Q: Tell us about your ideal reader. For whom do you write and why don’t they ever leave reviews or tell you how you’re doing?
-from Susan
Interesting. Rhys Bowen and I were just talking about who we write for – who our ideal reader is and why. As you doubtless know, Rhys has about a million of them, people who love her multiple series and standalones and wait eagerly for the next one. She can hardly write fast enough, but she refuses to write a book so quickly that it doesn’t meet her own high standards, so wait they do. Willingly. Ready to buy, to write reviews, to stay with her on Facebook and Instagram, to fill the bookstores when she visits. I have none of that.
Rhys says you don’t have to write something just so people will like it, but you have to find the people who like what you write. She said I’m kind of sophisticated, like to travel, know something about art and culture (well, she didn’t say it quite like that, but I’m blushing a bit as it is) and my ideal reader would have some of those characteristics too. Bluntly, readers who are most comfortable sticking with what they already know, who want to guarantee that the book they pick up will wrap them in something familiar – just like the last book they read? – may find it uncomfortable to be asked to venture into, let’s say, a foreign country with food they don’t think they’d like, or art they don’t appreciate. I’m not knocking them; they are some other author’s ideal readers, and bless them for buying books.
When I pivot to the fellow authors I read and enjoy, it’s a different cohort. I read lots of crime fiction, ranging from the lighthearted period series Her Royal Spyness (one of Rhys’s that I have enjoyed since the first one) to the atmosphere-rich Samuel Craddock police procedurals Terry Shames writes and the intense and offbeat thrillers several of my Minds colleagues write. I relish French author Fred Vargas’s peculiar crime stories set in Paris, Alexander Smith’s wonderful “first lady detective agency” series set admiringly in Botswana…I could go on. My ideal reader likes at least some of them also. The real problem for me is, how to I get the attention of their readers so they’ll give me a try? I haven’t found them and they haven’t found me. Maybe I need to spend big bucks on a book-specific p.r. person?
As to getting Amazon and Goodreads reviews, again, I’m not sure. I feel uncomfortable asking for reviews, although some fellow authors to it frankly, openly and without any qualms. I tuck a “If you like it, please review” note into the books I give away in contests, but not much happens. Maybe the recipients weren’t my audience and didn’t like the free book they got.
This question is a good challenge, but I don’t seem to have any answers. If I give YOU a free book, will you review it?!
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