So, you’ve written a book, or you’re thinking about writing one. Congratulations!
Now, who’s your target audience?
If you write without knowing the target audience for your book, you’re just writing a book for yourself, which is not inherently bad, but if you also want to sell books, you’re going to want to expand your reader profile (i.e., your target audience).
If you’re not sure who your target audience is, this article is for you.
We’ll take a closer look at:
What is a target audience?
A target audience is who you write your book for. It’s the group of people who would be the most helped or entertained by your book. Your readership might extend past your intended target audience, but the target audience for your book is who you intentionally aim for.
Target audience examples
One of the best ways to figure out what a target audience for your book might look like is to see real examples like the ones below:
- Self-Publishing School: Our company has multiple target audiences, but for our flagship program, Become a Bestseller, our target is someone who wants to successfully self-publish a nonfiction book to gain authority and grow their business, or leave a legacy. This person is typically out of their 20s, has some savings to invest in their own success, and is eager and willing to learn the publishing process so they can replicate the experience for future book ideas.
- Dillon Barr’s The Happiness Gap: The author’s target audience for his book on achieving success without focusing on money, fame, or accomplishments is a 21-year-old male fresh out of college, hungry for the next thing in life. Focused on building wealth and driven.
- Bolt Farm Treehouses: This company, which rents luxurious treehouses for vacation (and some long-term stays), targets couples who are newly engaged or married and looking for a romantic honeymoon destination that’s excluded from the hustle and bustle of life. Anyone can stay in these secluded romantic getaways, but the company understands that newlyweds will likely gain the most from the experience.
Focusing on the target audience doesn’t mean other people won’t find and buy your book; however, understanding your target audience is a way for you to dial into what your ideal reader wants and how your book(s) can meet those needs.
Knowing the target audience for your book is part of any good marketing strategy.
How to find a fiction target audience
There’s a difference between a fiction target audience and a nonfiction one.
Fiction readers generally buy fiction books to be entertained or for the emotional experience. This is why understanding genre expectations is such a critical component of well-written genre fiction.
Understanding who your readers are, what they like, and why they read books like yours can help you write stories that will resonate with their preferences. This doesn’t mean that you have to change the types of books your write, your unique perspective, or choices, but understanding the target audience for your book can point you in the right direction when you want to offer your readers a more engaging experience.
Most of the time, the book genre will determine the target audience for your book, along with the category.
Here are a few examples of a fiction book’s target audience:
- Young Adult Fantasy: The target audience for your book will be teenagers between 13-18 years old who enjoy magic.
- Adult Contemporary: The target audience for your book will be people over the age of 18 who like stories set in today’s world featuring uncommon but possible challenges.
- Middle-grade Science Fiction: The target audience for your book will be children aged 8-12 years who enjoy advanced technology set in a futuristic world.
Knowing the target audience for your book will help you craft everything from the plot, dialogue, and even the setting.
Nonfiction target audience
In nonfiction, the target audience for your book is who the book would help the most. You’re nonfiction book offers the solution that they are seeking. Where a lot of new writers go wrong with this is when they write the book for themselves, instead of for their audience.
For example, if you’re writing a book about motherhood—a book with YOU in mind might just be a diary documenting your personal experiences being a mother. Unless you’re already a celebrity, the audience for a book like that is likely just close family and friends.
A book by the same writer, with their target audience in mind, might be something like Best Habits for Nursing Mothers—people who are struggling to nurse are now interested in your book. Now you’ve got a niche target demographic—new mothers.
Narrowing the target audience for your book before you write can help you aim for the content your readers will be most interested in. It also makes your book easier to sell. Let’s get into a few more reasons you should define the target audience for your book.
Why knowing your target audience matters
There are several reasons why knowing your target audience matters, and the earlier you know who your potential readers are, the better. As mentioned in the previous section, it can help you write a better book. It can also help you better promote it. Let’s take a closer look at how and why below.
Demographics matter
When writing a book, things like age, gender, location, education, and even occupation matter. When you know your target audience, you can write with their specific demographics in mind. This isn’t about exclusion, but rather, writing authentically to capture the hearts and minds of our readers.
Earlier this year, I read The Trade Off by Samantha Green Woodruff. The book is about a young, Jewish, female immigrant living in New York in the 1920s who is mathematically gifted. The story follows the rise and fall of the New York Stock Exchange from her perspective. This was one of my favorite reads of the year, not because I can relate to being a young, Jewish immigrant in the early 20th century or because I read a lot of historical fiction, but because the authenticity of the story pulled me in, and I could empathize with her humanity, her struggles, and her resourcefulness.
While the target audience of Woodruff’s book is likely historical fiction fans who enjoy financial or business narratives, I was an outlier who found a piece of myself in its pages. This is the beauty of understanding your target audience. When you write for them authentically, there’s often a crossover connection with other readers because while target reader demographics might be different, our human connection remains a constant.
Story conflict matters
Whoever your target audience is, your conflict should be compelling. For example, the struggles of a preteen social media influencer may be of little interest to a new mom of two toddlers, or a newly retired school teacher looking for something interesting to read. If you don’t want to bore your reader to tears, know what they want and try to write it into the story in a way that makes sense for you and resonates with them.
The reason I emphasize “what they want” so much is that the reality is that even though you are the writer, and the stories begin and end with you, when you want to sell books, you have to make peace with the fact that audience expectations are real, and their influence can be strong. You have to decide early on how you’ll deal with the strong current pushing the book industry forward.
Language matters
Defining your target audience clearly can help you speak to them on their level, whatever that level is. To write for the target audience for your book, you need to know how that audience speaks. For example, if you’re writing a middle-grade book and don’t know what TikTok is, you’re either writing for the wrong target audience or you need to do some digging to fill in the missing pieces.
Knowing current trends, vernacular, and verbiage used by your audience is an important factor. This makes knowing your target demographic important for research purposes–if you know you’re writing for twelve-year-olds, you can research what twelve-year-olds are interested in right now.
Finding an agent, editor, or publisher
Knowing the target audience for your book will help you find agents, editors, and publishers who are interested in pushing books toward that particular audience.
For example, most agents only want manuscript submissions in one or two genres, and those genres will have specific audiences.
Know who is interested in reading your book, so you’ll know who might be interested in selling your book, and so you can know how to pitch it to them.
Where to advertise and promote matters
How can you sell your book to your audience if you don’t know where your audience is? Having a firmer grasp of the target audience for your book will aid in researching and developing marketing campaigns to reach that audience.
How to determine the target audience for your book
Now that we’ve covered what a target audience is, how do you find the ideal target audience for your book?
Here are a few things you can do to narrow your focus when building the target audience for your book.
1. Define your genre
There are countless genres and subgenres for both fiction and nonfiction books. Which is best for yours?
Defining the genre of your book starts broad and then narrows as you niche down. For example, How to Write the Perfect Resume by Dan Clay’s genres might look like nonfiction > business > personal marketing > job search.
By defining his book as a job search aid, Dan is cornering that particular market and can help readers looking for that specific assistance. If he’d just left it under the umbrella of “business,” maybe he’d catch a couple of people who were browsing, but “job search” is something very specific that readers will search when that’s exactly what they’re looking for.
The tighter your genre, the more you can target the information and content included in your book.
The tighter your niche, the richer your audience actually is, because they want exactly what you’re offering.
2. Find your book’s brethren
What books in your genre do you find to be similar to yours? Find out the target audience for those books and authors. Do any of them ring true for you?
You might not take their exact target specifications, but this will give you a wider and deeper understanding of how to target audiences with your book content.
3. Create an ideal reader profile
This might sound a little silly if you’ve never done it, but try creating a profile for an imaginary ideal reader.
Answer these questions to find your book’s target audience:
- How old are they?
- What do they do for a living?
- What media do they read and watch, and listen to?
- Are they single? Married?
- Did they go to college? Did they graduate? What was their major?
- Where do they live? How long have they lived there?
- Favorite color? Favorite food? Favorite thing to do on the weekends?
- What are they struggling with?
- What do they want to change about themselves or their life?
Your ideal reader is representative of the average person in the target audience for your book. When you have your ideal reader, you have a clearer picture of WHO you’re writing for. If your book is a knife, your ideal reader is the whetstone to sharpen it.
4. Use your current audience
Look at the audience you have now, especially for nonfiction books. Do you have coworkers at your day job who come to you for information, assistance, or entertainment? What kind of person would approach you to be your friend? Who do you share common interests with?
People who are interested in you, your advice, or the content you produce are probably pretty similar to people who would be interested in your books.
Not only does your current personal and professional network reflect what is likely your book audience, but it is the beginning of your book audience.
5. Ask your network
If you have an audience or network established before your book release, ask them what they’re into. More specifically, ask them what kind of content they want from you. What do they trust you with? On what topics do they consider you an expert?
One exercise you can try is asking your existing network to list the three things they associate you with the most, which will help you determine the target audience for your book.
Also consider asking your network what they are into. What are their top three areas of interest? What kind of books have they already read? What is something they’re currently struggling with, or have struggled with in the past?
Determining and narrowing the target audience for your book will help with every aspect of book production, from writing to selling. In book publishing, research is everything. Gather data, ask questions, and determine who has the most to gain from reading your book, then write and market your book with them in mind.
The original article written by Hannah Lee Kidder has been updated.
