Who is my audience?
When is a book not abut the thing that it's about?
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QUESTION:
I'm writing a NF book about blacksmithing for blacksmiths. Is there a way to tie in such a specialized field so other readers outside my niche might find it enjoyable?
- Henry Hamilton
Dear Henry Hamilton,
I’ll admit it. When I first read this question, I thought… sh*t. I can’t answer a question about a blacksmithing book! I don’t have any experience writing or publishing NF (nonfiction) outside of academia. I definitely don't know a single thing about blacksmithing. I live in an apartment in New York City. I am not a candidate for picking up blacksmithing, assuming it requires things like space. And materials. And space to house those materials. I'm a hack! A fraud! There's so much I don't know!
And all that may be true.
But.
My own thought process about how to answer this actually mirrors, I think, your process, Henry, in thinking about how to write this book, and all our processes no matter what we're working on. Whether it's fiction, nonfiction, a job application, an e-mail, or, yes, some advice, we're thinking about the content we want to convey and who we're conveying it to. This question about blacksmithing isn't so much a question about blacksmithing. It's a question about audience.
Is your book for novice blacksmiths? Experienced blacksmiths? Hobbyists? Professionals? Is it a how-to? A self-help? A guide? Do you talk about the history of blacksmithing? Changes in blacksmithing? Do you focus on specific techniques? Is it about your personal journey into blacksmithing? Do you challenge preconceptions about the field? Do you want to show people something they wouldn’t otherwise know?
Or is it about blacksmithing but really about life—what you've learned from blacksmithing or what blacksmithing can teach us? And by us, do you mean other blacksmiths, or could it be about what blacksmithing can teach all of us, even if we barely know what an anvil is, even if it's a topic we've never considered before?
All these questions lead to different books because they point to a different audiences—in some cases a very different audiences—that you’re aiming to reach.
You say that the book is about blacksmithing for blacksmiths. You also say that you're hoping other people outside this niche topic might be interested. On the surface, those do seem like slightly contradictory needs that warrant some thinking about. I don't think it's impossible to write something that will appeal to blacksmiths and to people outside that field. But it requires a strong handle on what the book’s center is and who you're trying to reach with it, since the answer can’t realistically be “everyone.”
Lots of books seem like they're about niche subjects, but they're really about something much broader. Books about cooking that are also about family and history and place. Books about a specific person's upbringing that have something bigger to say about growing up. Books about an experience that go beyond that one moment to explore something more about risk or frailty or the vast world we call home, so that readers don't need to have had that experience—or ever want to have that experience!—to be drawn to the book and its lessons.
Broader isn't always better, of course. Appealing to a wider audience might feel like it's diluting your message, making it not enough about blacksmithing so that it no longer puts you in conversation with the blacksmiths you want to be your audience.
Or, you may feel that writing a book specifically for blacksmiths narrows you too much, and you want to share with non-blacksmiths something they might not even realize they're interested in and can learn from.
It’s a choice—a hard one. One that ultimately comes down to a series of questions only you can answer about who your audience is, why you think they’ll pick up your book, and what you hope to offer them in exchange for the time they’ll spend reading. Personally, I love learning about topics I know nothing about. I would 100% read, say, a memoir about how you got into blacksmithing, what you craft, and why it’s so important! It’s admittedly less likely that I’d pick up a manual on learning how to blacksmith—not because that book isn’t interesting or valuable or deserves to be written, but I’m simply not the right audience for that particular topic (see again: the NYC apartment).
As writers, we can’t reach everyone, and we certainly can't make everyone fall in love with our work. A juicy romance isn’t going to appeal to a reader who's looking for a taut murder mystery, but that doesn't mean one of those books is wrong, or bad, or not reaching enough people. It means the romance is a romance and the mystery is a mystery, and even within those broad categories there are myriad subgenres, too. It's a question of making sure the book’s promise—what do I, the reader, think this is going to be about when I pick it up and take it home with me?—matches the expectations the book ultimately fulfills. The danger zone comes, I think, when we try to make our books do everything—be the romance AND the thriller AND the sweeping historical saga AND have lush prose and have tight pacing AND, AND, AND.
It all comes down to making informed choices about what you want and how you can achieve it.
I don’t know from your question whether you already have a publisher for your book. If you do, you’ll want to talk with your editor to make sure you’re on the same page for your vision. If you don’t, your answers to these questions will be invaluable when you write your pitch and discuss who your proposed audience is, what other titles your book will be in conversation with, and how you plan to market it. If your ideal publisher puts out niche books on your topic, then you know what direction to go in to appeal to them. If your ideal publisher puts out books on more generalized subjects, then you’ll want your proposal to signal that you think they’ll be able to sell this book to more than a handful of blacksmiths. If you’ve got the publisher and they’re asking you to think broader—or you’re self-publishing and want to push yourself to think broader—I’d go back to some of those questions I raise above and think about what blacksmithing, and your experiences in the field, can offer to others who are curious about the craft or but don’t know what it feels like to do the work you do or what lessons they can take from it.
I said this in my previous post about querying and self publishing, and I suspect I'll keep saying it again and again, but there’s ultimately no right or wrong answer here. It all comes down to your vision for your book and what you want to put into the world.
I’ll be excited to see what you come up with either way!
I know I promised a post on synopses, and it’s coming! Stay tuned, and please click below to share, subscribe, and ask a question for me to answer in a future post. After the synopsis run-down, I’ve got a response in the works for a great question about how much dang marketing publishers really expect from us…
Keep writing, keep fighting, and take care of yourselves.
Kate