In my last blog I discussed why knowing your purpose for writing your book was key to building your roadmap to success. One aspect I covered was how essential it was to know your audience. Now, I’d like to go into more detail about discovering your audience and digging deep to define your ideal reader.
Defining your ideal reader requires going through the research process and really honing in on your audience. This way you can begin to build a marketing strategy that revolves around them.
Your Audience: The Research Needed to Define Your Ideal Reader
First, there are three parts to your overall audience:
- Your target
- Your niche
- And your ideal reader
Your audience is not so much about age and demographics as much as it’s about worldview. I would guess that your audience is like you. Typically a person goes into business or writes a book because they are passionate about a topic.
What is it about your topic that gets you excited, why do you believe in the things you believe in? I think that you are looking for people who are looking for the same things you are—or were before you gained the knowledge that makes you an expert in your field or the author you are today.
Who Makes Up Your Target Audience?
Your target is the overarching group of people who may need your services, or read your book at some point. If you are not sure who this is, do a quick Google search. For example: Who reads romance novels? Or, Who is the average person getting a divorce?
What is Your Niche?
To find your niche, consider the area in which you specialize—who is most likely to need this service? Who are the fans of your genre?
Your Ideal Reader?
In a perfect world, who do you want your reader to be? Who do you write for and what are they looking for?
To define your ideal reader you’ll need to get specific. For instance: Young adults who are gay, under-served communities, people who have an obvious handicap, minorities, educated women seeking spiritual guidance, world travelers looking to explore new cities and discover hidden gems, etc.
What motivates them? What are their immediate and long term needs? Who influences them? Who are they listening to and reading?
How Do You Find Your Audience?
After you’ve done an initial broad search, start by finding the influencers in your sphere. You will also use your comparable titles as a guide.
Remember, these are the people who are excelling in your field and have a following of people you seek connection with. Take a close look at the people who follow your influencer and you will very likely be looking at your audience.
Then you can analyze the audience of these influencers and the readers of your comp titles.
How do you do this? Subscribe to your influencer blogs, newsletters, and podcasts, read their articles, and follow them on social. Next, pay attention to who is commenting and engaging with their content across all platforms.
To Define Your Ideal Reader, You Will Then Dig Deeper
Once you have a grasp of your overall audience, you will be prepared to define your ideal reader amongst them. You’re creating a profile of your ideal reader from this audience, in other words. When you read your influencer’s blog, browse their socials and find the reviews of your comp titles, a complete picture will begin to form.
Below are the four steps you can take to dig deeper into your audience to define your ideal reader.
Step One: Find out who is engaging with your influencers
Begin with their blog. Go to their latest blog posts and read at least ten posts to get a feel for their voice first, and then check out their audience engagement. Take a look at the comments, and check to see who is commenting and what types of comments they are posting.
If they don’t have blogs, then visit their social accounts and see what they are posting and who is commenting. This is also a good exercise to help you get comfortable with social media as well (seeing how it’s done and glean ideas to build your own social profiles down the road).
Step Two: Learn more about this audience
Once you see who is commenting and engaging with your influencer, follow the links of the people who read and leave those comments on the influencer’s blog posts, or socials. When you discover their personal websites or social accounts, you can begin to look for patterns.
Here’s what you are looking for:
- Age
- Race
- Education
- Employment
- Relationship status
- Geographic location
- Interests (movies, music, books)
- See if they travel and what things they share
- Where do they get their news?
Step Three: Look for consistency in patterns and track your audience
All this will give you a real-time view into the world of your potential audience and help you define your ideal reader. You’ll want to keep track of these stats in a spreadsheet or in some other organized way. You will also need to reevaluate and look for consistency in these demographics. Does this seem like stalking? A little. But in-depth research is how every marketer defines their target audience.
Studying Reviews of Your Comp Titles Will Help Define Your Ideal Reader Too
The people who will likely read your book are the same people who are reading your comp titles. This is why it’s important to know your comparable titles. They will lead you to your audience and help you define your ideal reader. Think of this as detective work. You are creating a profile of your ideal reader. You can find so many specific details if you dig deep enough. To use these to define your ideal reader, you will follow the same three steps as you did when researching the influencers in your sphere.
Start with the Top Ten 5 Star Reviews
Once, I did an exercise when researching comparable titles for a client. My goal was to see just how much intimate data I could glean from reader reviews on Amazon. I wanted to know how close I could get to knowing the personal details of her potential readers.
- What makes these readers tick?
- How can we best speak the language of our ideal reader?
I started with my chosen comp title and then looked at the top ten five star reviews, choosing to focus on people who left longer reviews since they included more details. Then, I looked to see if this was a one-off, or if this reader read other books in the genre. This let me check for patterns and consistency.
It’s All About the Super Fans…
Once I found a few readers who were proven avid readers in that genre, I went deep. I read all of their reviews from the past several months. From this data, I was able to tell a lot about these people. It’s actually kind of startling to see how much information we freely give away about ourselves (but I digress). NOTE: Be careful with this! You can find yourself headlong into the wee hours of the night and not focusing on the data.
What I discovered was that every single person dropped little bits of personal details that you can use to define your ideal reader, like:
- Where they live
- Their marital status
- How many children and grand-children they have
- Their pets and the names of those pets (which gives you some insight into their psyche)
- Their education and income
- What a typical Friday date night looks like
- The clothes they wear, what they drink, what movies they enjoy
- Recent tragedies or celebrations … and the list goes on.
These are all details you can use to create a profile and persona for your ideal reader. Whatever your genre, or area of expertise, you’ll use this data to know what your ideal reader wants and needs from you.
Food for thought: One star reviews are equally, if not more, important as five star reviews. Why? Because ultimately you want to know what your reader wants, and is missing, so you can better serve that need!
Be sure to find reviews across all platforms:
- GoodReads
- YouTube (yes, people review books onYouTube, YouTube is huge!)
- Blogs
- BookTok
How do you find book review bloggers? By inputting the following into Google: “blogs: your search term.”
For example, I did a search for “blogs: romance book reviews,” and came up with a list of over a hundred bloggers, and their contact info, who review romance novels.
I really hope that bells are going off in your head right now—this research helps you define the people who could potentially review your books when the time comes. Research is your friend!
Step Four: Creating a Profile and Persona for Your Ideal Reader
Now that you’ve spent some time looking into the day-to-day of your audience to define your ideal reader, and have identified what engages them and what drives them, you will create a persona for your ideal reader.
Finding and defining your ideal reader can be one of the most challenging elements of brand development. But creating an actual person whom you can name and relate to will help bring your ideal reader into focus. Further, it will help you better meet the needs of that ideal reader.
The following will help you define your ideal reader. Feel free to go beyond this list and really get in touch with them!
This is the person you speak to and write for, specifically.
- Persona first and last name?
- Age, gender, race, relationship status?
- Geographic location?
- Job status, length of time in position, income?
- Hobbies, sports, magazines, books?
- What social media platforms do they engage with most?
- Where do they shop? For groceries, clothing, books, what restaurants do they enjoy?
- Where do they get their news?
- What are Their Goals and Challenges?
You can even bring your ideal reader to life by giving them a face. Choose an image from a magazine and cut and paste their face onto your worksheet. Or do this digitally with a google image search. You could also try using AI tools with image rendering capabilities to create an image of your ideal reader.
NOTE: Google image searches will reveal lots of copyrighted images, so do not print or publicize these images unless you have image rights to do so. Private usage is totally acceptable.
This Ideal Reader Persona Helps You Connect on a Deeper Level
Now that you’ve done the work to define your ideal reader and you’ve created their profile and persona, you will be able to connect to this person on a deeper level. You can see more clearly who it is you are doing all this for, and what they need from you to become a loyal fan.
Can you now see how you would pitch your book, or products or services to them? Can you imagine a conversation with them? How would you speak directly to them? Would you enjoy this conversation?
Is this all making sense now? By defining your ideal reader, you have a connection point to real people in your audience. This allows you to speak directly to them, and to know how to speak directly to them. This will lead to engagement, and will grow your audience and build a loyal following. Your ideal reader will read your book and look forward to your next one. And because they are paying attention to what you are doing, they will know when that next book is coming.
Do you see how all these steps make it all come together? Are you ready to start researching your audience and then dig deeper to define your ideal reader now?
If you have experience with this, let everyone know in the comments. Who is your ideal reader?
