When I first started writing my memoir, LET ME IN, I thought I was writing to the world. Afterall, wouldn’t the entire world be interested in a book about me? I thought the book applied to everyone. Well, at least everyone who wanted a career. And any woman who wanted a career. And, of course, any woman who wanted a career who was Japanese. American. And any Japanese American woman who wanted a career and also wanted to know what all that was like in the historical context of the 1970s to 1990s.

Aha! Do you see what I did? I just segmented my readers down from every reader in the universe to readers who were interested in women, careers, Asian Americans and history.

The importance of knowing who will read your book is paramount. Many writers will start not having an audience clearly in mind, but if you want to sell your book—to an agent, publisher or to the public at large, segmenting your audience is critical.

In business, this is called Target Marketing.

We all have limited dollars and time to promote our books/writing. We need to spend out dollars and time wisely. Going back to our butterfly book example, if you had the choice of promoting your book at a book fair that drew readers of general fiction and non-fiction versus a conference for entomologists, which would be the better place to find your readers?

This not only applies to the end reader, but to pitching agents or publishers. An agent who specializes in nature books will likely be more interested in books about butterflies than an agent who represents authors of romance novels or non-fiction fix-it books.

Agents often look at a writer’s social media platform to see who follows the writer, and what their profile is like. If the writer has no social media presence, or whose platform consists of 100 high school friends and family members, it’s not enough to sell books on butterflies profitably. But if the writer’s platform is all about butterflies, and has 10,000 followers who are into butterflies, it would indicate that writer has a higher chance of success with the existing social media presence than the former who has a friends and family platform.

Not only is it important to know your audience from a “get it to market” point of view, but it’s also important to know so that you are writing to your audience. Why do people watch and love Hallmark movies? Many whom I have talked to say Hallmark movies appeal because there’s always a happy ending, the antagonist doesn’t win, the formula for the story is predictable and simple.

This is also why writing a series can be a successful strategy. A series of similar books can draw readers into the series knowing there are more like it, if they like one book, they know they will probably enjoy other books in the series, and the author can spread the cost of marketing over not just one book but many.

On the other hand, you may be writing for an audience of one—yourself. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, most of us probably write only for ourselves off and on throughout our lives. Recognizing that you write for yourself frees you from writing inauthentically. Be true to your audience, whether that is one or millions. And know that your audience can and will change depending on what you are writing. It’s all OK.

All that being said, I beseech you not to get bogged down before you even start. Getting words down on the page is the most important part. Remember my memoir LET ME IN? I wrote it for the entire world before I really recognized who the target market might be. And even after I segmented and subsegmented the audience, I backed off. The other point of identifying your readers is there is a point where the group of readers is too small to market to. This relates as it applies to spending dollars or time selling to market segments.

In our butterfly example, it might be enough to target your marketing dollars on people who are interested in insects in general. You could possibly find people that are into Blue Morpho butterflies, but it begs the question, are there enough Blue Morpho followers and are they easily accessible? If there aren’t enough to buy the book or if it would cost so much to reach them, then backing up and reaching a bigger audience in a cheaper way might be the way to go.

Of course going to the Blue Morpho conference in Tahiti might have some ancillary benefits that offset the costs in other ways, but I digress. PS: I don’t know how big the Blue Morpho butterfly market is, nor do I know where they hold conferences, if they even do. It is merely an example and it is a pretty butterfly.

My focus is for writers who want to publish and want to sell and distribute their books. Identifying your audience is one facet of the diamond a to consider, and the better defined the audience, the more likely you will spend your time addressing the people most likely to read your work, and the better the odds of getting the work distributed to interested parties.

Does this make sense?