Hi everyone and welcome back! I'm glad you are all here and I hope that this week has been nice to you so far. Mine has been interesting and hopefully the rest of this week will be full of some form of fun. Today is looking like it will be an easy-ish day at work, my only hope is that it involves cake of some sort.
I've talked previously about expanding your target audience, but I don't know if I've ever talked about finding your actual target audience. This is a deceiving idea in that since you know the genre you're writing, technically you should know who your audience is, however what I'm talking about is actually finding them. They are be anywhere, in places you wouldn't even suggest, possibly within your own family, and you'll never know it unless you look and/or ask.
Now that whole thing may have sounded like one of those paranoid propaganda films (find the commie! They could be anywhere!) but that doesn't make it any less true. Think about it; you're writing something and you have to tell a bunch of people, you may avoid your family because you are convinced you know what they like, so you just mention it offhandedly and suddenly you discover that they are all really interested and want to read it. This may surprise you, but at the very least it should be make you happy.
A good place to try poking around for potential readership is your place of work. You have a literal melting pot of potential since everyone is coming from different backgrounds, different likes and dislikes, and all those wonderful things. You can start off by mentioning you're writing a book and while this can be a really weird way to start a conversation, you can always bring it up as your 'interesting fact' in one of those ice breaker sessions. This will get people's attention and then they'll come to you with questions, which does help make the awkward feeling about talking to people about something they don't really care about almost go away. I also will ask people if they have an ereader, but that's mostly because my books are only in epub format, which means that someone who doesn't have it won't likely read it, however, they can tell others who do have them.
I bring all this up because while working on 'Daughter of the Shackled King' I came to the realization that my standard beta-reader might not be a good person for it, due to the amount of mythological and metaphysics involved and their lack of understanding regarding those topics. Now I'll probably will still have them read it just to use them as a control group to see where I may actually need more explaining, but that will be an uphill battle for me on a mental level because there are certain things that I won't feel actually need them (like the specifics of Thor and Loki and all that good stuff), but I'm sure there will be others that will. It will just be a test of patience.
That is why it's important to find your target audience along with using the shotgun approach to advertising. You want to expand who you get your work to, but also make sure that you are getting it to the right people, especially initially. They will be the ones to tell everyone else about it, and will be able to truly appreciate some of the more subtle things you've put into your story. I can't tell you how many times I've read or watched something and sat up excitedly and pointed 'That's absolutely right! That's awesome!' it always makes me happy.
For now I hope you all have a great rest of your week. I'll be back on Friday, hopefully with a book to review, if Smashwords' servers aren't on fire somewhere due to the continued heavy traffic through their site. Also, please remember my book, 'The Light Rises' is still free as part of that same sale, so please brave whatever slowness their site may have and take a look and also tell everyone. I would really appreciate it. I'll be back in a couple days though, have a great week!
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