Your Ideal Reader

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If you’ve ever tried to pin down your ideal reader and ended up with something that felt either too vague to be useful or too specific to be real, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re just working with the wrong framework for the context you need.

Ideal reader is a phrase that gets tossed at authors at every turn.

Know who you’re writing for.
Write your marketing messages for one ideal reader.
Show up where your ideal reader hangs out.

On the surface it sounds logical, it’s the mantra of most writing and marketing advice and businesses have been targeting ideal customers for decades.

But most of the advice you’ll find on ideal readers comes straight from the business world.

Build a customer avatar.
Name her.
Give her an age range and a job title.

And you end up with something like:

Sally, a 30-40 year old mother of three, lives in the suburbs, works as a dental hygienist, and prefers dogs over cats.

Fantastic. Can you tell me what type of books Sally likes to read? Certainly not from this standard, business-centric, demographic based customer avatar.

In some cases, you may be guided into also exploring what their hobbies and interests are, and obviously you want them to like the genre you write in. This gets us a bit closer, but still misses the mark, because no one is connecting the dots for what this information means to you as a fiction author or how to use it effectively.

Your ideal reader isn’t defined solely by demographics. They’re defined by how your book makes them feel, and by the specific language they use when they talk about stories they love. When you understand that, everything you write publicly gets easier: your posts, your emails, the way you describe your book in conversation. You stop guessing and start connecting.

Defining an ideal reader

An ideal reader is the perfect person for your book. They’re the one person who will love everything about your book as much as you do.

Ultimately, the goal is for your ideal reader to be a real person you can describe in extreme detail. You know everything about them. Which is why conventional demographics is usually the starting point. When you’re starting from nothing, this information often feels easier to name. It’s also the type of information that data is more readily available for, because publishers have been collecting this data through sales reports for decades.

But the way publishers use statistics and data to market books is different to the way individual authors need to approach things.

It’s important to understand that if you’re working with paid ads, understanding the broader purpose of conventional demographics is necessary. But that’s a layer that comes later. If you’re not already seeing traction with your books, or if you have less than 3 published books, paying for ads isn’t the place to start.

But even once you do start paying for ads, demographics are only one piece of the puzzle. They help you to narrow down your reach to the segment of readers who are most known for buying books in your genre, solely for the purpose of improving the efficiency of your ad dollars. But that is still a large pool of people, and your book won’t appeal to everyone in that pool.

Your job, as a fiction author, is to identify the person who will be obsessed with your book. That person may very well belong to a specific demographic group, but that isn’t what defines them.

You’re looking for the individual who will talk about your book at every possible turn, shout about it from the roof tops, and insist to everyone they know (and don’t know) that they should read your book.

You identify this person by understanding why they love your book. What is the emotional resonance they experience? In their own words, how do they describe that experience and what they love? This is far more specific and personal information than the description of Sally above, even if you tack on some hobbies and genre interests to it.

But many authors have a real, and understandable, fear of getting so specific. You have likely already heard the advice (and maybe brushed it off) that your book is not for everyone. This is often fuelled by the reality that many people who do not perfectly fit this “ideal reader profile” that everyone is pushing you to create, are readers who still enjoyed your book.

This is super noticeable when you’ve defined your ideal reader to be a 35 year old mother of 2 kids, and yet an elderly gentleman who never had kids leaves you a 5-star review. He certainly didn’t fit the “profile”! The missing piece here is who is he? What’s his lived experience? Why does he read? What experience is he looking for when he reads? Conventional demographics miss this, which is why authors get frustrated with the concept of narrowing down and identifying a single “ideal reader”.

But it’s not age, gender, occupation, or marital status that defines your ideal reader, and if you only focus on that information you will miss the mark for attracting the right readers at volume. The main reason being: it’s vague and generic.

I want you to deeply embrace a philosophy you may have heard before:

When you try to appeal to everyone, you will appeal to no one.

The main reason this will always be true is because your messaging will get watered down to be safe, so as to leave no one out, to the point that it will be bland and boring to everyone. This will not sell books.

An interesting phenomenon happens when you get specific: it has a ripple effect.

When you’re specific and frame your messaging to appeal to one particular person, countless other adjacent people will find aspects they relate to, or that piques their curiosity, and draws them in… because of that specificity. And because of the word-of-mouth specificity creates.

If you want to see this process working in action, study the Romantasy genre, because that community does this extremely well.

So, to wrap this up, yes, conventional demographics serve a specific purpose when creating an ideal reader profile. But understanding your ideal reader on a much deeper level is what makes it work.

But how the heck do you research, identify, and then find your ideal reader?

The materials in this section answers those questions for you, and if you want personal guidance on how to implement the information provided here, join my membership where the theory is turned into actionable steps, live Q&As, and direct access to me.

There’s a lot of information freely available through every section. Anything that requires a membership is clearly noted.

Learning about marketing is not a prescriptive, paint-by-number, one-size-fits-all process. Your personality and what you bring to the table in terms of interests and skills plays a big role in what will work for you. And one guarantee is that if you don’t enjoy the process, you won’t do the work, which means it won’t work for you. So don’t waste your time on things you dislike.

As you read through any of the materials I provide, listen to your instincts. Does something make you cringe? Then don’t do it. Does something give you an aha moment? Lean into that.

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