Who Is My Audience?

I thought my audience was supposed to be a type of person, such as:

 

Women

Men

Kids

Adults

Older people

Younger people

Historical fiction aficionados

Yada yada yada

 

But being honest that isn’t it at all.

 

Instead, I have concluded that my audience is people who love to get sucked into page-turning exciting fiction book, which effectively transports them to the world that the writer has created.  Where you love the good characters and root for them and you hate the bad characters and fervently hope for their destruction.

 

My audience is people who find themselves staying up all night reading rich fiction, or don’t want to admit they are blowing off their family, their loved ones, their jobs and just about everything else since they simply cannot get that incredible book out of their heads and want to sneak off to read it.  Maybe they (should I say this?) sneak into the bathroom for half an hour during a party that they are a guest at, or even hosting, just to read that book, which has hooked them in!

 

My audience is people who go to the bookstore – online or offline – and hope for the next book from their favorite writer – a writer who consistently puts them in the foregoing state of being.

 

That is my audience.  And it doesn’t seem to make much difference if the reader is a woman, a man, a kid or an adult, or a historical fiction aficionado.

 

I know I talk about Ken Follett a lot – as inspiring me.  I haven’t met him so I don’t know, but I wonder if he thinks of his audience in the same way.  His books have been so different and far-ranging, I wonder.

 

So who then is my audience?  The answer is that my audience is people just like me.