Who is your audience?

This question seems easy. Everyone! I want everyone to like my book. But that is severely unrealistic and not at all what editors, agents, and the like want to hear when they ask such a question. They want specifics and they don’t want something simple either, like women age 18-60. No. To vague. They want much more, but not as much as I’m about to go into in this blog. They want something like this:

I wrote A White Room for every woman who has ever felt crazy, and for every woman who secretly wished she could let go and really go mad.

photo  ©2007  Mohammad Jangda, Flickr

I’m actually worried that might be too vague. Maybe I should say:

I wrote A White Room for every woman who has ever felt crazy, and for every woman who secretly wished she could let go and really go mad. – Basically women aged 18-60.

I liked that – it’s quirky.

I decided to phrase my audience this way because that is the overall deep seeded woman experience I was playing with in this novel, and I hope that every woman who reads it gets to experience some of their own secret desires through Emeline Dorr.

However, there are so many other ways I could describe who my audience is, and I really want to say it all to really define who I’m trying to reach, not only through my novel but before I publish it with these blogs and my vlogs and my website.

My audience defined in detail:

• I would love for men to like my book, and I wrote it so that if a man happens to pick it up, he can relate to the characters but mostly this is book for women.
• This is also a book for women between the ages of 18-60, or around that because any younger and it might be out of their reading level/world view. Any older and I think women may start to be frustrated with the way I do historical fiction. To be more specific, older women are closer to this time period because their mothers or grandmothers lived in that period and don’t like what I do with it.
• I’m definitely targeting women who like popular fiction and historical fiction . . . like The Help . . . ahhhhhhh!!!!!!!! Professionals say citing The Help specifically as an example of your target audience is a huge no-no, but I’m sorry, I think a lot of women who liked that book would like mine. Specifically, I’m thinking women who enjoy reading about women’s issues and especially women’s issues in the past and to go even deeper, women’s daily lives in the past. A lot of historical fiction deals with women and women’s issues but I have a specific intent in this novel to highlight what it was like in the home from day to day. Of course all women weren’t battling their furniture day to day but still that’s something that I think I personally liked about The Help. It showed us how they lived.
• This will seem redundant but I want it in it’s own bullet – women who like reading about women, women’s issues, and women/women’s issues in the past.
• I also wanted to target women who were particularly knowledgeable in history such as history students, buffs and lovers. You may think – well duh you are writing historical fiction. Not so true—yes I’m writing historical fiction but not all people who read historical fiction know a lot about the time period. I’ve been told by several people that the way they like to learn about history is through reading fiction and for those people, they don’t get as hung up about historical inaccuracies. When it comes to people who know history-some of them can’t stand historical fiction because they are too distracted by the inaccuracies. However, I wrote A White Room to please people who know the history-in other words, I tried to be as historically accurate as possible without taking away from the story. At that same time, it’s not bogged down by the history by being overly accurate or text-bookish.

So let’s take this and put it all together, nice and clean like.

I wrote A White Room for every woman who has ever felt crazy, and for every woman who secretly wished she could let go and really go mad. – Basically women aged 18-60.  It’s a book for women who like to read about women’s issues, women’s history, and for those who want both historical accuracy and an amazing story.