Stop Guessing Your Readership’s Needs: Build an Ideal Reader Avatar

Nothing pleases an acquisitions editor more than a writer who can articulate exactly who their audience is.

By not-at-all-a-coincidence, nothing is more fundamental to an entrepreneur’s success than—you guessed it—articulating exactly who their audience is. Business courses have perfected the art of helping people identify their ideal customers. As writers, we can borrow their strategies to pinpoint our ideal readers.

Why Targeting Matters

Regardless of whether you’re creating a book, a product, or a service, you’re probably hoping a broad range of people will appreciate what you have to offer. However, it’s been proven over and over that success depends on targeting one specific slice of them. And that slice needs to be a group of people who:

• can (with your help) self-identify as people who will benefit from it
• can afford it
• are a narrow enough population group that they can be described using labels

Here’s how that might play out in practice:

• editing services for early-career authors
• a can opener for people with painful joints
• business coaching for gen-z entrepreneurs
• a gardening book for intermediate rose growers
• a novel for cozy mystery fans who like to bake
• a self-help book for new empty-nesters
• a finance book for middle-aged women

Will other people outside of these categories end up embracing these things? Sure! The last example is a book I myself bought in my twenties. But the clarity of its targeting helped me understand exactly what it was and make up my mind that I wanted it. If it had been presented as a finance book for everyone, I wouldn’t have known what to expect at all. For all I knew, it might have been trying to cover everything from getting started with basic financial literacy in your teens to advanced investment strategies for late-career executives—and surely no book can do all that effectively. By the same token, no novel is likely to appeal to fans of every genre at once.

Sometimes, however, it can be hard to wrap our heads around our core readership being just one portion of the population. If you’re struggling with that, a beneficial exercise may be to narrow your focus even further. Borrowing from marketers and business coaches everywhere, you can create an Ideal Reader Avatar.

The Ideal Reader Avatar

In business and marketing, entrepreneurs are encouraged to conceive of an Ideal Customer Avatar: the one person who would be their absolute most perfect customer, who needs, wants, and is ready to buy their product or service. They might choose a real person they know who fits the bill and interview them to learn more about their interests, likes, needs, hopes, and fears. Or they might come up with a fictional individual and invent the answers themselves. Either way, the results of this interrogation end up helping the entrepreneur make decisions about exactly what products and services to offer, how to position them, and how to market them effectively.

Excerpt from ICA interview: “I’m frustrated by people my parents’ age giving me advice that doesn’t match the reality I’m living in.”

Excerpt from marketing copy: This isn’t your dad’s business advice. Get real business coaching for real life today.

As a writer, you don’t just need to identify your ideal reader in your query letter or marketing copy; you also have to make sure that you’re appealing to their needs, interests, reading level, and worldview throughout your book. This need is especially obvious in nonfiction, where the level of subject-matter knowledge the reader brings to a book heavily impacts how much an author needs to explain concepts, constrain their vocabulary, and make tough choices about how much ground to cover. However, while it sometimes flies under the radar, the need also exists in fiction. One of the biggest struggles I see in fiction writers’ first manuscripts is a lack of clarity about who exactly will read and enjoy this story. Those writers can certainly benefit from creating an Ideal Reader Avatar profile.

Interview your Ideal Reader Avatar

This exercise will help you design the profile of your Ideal Reader Avatar. Don’t skimp on the work! Get paper and pen or open up a word processor and write the answers down.

Remember: Your Ideal Reader Avatar is not the only person who will read your book, but they are the embodiment of its most perfect audience member. You might have a real person in mind, or you can invent one. Answer the following questions.

• What is their…
  • age?
  • gender?
  • relationship status?
  • occupation?
  • culture?
• Where do they live?
• What are their favourite…
  • novels?
  • nonfiction books?
  • TV shows?
  • hobbies?
• What piece of media do they think is overrated?
• What is their level of education?
• How many books do they read in a year?
• Will they read this as a hard copy, an ebook, or an audiobook?
• What are their social values?
• What is missing from their life?
• What would their ideal life look like?
• What would they protect at all costs?
• What anxieties are they preoccupied with right now?
• In what ways are they active in their community?
• If they had unlimited time and resources, what good would they want to do for the world?
• What is their biggest shame?

If you’re writing fiction, ask yourself:

• What is their escapist fantasy?
• What is their guilty pleasure?
• What would their ideal relationship look like?
• Who is their favourite literary couple and why?
• What are their favourite literary tropes and why?
• What are their least favourite literary tropes and why?

If you’re writing nonfiction, ask yourself:

• What problem do they know they have that your book will solve?
• What problem do YOU know they have that your book will solve? (Sometimes it’s different and you have to guide them from their perceived problem to the real one).
• Thinking about your book’s subject, what skills or knowledge do they already have?
• What preconceived notions do they hold about your subject matter that you disagree with?
• Do they already like this subject? If not, what subjects do they like?

You might not find that every answer sparks a lightbulb moment for every book. However, taken as a whole, your profile will help you stay focused and avoid the trap of trying to please all readers. Later, when you’re writing your query letter, you’ll have the benefit of easily identifying exactly who your work targets. If you convince an acquisitions editor that this readership is an audience their publishing company can successfully market to, your chances of having your submission read eagerly will skyrocket.

You Might Also Like:

“How to Write an Author Bio with No Experience”

“Finding and Using Theme as an Author—With Examples”

“Answering Your Questions about Nonfiction Book Proposals”