If you publish your work, you can’t know for sure who will read your writing.  But you can know two things about them.  You can know who is most likely to read it.  And you can know who you want to read it.

Remember, you want to find out these readers’ care-abouts. What are their tendencies, talents, passions, limitations, knowledge levels, fears, hopes?  You want to discover these things because you want to elicit emotional responses in your readers, which in turn will lead them to action.

So to figure out the ones who are most likely to be interested in your subject, and the ones you want to be interested in your subject, you need to ask yourself some categorization questions.  These questions range from general and broad to as detailed as you want.

The two broadest and most general, of course are:

1. Gender. Are your readers more likely to be men or women? Are you writing for a particular gender? Remember writing is communicating – there have been many things written about the differences in gender communication styles.

2. Age. Are your readers like to be under thirty? Over fifty? Mid-life, seniors, Generation X, Y, or Z?

But don’t stop there. The more detailed you make the description of your ideal or most likely readers, the better you will be able to grab their attention. Here are some other categorizations you might want to ask yourself about the readers who will most likely read your book, or who you want to read your book.

• Knowledge level. Will your readers be experts, or conversant, with your subject, or are they from the general public whose knowledge is limited?
• Financial status. Are your readers people with money or people who are struggling with money? Money is an important factor in people’s care abouts.
• Education level. Are your readers mostly college educated or not? Do they have specialized knowledge, such as medical or legal knowledge?
• Social status. Are your readers members of a particular social class or sub-culture? If so, is this status based along cultural or racial lines, or financial wherewithal?
• Geographic location. Are your readers from the Southern States or Eastern Seaboard or Great Midwest? Or even – are they mostly Americans?
• Interests. What are your readers’ hobbies and favorite pastimes? For example, a book about how to write one’s memoir would probably appeal to amateur genealogists.
• Political ideas. Are your readers right-wing conservatives or left-wing liberals or middle-of-the-road Independents? And so on … are your readers outdoors people or couch potatoes? Engineers or artists? Romantics or realists? Intellectuals or jocks?
  

I sometimes share writing tips that have worked for me or my clients/students. Do you have a writing tip you’d like to share? If so, leave a comment here. You might win something! At the end of each month I’ll gather up the “Writing Tip” comments from the month and pick one at random from a drawing, and send the winner of the drawing one of my e-books: your choice of “How to WOW Your Readers” or “You Can Be An Author, Even If You’re Not a Writer.”

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