Market smarter with reader demographics and personas

Figuring out your "target audience" isn't an exact science. In the broadest sense, a target audience is the general group of people you are marketing your book to. Having an idea of who these people are and what they like to do is a good starting point for deciding how to market your book to them.

There's a fun post over at Matilija Press where Patricia Fry tells a story about talking to an author that I think gets to the heart of the matter pretty quickly. She writes:

Last year at a book festival, an author came to me asking for help promoting his book. It was a scientific view designed to disprove the concept of God.

Putting my prejudices aside, I asked the author, "Who is your target audience?"

He quickly responded, "Everyone."

I said, "Everyone will want to read this book?"

And he said, "Everyone should read this book."

She goes on from there to talk about the difference between who the author wants to read the book and who will be naturally interested in and drawn to the book. That's the big difference for me.

I wanted everyone to read the book I wrote because I'm proud of it and I think it's great. But not everyone is interested in reading about a 27-year-old male protagonist making meaning in a crazy world. But there were plenty of people who were very excited to read it. I spent my marketing time at events, on websites, and in other places where they spent their time.

Those people were my "target audience."

Target Audience Demographics

I think of demographics as numbers and attributes shared by large groups of people. Things like 18-25 year olds, or females, or people who make over $150K/ year.

Thinking about your target audience in demographic terms is a first step, and sets the stage for target reader personas.

To start with, list out some basic information about age, marital status, geographic home, gender, education, etc.

For example, this is what I started with for my own novel:

• 18 - 35 years old
• Single
• San Francisco (extended to all Apartment-dwellers in urban areas)
• Male
• High School education +

That was my starting point. It didn't mean that I ignored everyone else. In fact, I found that as I tested it with beta readers, married women actually liked my book a lot, and I adjusted my marketing when I learned that. This "target audience" doesn't have to be static: It's a starting point to focus your marketing strategy, and you can adjust as often as you learn something new.

Target Audience and Reader Personas

I used that target audience foundation as a jumping off point to create "reader personas."

Where the target audience demographics are about broad numbers, the target reader persona is about personality and behavior.

I adapted the idea from a design firm called Cooper that uses something called an "audience persona." They use it to determine how to better design products for clients.

They define personas this way:

• User archetypes – represent the specific needs of many individuals
• Based on behavior patterns observed in research
• Tools that allow us to drive our ideas from data about real people
• Can be used broadly to enhance any touchpoint with a user

(That whole post is well worth the read if you geek out on this stuff like me!)

When user experience designers work on products, they spend a lot of time talking to and interviewing people who are going to be using that product. The designers pick up on patterns, needs and themes in the intended users and design the product to better serve those needs. It's a lot of work and takes a lot of time, certainly more than most self-publishers have. If you have the time, do as much research online or through in-person interviews as you can to determine behavior patterns in your target reader- you'll be amazed at how much you learn and how much more effective your marketing outreach gets.

Even if you can't do the research, though, I like to use the idea of a "Reader Persona" to help myself and authors I work with to think more specifically about a book's target audience. It also helps to make thinking about the marketing feel more personal rather than just the numbers and broad strokes in demographics. You can imagine these reader personas somewhere out there as real people, and even go out and try to find real people who are like them to become beta readers for your book or to interview them about their interests as a place to start tweaking your marketing strategy into specific tactics.

For example, to create a reader persona for my novel, I started with the target audience:

• 18 - 35 years old
• Single
• San Francisco (extended to all Apartment-dwellers in urban areas)
• Male
• High School education +

Images courtesy of Lead from StockMonkeys.com and internal from Vironevaeh, both via flickr