Summary: A lot of my clients are preparing nonfiction book proposals to send out to agents and publishers. One of the sections they have to think through is their primary audience or target reader. We have to identify who this book is intended to impact.<br> <br> It’s a must for any writing project, big or small. We must know our audience to use the best language to connect with them.<br> <br> To understand what they already know about our topic—and what they need to know.<br> <br> To build a relationship with them and continue to connect with them over time.<br> <br> If we don’t know precisely who are primary audience is, we’re capable of generalizing and writing in a distant, unfriendly, unnatural voice.<br> Identifying Your Ideal Reader<br> But who is this unseen reader? Who's clicking on the article you publish at your website? Who reads your tweets? Who subscribes to your newsletter? Who will read your future book?<br> <br> It’s enough to make your head spin, trying to identify your ideal customer, your target audience, your target reader, your avatar.<br> <br> People advising writers are using terminology like this, and it’s helpful because they're pushing us to go specific. For example, they won’t necessarily let you settle for simple demographics like, “My ideal reader is a 30-something mom with young children.” Instead, they insist on a more detailed persona, something more like this:<br> My ideal reader is Cara, a 32-year-old mother of three kids—a second-grader, first-grader, and preschooler. Cara does yoga in the morning, then feeds the kids homemade muffins before loading them into her Honda minivan to drop the older two off at the private elementary school. She then swings through Starbucks with the preschooler, who is dropped off three days a week at the church-based program at 9:00.<br> And it goes on.<br> <br> You figure out what she does when she’s alone, and the problems she encounters, and the questions she has throughout a day.<br> <br> This approach helps a writer—especially the nonfiction writer—come up with articles and content that can address or completely solve this avatar’s problems and answer her questions, one after another.<br> <br> It’s sort of a creative writing exercise to write a character sketch of this fictional person, fleshing it out with enough detail to make him or her completely real to you as a writer.<br> Does the Fictional Persona Help You Write?<br> But for a lot of writers, fictionalizing the person you’re writing for never quite works. Instead of forging a confident tone and close connection, it all feels sort of contrived.<br> <br> Even if you can go out in the neighborhood and see a person who fits that description, or you can find that kind of person online in a Facebook group asking questions you imagined your avatar asking, it’s still sort of distanced and fabricated. Maybe even a little forced.<br> For Real Copy, You Need Real People<br> I like an approach Chase Reeves described in an episode of The Fizzle Show podcast.<br> <br> The Fizzle team was talking about writing copy and how hard it can be unless—unless—Chase says, "you know exactly who you’re writing to and what you need to tell them.”<br> <br> Creating a fake persona or avatar is a step in the right direction in that you’re trying to speak to a specific person, but he takes it to a super-practical level.<br> <br> Here’s Chase’s trick. He opens up Gmail and starts writing an actual email to an actual person he knows really well in his life—someone who fits the type of person he’s hoping to reach with his content.<br> <br> It’s often his dad. So he opens an email, types in his dad’s email address, taps out a subject line, and prepares to communicate directly with his dad, a real person he knows really well.<br> <br> As Chase is preparing to write the subject line, he wonders, What would surprise Dad?
