Tips for Fantasy Writers

chapter 6

#6) Know your audience

Oh I love this one. Yeah, I'm going to write a novel. First I have to get to know my audience. See you in twenty-five years when I've visited everyone who might buy my book. No that's just silly. I wouldn't visit them at all - I'd send them a survey. Okay, so you can't really know your audience. All you can do is guess that there is more or less demand for one type of fiction; style; genre; than there is for another. You can look at what's selling and attempt to emulate it. Or not. Where is the fun in that? Good writers want to be unique. They want to be groundbreakers. They want to find the untapped market that will make them a fortune. Attempting to write for some notion of whom or what a reader is, is bound to fail. Readers are all unique and what motivates them to read is hard to pin down.

At school we are asked to write essays and things we really don't enjoy. We're trained to plough on and do it anyway. That's difficult to shake off when we start writing for pleasure. My philosophy has always been not to struggle writing something heavy and to write what I enjoy writing. I figure if I'm not enjoying writing what I'm writing about, no one will enjoy reading it. So if you're finding your writing hard going, ask yourself why. Am I enjoying this? Is this a chore to do? Will my audience get the same level of enjoyment out as I'm putting in?

A young woman once wrote the type of children's book she enjoyed reading herself. It was like the books she'd read as a girl. Her manuscript was rejected many times by publishers who couldn't see past their belief that audiences had moved on to something more contemporary. Eventually she found a publisher who enjoyed the book and knew that it would appeal to both adult and child audiences alike. I'm not sure how much thought JK Rowling gave her audience when she started writing Harry Potter, but there's no arguing with the success of that approach.