Writing for target audiences

This is the final chapter of the course. (The next one is a short conclusion just to wrap things up nicely.)

It’s about something very important … but only once you’re able to tell a good story every time you try. You see, for a beginning writer, the struggle is just getting “a good story”. You struggle finding the right elements, getting your thoughts onto the paper, and so forth.

Once you can do that, your focus will shift. It’s no longer enough to write a solid story. You want to write a story that is perfect for your specific target audience. That’s the trick to actually selling books and gathering a fanbase. Because you deliver the goods to a specific set of people that want those goods.

Luckily, for the most part, this is embedded in everything I taught you so far. The course started with the idea of Promise, Progress, and Payoff. If you promise a love story in chapter one, you better deliver a love story. If you promise a lighthearted novel, it can’t turn dark.

As such, if you execute this idea well, your first chapter automatically does the filtering. The people who enjoy the promises of your first chapter, will stick around. They are your target audience. Those who do not enjoy it, put the book away and leave. That’s fine, they are simply not your target audience.

But there are some more (specific) steps to take. Hopefully this chapter answers all your questions.

How stories are chosen

You know the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover”? Yeah, obviously nonsense. More an ideal than an actual truth ;)

People do judge books by their cover. Just like they judge films and shows by their poster or trailer.

The first step to actually getting your story to your target audience, is to clearly signal that this story is for you. Specifically,

• Design a cover/poster/graphic that is both pretty and communicates the type of story it is.
• Write a marketing blurb that both reads professionally and communicates who would like this story (and who wouldn’t).

Trying to write a story for everyone is impossible. It just means you will “appeal only slightly” to everyone, which usually means you appeal to nobody. Similarly, trying to design a cover or marketing text that would draw in everyone, will make it a bloated and unfocused mess that draws in nobody.

It’s so important that I actually covered this at the start of the Storytelling course.

You need to know your target audience, preferably in advance, and design everything else around it.

How do you do this? By referencing existing material.

• Read stories that share your target audience.
• Check for patterns in their covers.
• Check for patterns in their promotional material.

The point is that you research your target audience. Find patterns to which almost all successful stories (targeting the same audience) stick. Implement them, even if they don’t work for you (because you are not necessarily the target audience!), and build your unique story around them.

I would love to have a character curse in one of my stories for kids. I also know it is frowned upon and will not go over well with the target audience. I accept that and find other ways to construct the story and characters.

How to write for kids

Kids aren’t stupid. Let’s get that out of the way, as it’s the most common misconception. Stories for them are dumbed down to the point of being … nothing. While at the same time, we now have decades of evidence that more serious and deep stories do resonate with children and mean something to them.

Here’s my best summary of the situation.

Kids are adults without experience.

Kids are smart. In fact, in many ways they are smarter than adults. They learn faster, think faster, are more creative and more open.

But don’t ask a kid about taxes or a broken heart. Don’t present them a story about somebody in deep financial debt or somebody who has to accept their aging body is failing. They simply do not have the experience to understand any of that and care about it.

As such, writing for kids mostly means picking your subject matter to be something that concerns kids. Everything else remains the same. No need to dumb down language, concepts, ideas, characters, etcetera. (You should always try to write simply and clearly. And, as mentioned above, difficult words are learned precisely because kids read them through the context of stories.)

Another useful tip is to perhaps take smaller steps in your plot. Due to lack of experience, younger readers won’t make big leaps or assumptions as quickly as older readers. As such, when moving from one plot point to another, perhaps add one or two smaller plot points along the way. To make the mental leap slightly less reliant on assumptions.

How to write for a large group

This brings us to the second “rule”. Many authors want their stories to appeal to “all ages” or to have “wide appeal” (thinking of the success of Harry Potter and the like). As stated earlier, this isn’t a good goal or something you can control. It’s better to write for a clear target audience, then get lucky when it appeals more broadly.

However, one thing that might help achieve this, is the following rule.

Write about universal truths.

There are many elements core to the human experience. Elements both kids and adults understand, both poor and rich, both educated and non-educated.

Think of something simple like “food”. Everyone needs food. Everyone likes food that they like. Everyone has the risk of eating too little or too much. Everyone has to do it every day!

A story revolving around food does not clearly target one audience or forbid another from enjoying it. (Although such a simple example is maybe not the strongest emotional core of a story.)

Tropes versus Clichés

Some writers think these two mean the same thing, and both are bad. That’s not true.

• Tropes are common elements (for the type of story you are telling) that people like.
• Clichés are common elements that people hate.

In other words, tropes define your genre. They’re the things that actually draw the target audience in. They’re the storylines or characters they want to see in your book.

Clichés are the bad ideas that inevitably appear from lesser writers. They’re bad solutions to story problems, cheating with plot, twists that are overdone and entirely predictable at this point. People do not want to see this.

You can already see the lesson here.

When writing a story, pick tropes that are especially enjoyed by your target audience. If needed, do this research as well! Ask people what they like in their favorite books. Find people in your target audience and ask what elements they look for in a good story. You probably want to throw in a few of those tropes.

Similarly, avoid the clichés. You usually get those without even asking, as people love complaining about clichés! Just go on YouTube and find anybody ranting about how bad a story was for an hour. The fact they’re doing it means they initially liked the story (they had high expectations and were the target audience), but were disappointed due to broken promises and clichés.

A website that contains basically all tropes and clichés you might ever encounter is TV Tropes. Despite the name, it deals with all sorts of media (film, tv, novels, games, comic books, …). But I warn you: there’s so much content there that you can lose days just discovering new tropes. I mean, just check out the overview page on Plot Archetypes and be overwhelmed.

Conclusion

That’s probably all the general advice I have. More specific lessons must come from researching your target audience yourself. (I can’t possibly list all possible target audiences here!)

The important step is to realize you have a target audience and to work around that.

Many writers don’t realize this, or actively try to suppress it, because they think “a good story will sell itself”. It’s similar to the mindset of “build it and they will come”.

No, it’s simply not true. Especially not nowadays, with so much on offer and so many stories already told. The only way to stand out, is to clearly appeal to a specific market, and satisfy them with what they think is an amazing story.