My audience
June 18th, 2009 | by Ben Hoare |For most of my writing life, I’ve had a tiny audience - often consisting of only one person.
First at school then at university, my work was only read by a teacher or tutor. During those years, I also wrote countless pieces that were only ever read by myself.
The size of your audience influences the work you produce. When I was writing my academic essays, I would think to myself: “What does the one person who will read this think of my work? What does he normally like to read? What impresses her?”
Years later, I’m still writing, but now I’m increasingly tempted to try and find ways of increasing my audience. In the publishing world, the focus is often (understandably) on the size of your audience. This is mainly because the size of your readership often has a direct relationship with commercial success: the more people buy your work, the more money you make.
When I started blogging in 2006, I took advantage of the many online tools for measuring your readership. Like many bloggers, I became obsessed with my visitor statistics, thinking that to be a successful blogger I needed to get lots of readers. I wanted to use this blog as a way of promoting my storytelling, so I was keen for as many people as possible to download my story, ‘A Cadence‘.
But during this process, something unexpected happened. Four people, all good friends of mine, responded to my work in an extremely creative way by getting together and illustrating my story. Years after I wrote it, I was suddenly very excited by my story again. More than that, the illustrations inspired me to start work again on the other three stories in my collection - and on new projects. When I wrote ‘A Christmas Argument‘, I was thinking more of my illustrator friends than of any potential wider audience. On 1 December 2008, I invited my friends round, Gemma cooked us a delicious lunch, I read out the story and then we illustrated it. I really enjoyed the day, and I think the others did too.
This has given me a new understanding of my audience. One approach to writing is to aim, constantly, for more readers. The goal is for your writing to spread as far as possible, reaching people you’ll most likely never meet or even hear from. The alternative is developing a relationship with your audience, nurturing what you have instead of constantly trying to reach more people. As Seth Godin puts it, “The internet lets you take really good care of 100 people instead of harassing 2,000.”
So really, the point of this post is to say: thank you for reading. I’m saying this to you, the people who are already here. Thank you taking an interest, and I promise that there’s another story coming very soon. Would you like to help me illustrate it?
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