Gathering Your Audience

Who are you writing your book for, and who do you want to be reading it?

Books are written for people and by people, and they are published, distributed, and read by other people. I know that seems like a self-evident statement, but while you are writing, it can be hard to keep in mind the materiality of your book’s reach and audience. Your books also have material effects on your career and professional prospects, and as a result, many scholars understandably want as large a reach as possible and can often lose a sense of their particular reader under the desire or pressure to write for that more elusive general reader.

But it is that particular reader, or readers, that help to center your project, making it legible to others and guiding you as you write, assemble, and edit your material. At its simplest, who you expect (or want) to read your book locates who you’re writing to, which then affects how you write to them, and others who also come along for the read.

Determining your audience is part of articulating your hopes for your book: where you want it to go, how you want it to impact the conversations it is joining, even what you ultimately want it to do in this world. Do you want to change legislation or reform institutions? Bring an overlooked dynamic into your field’s way of approaching your material? Tell a story to a different or larger audience? Change the way that a group of people is understood?

Your Demographic Audience

I was once in a meeting with a potential client who was writing a book that they wanted to be both scholarly and experimental. Part creative writing, part more traditional ethnographic analysis, the book was to be a hybrid effort, designed to bring readers into the shifting experience of being in their fieldwork spaces and encourage them through the reading process to engage with experimentation and change.

When I asked them who they envisioned reading this book, first they listed off the disciplinary areas they anticipated the book being marketed toward, the professional disciplines they were talking to. This is often how authors first respond to my question; it’s the professional answer. And it’s important.

This is key information: audience as marketing demographic. It helps presses, grant readers, tenure committees, and other professional audiences to understand your specific market reach and makes your project’s placement within publishing and contribution to scholarship clearer, which is especially useful for interdisciplinary or more unusual projects.

It also helps us with issues of accessibility: what will be legible to readers and what will need more explanation, where the balance between technical detail and clarity of explanation will have to be struck. How we can make a book as open for readers as possible while still keeping it coherently focused. And how we can do that with the most grace and elegance of approach, the strongest narrative pleasure.

Your Ideal Audience

But then this author said something else, something much more pointed: In this case, just as the book itself was to be an experiment of sorts, the ideal audience — the first line of people the author was writing to — was what they thought of as experimental minds.

In this instance, having such a clearly envisioned reader helped the author to be more flexible in their approach from the start. We were able to use that as a starting off point for breaking down the different knowledges, disciplines, and forms that the book could work with and through, and it gave us a touchstone for more formal experimentation in an early draft of a book that, when published, balanced formal experimentation with an almost eerie reading experience that echoed and underscored the topic at hand. And that spoke to many different types of readers.

It was super effective. But determining your ideal audience should also come with a warning: It is possible to unwittingly foreclose potential readers, to focus too tightly on one type of reader and lose sight of who else might be interested in your topic, or affected or impacted by it, which could cause exclusion and even potential harm. When we’re thinking of our ideal audience, I think it’s important to approach from a position of expansive potentiality: who might your book be speaking with in all sorts of ways, as well as who in particular you might want to be reading it? And how might that expand your approach and strengthen your argument as a whole?

Your Audience Ethos

In another manuscript (also an ethnography), an author was writing about a populace who rarely saw stories written about them that reflected their own experiences as they lived them, and it was of primary importance to this writer that this book be not only about them but also fundamentally for them. They were the ideal audience for this book, and so we worked on building a book that balanced careful scholarship with accessible storytelling — one that fulfilled tenure requirements while prioritizing narration, storytelling, and general, pleasurable readability. And one that could possibly find its way back to the people whose stories were told in that book.

Here, audience and ethos were tightly intertwined. The guiding principle was, how can we make sure that this book is, above all, useful for the people it's about, as well as for scholarship more generally? How could we create a scholarly book with reach not necessarily to the general reader but to this set of possible readers, who themselves are not generally scholars?

For projects rooted in a strong ethical or social imperative, interrogating the work you want your book to do in the world once it is published can help you articulate the readers at the heart of your project and, consequently, the way you might want to approach your narrative from the start — and where you might want to publish it at the end.

Not everyone will want to read your book, and not everyone should want to read your book. And that’s okay. You can’t write to everyone, and really, you shouldn’t write to everyone. Determining, embracing, and writing for your specific audiences — ideal and pragmatic — is a crucial component of turning your manuscript into a book, one that speaks to you and your readers.

So, who are you writing for and to? And why?