Reader Targeting is yet another concept we have to juggle. It's no wonder many writers take to the drink, or otherwise lose the run of themselves. Or can be a little… kooky. We have to wrestle with a number of contradictory notions all the time — it's enough to make anyone batty.

The most obvious is with the writing itself: we need at least some level of ego to push something out into the world and ask money for it. But we also must have the requisite critical faculties to see what's wrong with it and to motivate ourselves to fix it, and to otherwise work on our craft until the things we make are as good as we need them to be.

(As a famous editor once put it — Nan Talese maybe? — those first few years, when our taste is much more developed than our skills, are tough.)

The experienced author isn't done with these trying dichotomies though; one in particular that we all continue to struggle with is between our artistic natures, and our commercial sensibilities. It's not so much about what to write or how to write it — most pros can navigate that part. The battlegrounds are elsewhere, things like cover design, series titles, descriptions, branding.

And one more surprising, perhaps: reader targeting.

It's not just with packaging that our Inner Artist can lead us astray, trying to convince us to be unique instead of realizing that a cover's job is to communicate genre very clearly and get readers, the right readers, to click.

That Inner Artist is often what drives us to create, but she can mislead us with marketing, trying to push us to broader audience. That feeling of wanting to share it with the world is great and beautiful and powers us through some tough moments in the process of creation but can actually harm our book's chances of connecting with its core readership.

And it's not just those indulging their Inner Artist at the wrong moment who can fall into this trap. I also see very hard-nosed commercially minded writers seeking to "break out" of a niche they haven't dominated yet, which is a little backwards.

The core principle of reader targeting is this: aim your book exclusively at true fans of that genre.

That might seem uncontroversial, but it's harder to adhere to than you might think. Your Inner Artist is quite the Wormtongue. You can be building an Amazon Ads campaign and wondering whether you should include Conn Iggulden as a comp author. Your commercial instincts will be telling you that you don't really have enough audience crossover with this author as your books don't have quite as much action, but your Inner Artist will seductively whisper, "tryyyyy it."

BookBub might knock you back for the Historical Fiction list and offer you Action/Adventure instead, which isn't really a good fit, but your Inner Artist can convince you to make a bad decision. These adjacent audiences are a killer and where we waste most of our money.

But it's not just wasted money that is the danger here. In fact, with really adjacent audiences you can actually make the sale to that reader who isn't quite in your target audience. As you should all know by now, this can scramble your Also Boughts, something I have spoken about a lot.

Dangers of Also Bought pollution aside, these are the readers that may be less than happy with your story, and can leave you a bad review. Only a small percentage of readers bother doing that though, the more insidious cost — Also Boughts aside — is the slow corrosion of DNFs and weak-ass sellthrough and strangely low sign-ups to our mailing list and muted page reads after a push of some kind.

The way to combat this is to enshrine that core principle of reader targeting in absolutely everything you do. It's not just about pointing your ads at the right people, that philosophy has to influence in the entire chain. This means your description, your cover, the categories and keywords you choose, the story itself, of course, the way your write your end matter, the manner in which you speak to readers during your onboarding process for your newsletter — all this stuff should be appealing explicitly and exclusively to your target audience.

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