoughts, of course, but if you’re looking for really solid, actionable, tactical, tangible things you can do to narrow down your audience as far as possible, BookBub has a really good article and you should check that out. After all, they have a lot more experience with the process than I do, as narrowing down audiences is really their thing.
But I do think that writers, especially ones who are just starting out, tend to agonize over this question far more than is necessary.
Yes, know your audience. But I don’t think you need to know everything about your audience all the time. As authors, particularly indie authors, we have to remember that we are just one person. Or maybe two if we have a PA or spouse to help. We can’t do everything all the time.
Which means, it is important to ask first, “Why do I need to narrow down my audience?” and then “How narrow?” So, for example, if you are trying to write to market, it’s critical to know your audience. You need to understand the market and understand exactly what different types of readers are looking for. But, if you’re trying to decide which social media platform to prioritize as the next step of your marketing, does it really matter what income level your readers are? Does it matter what they do for a living? Does it matter if they have a college degree or not?
The truth is, you can always add another social media platform later. You can always narrow down your audience more. You can always do more. So my first tip for writing your ideal target audience description is this:
Start wide.
Start with a wide understanding of your audience. For example: what genres do they like to read? This is probably the easiest audience descriptor.
You don’t want to be writing books for sci-fi readers using romance techniques. Similarly, you don’t want to be marketing romance books to sci-fi readers.
So you might begin your target audience description with a statement like this:
“My ideal target audience is a person who enjoys sci-fi and fantasy.”
[Note: I’ll be basing all of the examples in this post off of myself, my books, and my audience.]
You should also think about the way they like to experience stories. It’s less important to target a sci-fi movie watcher or TV buff than someone that likes to read.
“My ideal target audience is a person who reads books.”
How do they consume their books? E-book? Paperback? Audio book?
These things matter to your production choices and your marketing tactics. You don’t want to market an e-book to audio book listeners. You don’t want to market a paperback to people who prefer e-books.
“My ideal target audience is a person who reads e-books.”
This matters because it can help you determine where you’re going to market your book, whether you’re going wide or staying in KU, and figure out where your readers buy their books.
So a general target audience might look like this:
“My target audience enjoys scifi and fantasy, reads, and prefers e-books.”
And this is a really great place to start. If you think this is all you need for whatever question you’re trying to answer, then just start here. After all, as I said earlier, you can always come back later and define your audience more.
But, if you want to deeper than this, then your next step is to:
Draw some conclusions.
Just with this basic, wide audience, you can begin to make some sweeping generalizations. A person who reads sci-fi and fantasy probably also watches TV shows and movies that are sci-fi and fantasy. Perhaps they attend comic cons and wear shirts featuring their favorite characters or slogans from their favorite series.
A person who reads e-books is more likely to hang out online. They probably spend time on social media, or platforms like Goodreads or Wattpad. They are more likely to sign up for services like Freebooksy or BookBub than someone who only reads paperbacks.
A person who reads paperbacks, on the other hand, is more likely to walk into a bookstore or a library (at least when there isn’t a pandemic). They are more likely to order signed copies or come to an in-person book signing.
A person who listens to audiobooks is more likely to be signed up for services like Chirp. They’re more likely to prefer longer books so they can get more out of their audible credits.
All of these details can be used to find your audience, to know where to market, and to decide how to spend your time and money.
And honestly, this amount of information is probably enough to do most of the things you want to do. A wide audience with a few conclusions drawn can help you set up Facebook ads, figure out what content to publish on social media, and keep writing books in your genre.
Your target audience may now look like this:
“My ideal target audience is a person who enjoys science fiction and fantasy books, and reads primarily on an e-reader.
They hang out sometimes on social media platforms, enjoy watching popular sci-fi and fantasy TV shows and movies (like Doctor Who or Marvel), and may sign up for services like BookBub or Freebooksy. They sometimes go to comic cons and wear nerdy shirts, and they are interested by unique content, and will mostly scroll past if my ads and social media content are the same as everyone else’s.
They are less concerned with aesthetic, and more concerned with me and my work being interesting.”
Yes, I jumped to a bunch of conclusions based on my own experiences with people I know. But honestly, at this point in my career, this can provide enough direction for most of what I do. And digging down to develop a completely thorough description of my ideal target audience isn’t really going to help me that much more, and it will use up time that could be spent writing.
Look at other authors like you.
The other most helpful thing I think an author can do is to look at other books and authors who are similar to you, and figure out what else their potential audience is reading. We all think we’re special and unique, but I guarantee you that there is someone else who writes something similar to you.
Start with the authors who are super famous and you want to emulate. For my first series, that was Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams. If there is a writer that your readers compare you to, start there. For my fairy tale series, this was the Lunar Chronicles series by Marissa Meyer. You can also start with your genre or sub-genre. For my monster series, I classified it as post-apocalypse. Or maybe review your BISAC categories or Amazon keywords.
And then look around.
Browse Goodreads lists. Check out the Amazon bestsellers in those categories. Sift through the reviews of the top books—what other books are readers comparing those books to?
Eventually, your audience can look begin like this, but with as much detail as you want:
“My ideal target audience is a person who enjoys science fiction and fantasy books, and reads primarily on an e-reader.
They hang out sometimes on social media platforms, enjoy watching popular sci-fi and fantasy TV shows and movies (like Doctor Who or Marvel), and may sign up for services like BookBub or Freebooksy. They sometimes go to comic cons and wear nerdy shirts, and they are interested by unique content, and will mostly scroll past if my ads and social media content are the same as everyone else’s.
They are less concerned with aesthetic, and more concerned with me and my work being interesting…
…and they also enjoy books such as: [insert list of list of books and authors here] Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine; the Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyers; Ash by Malinda Lo; and Goose Girl by Shannon Hale.”
Again, you can stop here if you want. This is a really good picture of your ideal audience, honestly. It will give you a good place to start for choosing what to write next, figuring out what social media content you want, determining which formats you want to release your book in, and doing the research for most different types of paid advertising.
Or, you can keep going and narrow it down even more.
Sift through your data.
If you have a website, a social media page, a newsletter, published books, or have run any ads, you have data. All of this data can be used to get a closer look at your current audience. It may not be a perfect match to your ideal audience, but it’s a good element to add.
Reviews
Let’s start with your reviews.
Reading reviews sucks, I know. But try to focus on the 4- and 5- star ones. You want to know what your audience likes, not what they don’t like.
Here are a couple of mine from my book, Midnight Wings, that give me helpful information about actual, real-life reviewers that could potentially apply to my ideal reader:
This review indicates that this reader was a regular reader who went through a reading slump. Perhaps my ideal reader is one who reads several books per month. The reader also indicates that they love fairy tales and retellings (and in fact, most of my reviewers on this book confirm this same thing, even in the lower star reviews), and spends time on Instagram.
This review confirms that the reader enjoys fairy tales and retellings. But the reviewer also suggests that they liked the twist are excited that this book is part of a series. So perhaps I can add into my target audience description that they like twists and read series as opposed to standalones.
This reviewer reveals that they enjoyed the Lunar Chronicles, which is a very helpful tidbit that I have used many times over in my marketing. They also revealed that they prefer character-driven stories, or at very least that this was one thing they preferred about this book.
So let me pause here for a moment and update my ideal target audience description:
“My ideal target audience is a person who enjoys science fiction and fantasy books, and reads primarily on an e-reader.
They hang out sometimes on social media platforms, enjoy watching popular scifi and fantasy TV shows and movies (like Doctor Who or Marvel), and may sign up for services like BookBub or Freebooksy. They sometimes go to comic cons and wear nerdy shirts, and they are interested by unique content, and will mostly scroll past if my ads and social media content are the same as everyone else’s.
They are less concerned with aesthetic, and more concerned with me and my work being interesting, and they enjoy books such as: Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine; the Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyers; Ash by Malinda Lo; and Goose Girl by Shannon Hale.
They spend time on Instagram, prefer series to standalones, like fairy-tale retellings, and enjoy character-driven stories.”
Keep in mind that these last two paragraphs would really be more specific to my fairy tale series, and less relevant to my monster or soft sci-fi series.
Website Data
Next, take a look at your website. Most website platforms offer analytics; you can also set up Google Analytics if you want to. I have both.
I’m not an expert at analytics, but here are a few things to look for:
Your top pages
Mine are: 20 Weirdly Specific Words, Home, How To Write Taglines For Authors. The important thing for me to notice here is that these are author-specific pages, not reader-specific pages. I probably wouldn’t use these to add nuance to my target audience description.
Where your audience is primarily coming from
Mine come from (this year):
Google search and direct traffic
Mobile and Desktop
Chrome, Safari
iOS and Windows with Android as a close third
Facebook as my top social media traffic driver, though I’m also getting a surprising amount of referral traffic from tumblr
Days of the week where you get spikes
Most of the spikes I’ve had this year have been Thursday, Friday, or Sunday
Geography—countries and cities where you’re getting the most traffic
For me, it’s the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia; and in the US, it’s mostly from CA, WA, MD, and NY.
Keywords people are using to find your site
Mine are mostly “specific words” or “oddly specific words,” and “tagline for writers,” both of which point to two the specific blog posts listed above, and “ariele sieling” (Again, I probably wouldn’t use this information as part of my ideal target audience description.)
Facebook, Amazon, and Other Platforms
Facebook has this convenient feature on your public page called “Insights.” In the left-hand column is a button called “People.” You can find a lot of information about the people following you—gender, country, city, languages they speak. My audience is 65% women, mostly ages 35 – 54, from the United States.
You can also find out what content is resonating the best—my top video this year was for my launch of Hook’s Regret. The second video was an interview I did with the I Thought Ladies. I can also see that my audience is more likely to comment or react to photos rather than videos or links.
You can extract similar information from Instagram and MailChimp. You can dig around and look for patterns on your Wattpad or on Goodreads. You can sift through the data Amazon or Facebook provides when you run advertising.
And each time you draw a conclusion, you can add it to your picture of your idea target audience:
“They live in the United States, primarily CA, WA, MD, or NY. They are mostly likely a woman between the ages of 35 – 54. They speak English. They enjoy images on social media more than videos or links. They tend to spend more time online later in the week, Thursday - Sunday.”
Again, you can stop here if you want to. This is a lot of information. It’s not the end-all be-all, of course. But it’s a really good start, and should give you more than enough information to really craft social media content and the like.
Do external research.
Now that you know what you think your audience should look like, and have a picture of what your current audience does look like, it’s time to take a look at industry trends and other authors’ audiences.
I want to talk about the romance genre for a second here. Did you know that the biggest genre in fiction is romance? It’s a billion-dollar industry, and it is now primarily run by indie authors.
One of the things about this specific genre is that romance readers know what they like, and they are voracious. As in, they read a lot. They talk to each other. They leave reviews.
And as a result, there is a ton of data out there.
According to the “Romance Book Buyer 2017: A Study by NPD Book for Romance Writers of America,” the marketing focus should be on younger readers, who are:
”…diverse in sexual orientation and in ethnicity; more male; frequent readers; listening to audiobooks; reading e-books on smartphones; shopping at a greater number of online retailers; and extremely engaged on social media and willing to experiment with new authors.” [Source]
(Members of RWA can access this entire study.)
All I did to find this was google “understanding romance readers,” and voila!
The RWA (before it’s epic collapse at the end of 2019) was one of the biggest and most influential organizations in the book industry. There are thousands of romance writers and millions of romance books. Romance readers are known to be voracious, reading ten or twenty (or more!) books per month. Which has led to a lot of interesting strategies that romance writers use to access their audiences.
My point here, is that because the romance genre is so big and influential, many of the marketing strategies floating around the aether come from them. And those strategies were developed because they know their audience.
But it gets a little tougher if you’re a scifi writer. Or fantasy, mystery, thriller, horror, memoir, self-help, or whatever.
I can’t post pictures of scantily clad men and have that turn into actual book sales. I’ve also found that repeated posting in reader groups doesn’t work for me. Creating a FansOnly account is probably not going to get me new readers—it might make me money, but it doesn’t really fit my brand lol. Sexy tips and tricks aren’t going to make the type of reader I’m looking for hit buy.
So what other information is out there to help figure out your ideal audience?
Well, you can talk to other authors, for starters.
Join some Facebook groups and start engaging. Ask other authors what their target audience looks like. Ask them who follows them on Facebook or what their website traffic looks like. You can also do a little stalking (figuratively, I mean!). Join some reader groups. Sift through the group members. Pay attention to conversations. Look for trends.
You can also go to comic cons or events focused around your genre (post pandemic, of course). Talk to people. Be friendly, not creepy. Ask them if they like to read and what types of stories engage them. Take notes.
Sift through posts on relevant hashtags on Instagram and Twitter. Look for conversations about books, tropes, market trends. Follow bookstagramers and book bloggers. See what readers are saying about books—but also pay attention to their other interests. Do they like cooking? Dogs? Gardening? Hiking? Civil War reenactments?
Buy industry publications. Jane Friedman puts out a monthly newsletter called the HotSheet about what’s going on in the world. The Pew Research Center regularly releases new reports on a wide variety of things. Check out research from the Association of American Publishers or the International Publishers Association. Bowker puts out a report every year outlining trends and patterns in book sales and reading. (Though, keep in mind, some of this information costs money.) Follow Mark Coker, Joanna Penn, Kristin Katryn Rusch, David Gaughran, Mark Dawson. Listen to podcasts, read articles, follow influencers in the publishing industry
The information is out there—you just have to pay attention and take notes.
Ask.
How can you really, truly know who your audience is if you don’t ask them?
When I was ideating on the concept for this post, I decided to pick my spouse’s brain. He works for UnderArmour, and I wanted to know what types of things a big company might do to figure out their target audience.
His answer: Consumer Insights Survey. Big companies will often hire out third-party consultants to dig deep. They will survey thousands of potential customers to determine who they are, what they do, where they live, how much money they make, and what their interests are.
And while it is much more difficult for an individual writer to do something like this (you should be writing!), it is certainly possible.
You can always pay someone to do this for you. Otherwise, the simplest method would be to create a survey using a platform like SurveyMonkey or MechanicalTurk, and spread it around to as many people as possible. Post it on social media, send it to your newsletter, email it to people you know, ask other authors to share it with your audience (they’re more likely to do this if you offer to share the results with them)—and in fact, you could even get together with a few other authors and all do this together.
Don’t lose sight of the main point.
As you do all of your research, no matter how deep you decide to go, never forget that the #1 most important characteristic of your ideal target audience is this: they like your books. They like books like yours.
Know your own books. Know what’s unique about them and what’s similar to other books. Know the common tropes. Know your main character. Have your blurb and your elevator pitch crafted perfectly. Make sure you have a cover that represents your genre, your style, and your brand.
Make sure the story is a good story. Well-written. Edited.
And make sure that all of the things that you choose to do—your social media posts, paid ads, videos, website, public appearances—point back to your books.
My ideal target audience description:
“My ideal target audience is a person who enjoys science fiction and fantasy books, and reads primarily on an e-reader.
They sometimes hang out on social media platforms, enjoy watching popular sci-fi and fantasy TV shows and movies (like Doctor Who or Marvel), and may sign up for services like BookBub or Freebooksy. They sometimes go to comic cons and wear nerdy shirts. They are interested by unique content, and will mostly scroll past if my ads and social media content are the same as everyone else’s.
They are less concerned with aesthetic, and more concerned with me and my work being interesting, and they enjoy books such as: Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine; the Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyers; Ash by Malinda Lo; and Goose Girl by Shannon Hale.
They spend time on Instagram, prefer series to standalones, seek out fairy-tale retellings, and enjoy character-driven stories.”
They live in the United States, primarily CA, WA, MD, or NY. They are mostly likely a woman between the ages of 35 – 54. They speak English. They enjoy images on social media more than videos or links. They tend to spend more time online later in the week, Thursday - Sunday.
Mostly, they like books like mine. Books with engaging, interesting, female main characters. Books that explore ideas, my own thoughts, and the universe. Books with vivid descriptions of the natural world, and books that try to pick apart what the role of humans is in a world that is so much bigger than us.”
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