The Importance of Understanding Your Audience by Janelle Evans

As an author, understanding your audience is paramount, at least, if you want to sell books. That may seem callused and calculating to what really is a creative process, but you’re not spending all these hours clicking away on a computer for mere self-fulfillment. It’s for others to read and enjoy. So today I will be talking about three audience factors I always consider while writing novels.

First: the age group of my target audience. I write for young adults so I don’t fill my novels with uncommon word choices. Let me write that statement using different words to illustrate. I compose for young adults so I don’t dominate my narratives with infrequently used terms. The sentence means the same thing as the first statement but let’s face it, it’s harder to read, especially for my target age group of 12-18. If you write for an older audience go ahead and elevate the vernacular, but I like to caution all writers of fiction. If your audience has to keep pulling out a dictionary to understand you, they will stop reading. Your goal when writing fiction isn’t to show your audience how smart you are. Entertain them and I promise they will come back for more.

Second: the age of the protagonist in the story. It is best if the main hero/heroine of you story is close in age to your target audience. Other sub-characters can be older or younger as needed, but if the character is going to be a love interest, they should also be close in age. Yes, in society we see age gaps between couples, but it is not as common as it used to be. For example the Victorian age of Jane Austen’s novel Emma. In the story, Emma is sixteen and her eventual love interest is thirty-two-year-old Mr. Knightly. Yeah…that’s probably not going to work in today’s society. You don’t want an ew factor to happen with your audience and your character’s budding relationship.

Third: the all-important ending. Since I write for young adults my goal is to give them satisfying happy endings. It’s what this age group expects and likes the most. Now if you’re a writer that despises happy endings, young adult fiction probably isn’t for you, but again I would caution you in whatever you write. All endings should satisfy your audience. That doesn’t mean it has to end happy, but there should be clear resolve to the conflicts in the story. If it is a series, not all conflicts have to be resolved, but give your reader something uplifting to cling to before you make them wait for that next novel to be released.