Today's topic is one that sometimes gets overlooked when you're writing something: who will want to read it? In other words, who is your audience. You may think that it isn't a big deal, that you are just "writing for yourself" or "writing what you want to read", but many of us would like people to eventually buy the things that we've written. The question is, who are those people?

Now, I might be tempted to say something silly like, "everyone will like my book," but that's just not true. And, if you tell an agent or a publisher that your book is for everybody, you will likely get a rejection. Why? Because publishers and agents need to be able to market your work, and in marketing, a shotgun approach is rarely as successful as a more targeted approach. You need to be able to tell them who might like your book, so that they can target that audience for sales. This usually means age group and genre. This is also where coming up with comp titles is useful.

This is still somewhat true with short stories as well. When you're submitting a short story you want to think about the subscribers of the magazine or the readers of the anthology your short story might be in. Is it targeted at adults, teens, or kids? Is it a group that prefers quirky stories or serious stories? Might the readers want a more literary piece or genre piece?

Now, when a lot of writers think about writing for a particular audience, one thought that might come to mind is something along the lines of "dumbing down" a story for kids. It's not that children aren't able to handle adult themes, but maybe just reigning in on some of the vocabulary might make a children's book more audience specific.

Hope that all makes sense. Good luck on finding your audience! :)

To find out tips on how to identify your audience, here's a link to an post on The Creative Penn entitled Writers: 5 Tips on How to Identify Your Target Audience

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!

I have found that without constant vigilance and effort, it is really easy for an author to get out of what I've decided to call the "rhythm" of writing. This rhythm occurs when you've been slogging along almost forcing yourself to write on a schedule but feeling like you aren't accomplishing anything, and then suddenly writing and editing becomes effortless and you feel that buzz inside. The buzz of: this is happening, this is real, I'm really doing this, I'm going to get this done! It is an amazing feeling that often morphs into that other great writerly feeling of being in "the zone." This is usually right about the time some story or project finally comes together.

Only very recently have I been able to get back into a rhythm of writing and it feels good, but the important thing that I have to remember is that you can't wait for these feelings to spontaneously come upon you. Like I said, the rhythm only comes after the habit. Writing has to start as a priority, then become a habit, then a rhythm, and then you're in the zone. Some writers can live in the zone once they get there. Others of us have the inevitable distractions that pull us back out of the zone and force us to repeat that slog up from priority, and in that slog it is easy to forget what it was like to be in the zone. Never give up. The zone is waiting for you. Just follow your rhythm.

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!

Okay so I'm not going to lie, as an author you sometimes you have to commit acts of shameless self-promotion. This post is one of those acts.

Come join me Saturday, August 19th, 2:00pm-4:00pm for an author panel and book signing for teen books at the Barnes & Noble in Brighton, MI.

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.

Okay, so this is not a political blog, I know, it is a writing blog, but I can't let this go today. In the middle of researching a short story I'm working on, I decided to get some more information on that thing with the internet that happened a while back in Egypt. Long story short: 1) It's still happening, 2) It's not just in Egypt, 3) It's not just a "thing with the internet", it's denying people access to social media, world news, and sometimes denying them access to the internet completely, and 4) No one is doing anything about it!

Silly me, I thought we had an overarching global organization that told countries when they were being assholes and gave them slaps on the wrist until they stopped. I had actually assumed that NATO had taken care of this nonsense, but NATO seriously considered doing something, and then decided it was too politically incorrect to fine countries for keeping their populations ignorant and isolated.

...And this is why I can't read the news ever. I just went to the Amnesty International website to see if there was something that I could do about this, some petition I could sign, etc. and found so many other human rights violations that I want to cry or puke or both. So I'm going to just stop now, but I will ask everyone who reads this blog post to go take some action for human rights in the next 5 days. Go ahead and write a blog post, write a letter to a congressman, sign a petition, donate, something, anything...please. I'll do the same.

Thank you.