Your Ideal Reader: Who Are They? Is It You? Is It You+5?
Do you have an ideal reader in mind when you write?
I hear this piece of advice a lot: that you should envision The Person you’re writing for, and write only to them. Some authors take this very literally. They might invent Marjory, a 34-year-old mother of two who only has time to read on the weekends—reads in the sunroom with coffee while her kids play beside her—and write for her.
Thinking of a single person is a very foreign way for me to think about my writing. It’s not that I’m writing to anyone, or for anyone, and more that I’m trying to tap into or inspire a commonly held emotion. As Kazuo Ishiguro wisely said: “Stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?”
But I see benefits to inventing The Person you are asking these questions to. Inventing your One True Reader (OTR) seems like a good way of mitigating the pressures we tend to feel as writers: what if nobody likes it? Well, my OTR Sullivan will love it, so who cares about the rest? Having an intended audience in mind can also help with genre positioning and the “image” of a project: if your ideal reader is a 16-year-old girl named Julia, your finished project should probably look different than it would if your intended audience is Marshall, a queer man in his 60s, and you can guide your book accordingly. OTRs might be a good way to stop your manuscript riding off the rails.
For me, though, this doesn’t work. I don’t know if Sullivan, Marjory, Julia, or Marshall will feel what I have tried to put on the page. I’m not sure the idea of an individual reader works for me…
…except when I come up against is the related adage of “write what you want to read.”
Like the OTR, this adage only possibly works. It depends what your motives are for writing. If you’re churning out a book every two months with the sole purpose of making money on the self-publishing market but you frankly wouldn’t pick up any book you write, “write what you want to read” obviously falls short as a manifesto. In that case, you’re probably more likely to be writing to Marjory, or maybe to Hester, the 23-year-old who just graduated from college and is delivering pizzas as she interviews in her field. I also think George R.R. Martin probably has an ideal reader in mind when he puts his words on the page, but his ideal reader is possibly himself.
I think in many ways, my ideal reader is also me. The surest way to hit that “does it feel that way to you?” is if the author’s primary reader is themselves.
But I write for me—with a twist. I’m not writing for myself today. I’m trying to write for the version of me 3-5 years from now who’s going to open up this document and want to see something promising in it. I don’t need to write perfect works; I’ve given up on that project. (Since writing that line I’ve started final edits for a book, and this is a vicious lie.) I also don’t know what Leighton+5 is going to be like—I am very unlike what Leighton-5 thought I would be. But I do know that I expect my ideal reader to evolve as I do, and that takes some expectation of perfection off my finished work: nothing I read from myself five years from now is going to look as good to me as it does right now.
Right now, I want Leighton+5 to look back at the foundations of the career I’m building and feel proud to see the risks I took, my accomplishments, my failures. To learn from them, and do better. I hope they’ll not only see the areas for improvement, but have already improved upon them.
No other reader is going to evaluate my work the way I do. This is a very exacting OTR I’ve invented. But the approach is serving me well. I also learned a while ago that I am shit poor at predicting what my non-me readers will or won’t like, so this removes some worry from marketing as well. Trying to write to market is something I have tried and has made me utterly miserable. The world where my ideal reader is the one with money has created something of an ego death within my own work: I can’t see myself in it.
Then am I writing to satisfy my own ego? Maybe. Does that make my writing a bit masturbatory? Mmmaybe. But holding Leighton+5 as my OTR is still not the same as writing only what I’d want to read; I think that idea keeps me safe from innovation. I can write elements of what I’m excited to read: single POVs; closed-world fantasy; the vast and sprawling worlds that live beyond them, outside the protagonist’s perspective.
But, crucially, others do this better than me. I read to learn, to take in new perspectives and skills. I can port qualities into my writing, and practicing those modes is part of how I hone and expand my craft. But in terms of content, what I have the skill to put into the world is much different than what I most want to read.
Giving Leighton+5 an interesting read doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to look back and think this book is perfect for them. If I’ve done my job well, Leighton+5 may in fact think this book doesn’t suit them anymore at all.
But Me+5 also doesn’t qualify as an audience in marketing terms. My motives for writing are to impress and horrify my future self with my choices, but that’s not the same as “why would an impartial reader who picks up my book for the first time want to read it?”
Here there emerges a separation: my ideal reader becomes fundamentally different from my target audience. If I try to write only for my target audience, I get that ego death that comes with writing to market. Making Me+5 my ideal reader balances out the need to identify a consumer so I can survive in this hell economy—but I do need to identify that non-me consumer.
Being a queer person, my target audience is probably other queer folks. But it’s also not that simple: I also hope that at least some straight folks may be able to pick up my book and understand what I have put down. The more I think about this, the more my ‘target audience’ develops progressively wider catchment areas. I can clearly identify my in-laws—people who are excited to read my book before it’s actually in their hands—as “not my target audience.” But my dad, of similar age and disposition, might be one of those “I hope they ‘get’ it” broader catchments. My in-laws aren’t genre readers—but my dad is.
From this I extrapolate that, narrowing down from ‘queer people’, I’m probably targeting people within about 20 years of my age group who are likely to be at least somewhat familiar with the current state of genre fiction.
That makes my narrow target audience:
- queer folks
- likely born between ~1980 and ~2000
- who read genre fiction
My broad target audience, meanwhile, would be people who hit any one of those criteria. My widest possible hoped-for catchment, meanwhile, is people like my in-laws, who don’t read genre fiction, don’t fall into that age group, and who, to my knowledge, aren’t queer—but who still, at the end of the day, may fit the Kazuo Ishiguro criterion of “does it also feel this way to you?”
At its broadest, my intended reader is someone who fits into no particular demographic category, but who are sentimental softies who aren’t immune to a bittersweet emotional journey.
Leighton+5 is guaranteed to fit that criterion. I don’t know anything about them, but I can bet they’ll get at least that much out of their five-year-old book—as long as I do it right. That much, I can pretty much guarantee I’ll put out. It’s all about those lower standards, baby.
Do you have an ideal reader in mind? Do you have a target audience? Are these the same? Or are you like me—writing for the writer you hope to become?
May Totals
- 53,260 words written (! pleased with this, but June is catastrophic so far; giveth and taketh)
- 10 projects
- 222,609 total in 2021 so far (about 14k over 500k 2021 target pace)
I am doing something different with “read this month” going forward, where I only note the books I really enjoyed. As I get closer to enmeshing with the author community instead of the reader community, I think probably I want to be a force for positivity and praise instead of Overly Critical, Unhelpful Reddit Member Read This Book.
I read six books in May. Here are my favourites:
- THE LUMINOUS DEAD, Caitlin Starling (4.25 stars) — A woman takes a caving job on a poor mining planet only to discover she’s the twenty-eighth person to descend—and the only one of them still alive. An excellent sci fi horror novel with a single POV and plenty of suspense.
- CATHERINE HOUSE, Elisabeth Thomas (4.25 stars) — A school pays full tuition and board for its students, with a twist: they must stay cut off from the outside world for three years, resulting in some deep loyalties to the university and the project it serves. A literary academic novel with a supernatural twist.
- ALL YOU CAN EVER KNOW, Nicole Chung (3.5 stars) — Nicole Chung reflects on her journey searching for her biological family while starting a family of her own. I’ve been on the hunt for a strong memoir for months now and was delighted to find it here!
You’ve been reading OUT OF CHARACTER. Let’s put something on the page.