Imagine that you are sitting in front of a group of people and you have just completed your first reading of your first story and the audience gives you a standing ovation. Or, imagine that you are sitting at a table in a bookstore signing copies of your first book, and there is a line out the door and around the corner of people waiting to meet you. In both cases, you look at these people and acknowledge that these are your fans, these are your people. But who are they? Can you see them in your mind's eye? Can you tell me how old they are? Can you tell me their gender, their income level, their main area of interest?

Knowing who your audience is will make a big difference in how you craft your story. For example, let's say you are writing a children's story. What age group are you targeting? The text in a ‘first reader' will be different than the text in a ‘read it to me' book. There was a gentleman who gave me a manuscript for his children's book; he wanted my opinion and helpful comments. The story had short sentences but the words were big and the ideas were vague. There were very few concrete images for the reader to imagine. When I asked him which age group he was targeting, he said, "I don't know! Maybe this isn't even a children's book!" Mind you, this was after he had already spent thousands of dollars with a graphic artist to do the pictures! There was no turning back. He was crushed.

This man made a common mistake. He assumed that because he was writing a ‘children's book' that he should write short sentences and that would qualify his work as being for little people. When I read it out loud to my eight year old daughter, she was offended. She picked up immediately that he had made a mistake. She wanted to know why he was talking down to her with the short sentences and then over her head with the big words and ideas. The result was that she wanted me to stop reading; it was boring and offensive. Her expectation was that we were going to read a story that would be for her; what she got was something else, which caused frustration and rejection of the story.

Knowing who your target audience is will help you choose the language in your narrative voice. Ideally, your narrative voice should sound like you, and we'll cover this more in-depth in another article, but if you are writing an autobiography and you are a Mexican woman and your goal is to inspire other Mexican women to rise above their circumstances and make something of themselves the way you did, then you should write to that target audience. In other words, if you sound like an academic, because now you have your PhD, this particular audience might not want to read the book. They might be offended by your tone. Similarly, if you are writing a book about nuclear science, then your language needs to reflect the educational level of your audience in order for them to want to approach your book.

Knowing your audience is crucial because each reader comes with certain expectations, as do publishers. Depending on the genre, females might be attracted to language that invokes more emotion; males might like language that is concrete and tangible. A sports story needs to know if the audience is full of beginners or experts. If you are not sure who you are writing to, go to the bookstore and people watch. Hang out in the section you are interested in and see what kind of people pull books off of your shelf. Are they more male or female? How old are they? Which books did they choose? You might be surprised by this research.

So imagine again, this time you are on the Today Show or sitting on the couch with Oprah for your whirlwind book tour. Who is in the audience? Can you see them? Find out who they are so you can speak their language. They'll love you for it.