When asking an author who’s your ideal reader or who’s your audience, as well as asking, similarly, a filmmaker as to who is his or her audience—all too often the reply is “Everyone!” That type of response although optimistic isn’t pragmatic. Nor has the content creator really given serious thought to the marketing or messaging.

Although your book or film may appeal to readers in every walk of life or your themes are universal, an author—or filmmaker—cannot be ensured success in taking the “My book (or film) is for everyone” approach. A good question to ask in determining your ideal reader or audience member is “Who would I invite to coffee who’d like to hear about my book?” More specifically, who would be impacted, influenced, entertained or informed by your book?

You can certainly have more than one audience. You may have multiple audiences. But then, you must be prepared to separately and effectively target your marketing content and your writing to more than one. Marketing and messaging to each of those audiences will be unique and strategic. You may also have a readership or audience that you never thought of or is different than you anticipated. A good publisher and team will point those out to you for your consideration.

As a trial attorney, I was regularly faced with twelve jurors, all very different demographically. I would find out about each juror, as much as I could, through the voir dire process (i.e. the questioning of potential jurors to select a fair and impartial jury). This was done not only to look for bias, cause to strike or to end up with the ideal jurors for a client’s case but also, to obtain valuable information regarding each juror. That information established the groundwork to discover messaging opportunities during the trial to achieve a connection of those jurors to my client. The crafting of that connection would be designed in a number of ways. It’s actually very similar in technique when a writer is looking for ways to connect the reader to a character, whether it’s the writer himself or another. However, before that connection method is chosen and implemented, we must determine, first and foremost, who that reader actually is.

Now….let’s have that cup of coffee!