Million Dollar Outlines - 2013

Part 12: Taking Steps To Expand Your Audience

I took a lot of writing classes in college, and I think that in just about every one I took, the professor pointed out that the world is made up of both men and women, but beginning writers typically only write stories for people of their own sex. That's because they are used to reading stories primarily about people of their own sex.

But think about it: why would you want write to a small audience?

So let's say that you're a male, writing a story aimed primarily at men. Currently the earth has some 7,000,000,000 people in it. Of those people, over half are women.

It only makes economic sense that if you could capture readers of both sexes, you would more than double your income.

Of course, not all authors want to capture readers of both sexes. There are men who are only interested in writing for other men. Women are too hard to understand, they think, and as a male author you may be afraid that you won't be able to write about them convincingly.

Similarly, some women don't feel that they can write stories that will engage men.

So we tend to write stories about people who are of our same sex, and roughly our same age.

Some authors take it much further. I happen to be a Mormon. I know lots of Mormons who are so deeply rooted in their own culture, that they couldn't write authentically about someone who was an atheist, a Catholic, or a Muslim. So these authors tend to write for the 15 million people who belong to their church. But with such a small audience to draw from, very few of them can make a living.

And that's the crux of the problem: the smaller the audience you write for, the tougher it is to support your writing habit. If you want to write a novel that could only really be appreciated by Texans, you've got a fairly small audience. You want to narrow it further and say it's just for men. The audience gets smaller still. You want to decide that it's only for men who like polyester, and it shrinks further.

So I suggest that you look for ways to expand your audience rather than minimize it. Here are a couple of authors who did just that. Let's take J. K. Rowling first.

In chapter one of Harry Potter, three people gather together to leave a child on the doorstep of a Muggle family. One is the aging headmaster of a school for wizards, the second is a woman of similar age, and the third is a middle-aged half-giant. Though young Harry Potter himself is only a babe, he takes the center stage, not because he's the viewpoint character, but because:

               —He's the one that the others are talking about

               —He is so powerful even as a baby, that he has just killed a Dark Lord.

Do you see what Rowling has done? She has inhabited her scene with people of diverse backgrounds, from newborn babes to graybeards, both male and female. The group is small enough to be intimate, large enough to give us diversity.

She then continues with this throughout the books. Harry grows up in a nasty household, is rescued by wizards, and soon meets a nice cast of friends and enemies—once again of varying ages and sexes.

The reason for this should be obvious, but in case it is not, here it goes: the easiest way to engage a member of a particular demographic is to write about a character in that demographic so that the reader can develop a rooting interest in that character. Of course, the easiest way to gain rooting interest is to show that this person is somehow like the reader.

In short, we almost always grow attached to people who are like us. Women tend to feel more strongly for other women—women who are their age or slightly younger. It's easier to empathize with such characters. And of course men tend to empathize with other men.