You hear it all the time, but for some reason think it doesn’t apply to you: define your audience. Today, we’re going to talk about something you do all the time in your in your work, with your family, your friends. It’s something you even do with your diet and your wardrobe, but for some reason you refuse to do with your writing,
It’s pretty easy to know who your family is, right? I mean, they share your genetics or they share a legal bond to you. Okay, and maybe you’re not married but still consider your partner family. Absolutely. Still the point is clear enough. You know who family is.
You can do the same with friends. You have criteria that determines who you consider an acquaintance, who makes the friend circle cut, and even your best friends.
When you go to a store, you know what kind of clothes you wear, from the gendered articles you prefer to the cuts and colors. You don’t even give much thought to it any more. You browse, you see, you love, you buy.
And there are foods you love, those you tolerate, and those you wouldn’t eat for a hundred dollars.
Why is it then, that you have such a hard time claiming your writing? Hey, I get it. You want your stuff to sell. Maybe you feel like if you tell people your writing appeals to people who prefer character-driven thrillers with messy resolutions, where good and evil not only intermingle but often come from the same person, that you’ll turn away that one reader who tends not to pick up thrillers but will just rave about yours because she uniquely connected to the amazing prose and timeless story.
But here’s a question for you: Say you go to a bar with a group of people, and you run into an old acquaintance and you start to introduce the acquaintance to your group. You say, “Hey Jane, this is John, my best friend.” and Jane and John exchange greetings. Then you say, “And this is June, my best friend.” And as you go down the list of people in the group John meets your best friend Jean, and your best friend Jen, and your best friend Janet, until John says, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I thought I was your best friend.” At which point June and Jean and Jen all look at you and say, “Yeah, I thought I was your best friend.”
You probably see it. You’ve got a little problem on your hands. Your problem never was having lots of friends. And no one was going to be offended if you said “you’re my good friend,” or “a great friend,” but you tried to expand a niche of one into a limitless category and everyone immediately lost trust in you.
commit to your niche.
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