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Throughout my life, ever since I was a small child, I’ve been accused of having an overactive imagination. I know, “accused” is a strong word, especially since some people said it affectionately, others said it laughingly, and most said it exasperatedly.

And the truth is, I’m not the only one! Most fiction writers have at very least active imaginations, if not overactive. And this active imagination is critical to a writer’s ability to do their job. Fiction writers invent new people, imagine strings of worst-case scenarios, and create entire worlds out of basically nothing.

But while this active imagination is useful to our craft, it can actually hold us back in other areas.

Such as in the process of developing a business around our writing. Or when we’re building a marketing plan. Or trying to make decisions about publishing and distribution.

Just because we can imagine a scenario, good or bad, doesn’t mean that it’s the right scenario to be basing our decisions on. I can imagine a full business structure with hired employees filling all kinds of roles from CEO right down to janitor. I can imagine renting or owning a building to conduct my business from, and rubbing elbows with the famous actors who are going to star in the TV shows based on my books. And I can see all kinds of tasks I could currently perform that would create a solid foundation for said business.

But should I be doing all those tasks? Or should I be writing more books?

One really common area I see this pitfall frequently is in discussions about readership.

Imagine an author who has one, maybe two or three books published. They have 200 followers on Facebook (mostly family and people they knew in high-school), 25 newsletter subscribers, 128 Instagram followers, and 7 BookBub followers (all other authors from an author Facebook group follow-a-thon). In total and assuming no overlap, 360 people who have chosen to engage with their brand for some reason or another, and maybe 15% of them are strangers to the author (or possibly bots).

Then, this author has a new idea for a new book. It’s different from their first, second, and third books. A different tone, a different genre, different themes. And they are terrified that writing and publishing it will “upset readers.”

What readers, might I ask?

There is endless conversation in the writing community about “what readers want.”

What do readers want in your newsletter? What do readers want you to write and publish? What do readers want you to post on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter? What do readers want your brand to look like? What covers do readers want? Will this ending piss off my readers? What if I kill off this character? What if… what if… what if… But what about the readers?

And most of the time, these questions come from authors who have no readers. Or who have very few, at best.

Sometimes it feels like collectively, we have created an imaginary monster that haunts our writing, our branding, our business—the looming colossus, the invisible watching eyes, the sinister and pernicious Dastardly Reader, who has the power to destroy our careers with a sneer and a bad review. They peer over our shoulders and growl at cliffhanger endings, hiss at overused tropes, and spit acid whenever we dare do something (can I even say it aloud?!) out-of-the-box. And if you dare publish a work with anything the Dastardly Reader dislikes, they’ll sweep in and burn everything to the ground with one fiery breath.

Well, I have good news for you.

The Dastardly Reader is naught but a figment of our collective oversized imagination.

This is not to say that we all should completely ignore what our readers feel, think, and want (although, I do think this is still a perfectly valid creative strategy for some authors). Rather, that the key word here is our readers.

Every author has a unique audience; yes, even authors who write to market. You may have some crossover with other authors, sure. But your audience is yours and yours alone. So, what your audience wants may be different than what another author’s audience wants.

For example, if you see a newsletter guru in the author community recommend writing short emails, and then proceed to write excruciatingly long emails for their own audience—this is because they’re giving you general advice, but then applying specific, strategic choices to their own business, based on their own audience.

There are lots of strategies out there for figuring out what your reader wants: sending out surveys, creating reader groups and letting them talk to you, inviting them to email you, reading reviews (proceed with caution!). But I think the most frustrating time for an author is right at the beginning, when you have no readers. No one participates in your reader group. No one responds to your emails. And you can’t even get reviews in the first place.

So how, then, are you supposed to make decisions about what your readers want, if you don’t have any readers to ask?

Beware: this is the exact moment the Dastardly Reader likes to show up and start poking and prodding at you. So make sure you acknowledge it for what it is: imaginary.

My advice would instead be this: do what you want.

Do you want to play around with that overused trope? Do it. Do you want to leave some kind of potentially-obnoxious cliffhanger ending? Do it. Do you want to have a messy and chaotic social media presence? Do it. Do you want to send out really long (or really short) emails? Do it.

The thing that makes your brand unique is you. The thing that makes your audience unique… is also you.

You can always follow someone else’s template for a business model if you want. You can always change your approach. You can always grow, learn, and refine your tactics and methods.

But I honestly believe that there’s no time better than at the beginning to focus on figuring out what you want in your books and your business. When there aren’t any real eyes watching your every move, when you have no obligations to anyone, and when you don’t have an audience to “disappoint.”

Explore, experiment, evaluate—and don’t let that Dastardly Reader get in your head.