Ideal readers… a phrase that gets tossed at authors at every turn. Know who you’re writing for. Write your marketing messages for one ideal reader. 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 when you sit down to apply it to your books, you come up empty. How the heck do you research, identify, and then find your ideal reader?

What (who?) is an ideal reader? 

Ultimately, the goal is for your ideal reader to be a real person you can identify who is obsessed with your book. The person 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 can base them off a fictitious person to start with, but the real magic happens when you can shape your ideal reader profile around a real person.

But one thing that trips people up is the fear of getting so specific, and I get it. Realistically, every person who reads your book isn’t going to perfectly match this “ideal reader” profile. But there is a common saying in the business world: when you try to appeal to everyone, you will appeal to no one. And this is 100% true for you as an author as well. The main reason 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.

And an interesting phenomenon happens when you do get specific: it has a ripple effect. So while you’re being specific and framing your messages 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. When they see your ideal readers spreading details about what they love, FOMO will set in. What are they missing out on that these rabid fans are so obsessed with?

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

Shaping an ideal reader profile

Most of the information you’ll find on this topic will be business-centric and will have you naming:

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

What’s infuriating for authors is that this IS the type of profiling book marketing companies, ad courses, and big publishers do. So what can they see in this information that the rest of us can’t?

Numbers and historical data of the purchasing patterns of specific demographic buckets.

Business marketing and most digital advertising uses this type of information to get in front of large audience groups in order to snag the small piece of that demographic profile who are in fact the ideal reader. They have information that tells them that X% of readers of X genre fall into a specific demographic bucket, so that’s the bucket they focus on. But it’s playing a numbers game that most individual authors don’t have the luxury of playing. 

The good news is you don’t need to. There are other ways to narrow down and specifically identify your ideal reader, and to then find them. 

The bad news is it’s going to take time and some effort. The type of information you need in order to research, identify, and find your ideal reader doesn’t exist in a public, mass database you can just plug into.

But it is information you freely have access to.

For example, reader reviews are a goldmine for research when it comes to identifying and understanding your ideal reader… when you know what to look for. 

If you’re groaning, I want to first cover a hard truth here. Reviews provide critical marketing insights. Yes, reading reviews of your own books can be a challenge at times. But, if you’re writing good books that are reaching your ideal readers, there will be far more positive reviews than negative ones. And if your books in fact aren’t very good, critical reviews highlighting the same concerns could be the feedback you need to improve your career. 

Also, reviews are mostly subjective, especially when they’re talking about reader preferences of likes and dislikes. These ones aren’t a reflection of you, they’re a reflection of the reader. And that information is also useful to understand who is not your ideal reader. If a whole bunch of reviews say “too much hugging” well then, you make sure your marketing highlights that there is oodles of hugging. That’s going to weed out the people who don’t want to read a book with a bunch of hugging. (You can laugh, but this was a complaint I received from beta readers of my first book. My characters were constantly hugging haha.)

Okay, that’s my tough-love. But don’t despair, because I also have an escape route for you. 

If there is simply no possible way you can steel yourself to read through your own reviews, then you need to find or hire someone you trust who can do it for you. They need to be capable of analyzing reviews to extract patterns and specific language use as it specifically relates to your book.

Another option, which also works if you don’t actually have any reviews yet, is to analyze the reviews of books similar to yours. The books that will appeal to the same type of reader your book will appeal to. This information won’t be a perfect match because every book is unique, but it will at least be a good starting point that you can refine over time.

Once you’ve analyzed enough reviews that you have a solid sense of the vibes, tropes, emotions, and language your readers are referencing and using, as they relate to your book, you use this information to create an ideal reader profile.

Using your research to find ideal readers

Now that you have a clear ideal reader profile, you can start searching social media for keywords and phrases from this research to look for the people in your space who match the ideal reader profile you’ve created. This will take time and patience to sift through a lot of irrelevant posts and accounts, so pace yourself and take notes.

But these are your people. And likely more of your people will be found through their followers and following lists. And the number one place to find them is through other authors writing for the same audience.

This is the real catch here. Many authors think of finding their ideal reader as a process of literally finding “readers”. But the initial path to finding readers is through the book community, which interestingly is not where the majority of readers hang out, and they’re more often not active engagers. But the book community: authors, reviewers, vocal avid readers, artists, service providers, librarians, bookstores… these are the people who need to make up your core network, and it’s through those connections and well established relationships that you’ll get the reach and visibility with your ideal readers. Because that’s how word-of-mouth works.

The majority of your book sales won’t come from the people you directly connect with. They will come from the people that their network is connected to. Which is another reason why trying to constantly sell your book within the book community is so ineffective, and why building a core network is critical.

This is also why your core network needs to be relevant. We all want to support the author community in every way possible, and it’s a good thing to do. However, it’s really important to understand that doing collabs and promos with authors outside of your niche will be less effective. The key behind a relevant core network is that you’re all serving the same audience. So if ten authors each have 100 dedicated readers, and they work together on say newsletter swaps, each author has instantly expanded their reach by 10x to the right readers.

But in addition to being able to build a relevant and strong core network, when you understand the way your ideal reader thinks and talks about your book you can start shaping your posts to appeal to them by using the same language they use.

This will be a great starting point for you. But analyzing reviews is just one strategy of many you can utilize.

These strategies and how they work is exactly what I guide you through in my Patreon.

Pathfinder Topic Overview

January’s topic is: Your Ideal Reader

The Pathfinder tier is where the real action happens. If you’re a DWY Implementer who wants support, guidance, and accountability, this will be right up your alley.

Pathfinders get:

• Deep-dive how-to article
  • Understand your ideal reader through research
  • Shape your content to attract your ideal reader
  • Build your core network to find your ideal reader
• Recorded workshop
  • A live walk through on the tech behind some of the strategies
• Implementation Quest
  • Specific activities to apply the concepts in real-world scenarios
• Content Creation Quest
  • Use your research to add to your content pool
• Q&A opportunity to ask questions specific to your unique situation
  • Post publishes on January 5th, drop questions throughout the month, some will be answered within the post others will be covered in the Q&A recording released on January 26th.

All that for only $14.50CAD ($11.50USD). Top quality professional help at a price everyone can afford. Plus, I offer a money-back-guarantee. If you do the work and feel that my materials aren’t a fit for you, just let me know. 

Find the details for all tiers here. Whichever tier is the best fit for you, I invite you to join The Anti-Marketing Implementation Circle where we turn theory and concepts into action, replace pressure with purpose, trade performance for connection, and build visibility that feels like an extension of your creativity instead of a threat to it.

If you’re new to the concept of anti-marketing for fiction authors, check out The Anti-Marketing Roadmap.