Forget that audience…
“Know your audience” is an adage that might work for Hillary Clinton when deciding to charge $33,000 per plate at a Hollywood A-listers’ campaign financing dinner (just more one-percenters in Hillary’s camp, but even Clooney said $33K was obscene), but it’s not a tactic that’s any use to a storyteller pushing her or his stories. Here’s much better advice for writers: just tell the story you’re itching to tell and do it well. While following either piece of advice doesn’t guarantee that Field of Dreams moment—“Build it and they will come”—trying to predict readers’ tastes or writing to a specific group of readers is next to impossible. Readers rule, and they will always surprise you.
The incredible success of the Harry Potter series (I see Rowling returned to her wizarding ways—her detective stories flopped until she used her real name), the Fifty Shades series, Gone Girl, The Martian, and so forth were unpredictable. Anyone who says otherwise must be smoking something pretty strong or had a recent lobotomy. Hell, even Clancy’s incredible run was unpredictable. That’s why traditional publishing’s agents and editors are probably wasting their efforts—they can’t choose the next big book success, so they’re moving more and more to “proven talents” AKA sure bets in their stable of old stallions and mares ready for the glue factory.
Many of the series and books just named aren’t even that well written, so maybe my “do it well” tag on my better piece of advice isn’t necessary. If you win the lottery, you don’t even have to write well. In any case, no author, agent, or publisher can really pretend to know and/or predict “the audience” for a book. Two examples: One of my readers, almost a beta-reader for most of my books, in the sense he usually reads them hot off the press and comments back to me—I’m still trying to get him to write a review—doesn’t like sci-fi much, so I predicted that he wouldn’t like my new novel Rogue Planet. I sent him a copy anyway. To my surprise, he liked it. He seemed to identify with the story and characters. That was a pleasant surprise, but I could never have predicted it. Quite the contrary.
A more unusual example was provided by my 90+ -year-old neighbor. She wasn’t enthralled with Survivors of the Chaos. She might have identified with the post-apocalyptic Chaos theme—she’s a true liberal in a town filled with faux ones (for example, Stephen Colbert)—but she didn’t like the sci-fi. When I published the second edition of The Midas Bomb, I gave her a copy of that. Because the themes in the two books are actually similar, although the first is set in the far future and the second is more current, I thought she wouldn’t like the second book either. On the contrary, she loved it and read it in two days.
My YA novel, The Secret Lab, provides a third example. I spent a couple of years stealing time from my regular writing, reading many YA books (far beyond Harry Potter, of course) and learning by osmosis what characterized books popular among the tween-to-teen set. I also lurked on many forums, harvesting ideas from YA authors. I reviewed some YA books too. I did my best to design my book for that vast and challenging YA audience. To my surprise, many adults liked it too. I changed the blurb to “…for young adults and adults who are young-at-heart.” It isn’t a rip-roaring success by any means, but the audience certainly isn’t limited to young adults. Maybe because it was a cat mystery before cat mysteries existed?
These three anecdotal examples prove my point (in the book business, all stats are anecdotal unless they’re useless). In the first two cases, I know the two people personally, not via the internet, an old-style face-to-face relationship. They are both valued friends, and you can’t have any closer relationship than I have with them. Yet I obviously completely failed in predicting how much they would like a book. Adding the YA book stat and multiplying that by whatever number you want and move to the internet, I’d say that I can’t really know my audience. I’d also say that’s generalizable. And, when you think about attracting new readers to your catalog, how can you write your next book so that it will appeal to them?
The answer is: you can’t. I’ve seen authors jump on bandwagons and shake my head. After Harry Potter, there were many YA magic books. After Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, there were many Girl-with books. After the incredible success of The Martian, I’m expecting a lot more boring tomes about potato farming on Mars. I avoid bandwagons. Rogue Planet is hard sci-fi with fantasy elements; there’s no magic, just high-tech. More than Human: The Mensa Contagion is about a lot more things than growing potatoes on the Red Planet. And all my crime novels in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” treat many more themes of consequence than Sig Larsen or Gillian Flynn ever did.
Jumping on bandwagons is one way of knowing an audience, of course, but it’s hindsight. Moreover, by the time you finish your novel corresponding to it, the bandwagon has already passed you by. And predicting what the new bandwagon will be is impossible. Here’s an example from outside the book world: Toyota designers thought big, ugly shark-mouth grills were the next big thing in car design. But people didn’t like them. So they’re trying now to spin things their way (hard to change a car design) by having a prospective customer liking that big, ugly grill. You can’t spin an audience into existence either. Feverish audiences are created like a snowball turning into an avalanche among the reading public, but you can’t predict why or how. Customers’ support is a fickle thing—much more random than the stock market.
That’s why my advice is good. Be true to yourself and just tell the story you want to tell, but do it well. Forget about genres, PR and marketing gurus, faux advice, and past bandwagons. Spin a good yarn and maybe readers will come. If you go the traditional route, NEVER pitch your story as the next X or like Y’s. You can pitch it as NOT being like Y’s—I called The Secret Lab NOT Harry Potter in space when I was querying agents long ago (I liked the Harry Potter stories, but not the writing). Even better, gear your pitch or blurb to show you have a great, original novel that should entertain the hell out of readers while making them think a bit about the serious themes you’ve treated. It’s best to create your own audience. I’m still trying to do that, and I’ll continue to do so. I’ll emphasize the story and write it to entertain. If you can’t be true to yourself, you shouldn’t be writing.
***
May Day Sale. Mary Jo Melendez invites you to a Kindle Countdown sale. Before she adds her stories to Smashwords, making them available in all ebook formats, she’s giving you a chance to read Muddlin’ Through and Silicon Slummin’…and Just Gettin’ By at $0.99, reduced from $2.99. That’s a lot of exciting spring and summer reading for only $2. The sale will take place from April 29 through May 6. This is absolutely the last time these prices will be reduced. Celebramos Cinco de Mayo con María José.
In libris libertas….
