Target Audience
Target audience is a simple concept. It is the demographic you have in mind when you write your story, the sort of person you are aiming your story towards. I think most authors would agree that your target audience is very important to your work. However, I don’t really agree with this idea myself.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s something to be completely disregarded. Obviously, some subject matter is not going to be suitable for children. Some writing will be too complex for kids too. Conversely, some stories are going to be too simple, silly or childish to really be engaging for an older audience. This is just fact and it’s pretty much irrefutable.
What I say when I talk about target audience being less important than people think it is, I don’t mean that we should be handing Game of Thrones to six-year-olds or that most adults are going to find The Very Hungry Caterpillar a particularly engaging read. What I mean is that I don’t think your target audience should be as centralising a part of the writing process as some people want to make it. Personally, I think once you get beyond a certain point, focusing too much on the age of your audience becomes a limiting factor.
Now, I’m not going to claim absolute authority on this topic. There’s probably advantages to writing with your target audience very firmly in mind. This is just my own preferred philosophy for story writing.
My biography page on this site mentions that I absolutely refuse to be pigeonholed into writing any one kind of story. Way back at the beginning of Stories Across Borders, when we talked about Domino, I talked about my reasoning for making the protagonists of that book children and how I want my stories to be accessible to as wide a range of people as possible for the subject matter of that story. These are two very big factors in my thoughts on this subject.
The first is, admittedly, a bit of flimsy reasoning. I don’t want to get labelled specifically as a “YA writer” or “children’s author” or even as someone who primarily writes for an older audience. I want to be able to write the stories I want to tell without worrying about branding. So I don’t think about who a book is for. The reality of it though is that there’s nothing really stopping any author from changing target demographics between books and this is more of a marketing issue than anything to do with the writing process anyway. It’s more like paranoia on my part.
The second of those points, that writing very intentionally for a specific demographic could potentially be a limiting factor, holds more weight I think. That isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with writing specifically for a certain demographic or that doing so will make your story worse. But I do think that it might hold someone back from telling the story they want to tell, the way they want to tell it and in a few different ways.
Rather than setting out to write a story for a certain audience, I prefer to start out with a concept and just write it in a way that feels right to me. I feel like I can’t do that if I set out specifically to write for a certain audience from the beginning. I can go back over it and figure out who the content is most likely to be appropriate for and be engaging for after the fact once I’ve told the story as I want it to be. Given how I write and the subject matter I work with, this usually means that my work ends up being geared more towards teenagers and older. But I don’t set out to write YA stories. The stories I want to tell just typically end up being appropriate for that bracket and up.
Another reason I don’t really write with a target audience in mind is the general subjectivity of art and the varied interests, maturity levels and capabilities of human beings in different demographics. Again, some content is going to be boring for adults. Some will be inappropriate or too complex for children. That is a given. But I do think that the dividing lines between demographics are sometimes drawn a little too thick and should be treated like suggestions more than rules beyond a certain point. Where exactly that point is, I am admittedly not sure of. I wouldn’t write a story featuring addiction, abuse and rape and hand it to a primary schooler. I wouldn’t write a story like The Lonely Wizard and expect a professional lawyer in their forties to find it particularly interesting. But I do think we tend to underestimate what young people are capable of comprehending and tolerating and that we tend to stigmatise adults enjoying media that doesn’t feature outright mature or adult content. There are twelve-year-olds that could stomach Domino and understand the story arcs of the characters and grown adults who couldn’t. Are either groups majorities? Probably not. But that’s kind of besides the point. Demographics just aren’t as clear cut as we often make them out to be, so it feels strange to me to make them a central thing we keep in mind when we write.
The final major reason I hold this philosophy is almost in contradiction to the paragraph above. That is that a target audience is going to be naturally built into a lot of stories. A teenager is more likely to be drawn towards a coming of age story than someone middle-aged because they relate more to what they are currently experiencing. A story focusing on racial or LGBTQ+ issues is probably going to resonate more with people in those demographics who have experienced those issues first hand. That being said though, that doesn’t mean that those stories can’t or won’t be enjoyed by people who don’t fit those demographics any more than people in their thirties can’t enjoy The Hunger Games or a fifteen-year-old can’t enjoy a Jeffrey Deaver crime thriller.
Every story is going to have an audience out there. That audience may have a majority fit a certain demographic, but it’s probably going to be a lot more multifaceted than you would suppose at a glance of a story’s blurb. So it just seems strange to me to set out to write for a specific audience from the beginning unless you have a significant reason for doing so. Just write the story you want to tell and somewhere out there will be someone who will read it and love it.
That all being said though, I did briefly mention marketing before and this is where I have to present a different perspective on the idea of a target audience. That is, even if there isn’t a target audience for your story, there probably is going to be an audience that will resonate more with it than others. It does make sense then to target your marketing towards that audience and my reluctance to do that hurts me a lot more than it helps me. So, while I don’t think having a target audience in mind for your story makes a lot of sense for most of us, I do think that it makes a hell of a lot of sense for who you market towards once you’ve figured out who your story is most appropriate for.
Really, this is just a whole lot of words to say that I don’t want myself or any other writer to feel like they have to write any one variety of story. The story you write will have an audience out there and it’s more important to write what you want and then figure out who to market it towards than to know who it’s for from the beginning.
Am I right about this? I honestly don’t know. But it’s definitely how I feel about it right now.
