My Books

More About the “Ideal Reader”

Thanks for all the responses about my “ideal reader.” It’s good to hear that I pretty much have it nailed. I guess my instincts were right. And it seems that I have a lot of Hufflepuffs among my readership. I’m more of a Ravenclaw, I’m afraid, possibly a Ravenpuff. Or else I’m the Ravenclaw who hangs out with Hufflepuffs because the other Ravenclaws are a bit too intense and competitive for me. But I digress.

I was asked where the Rebel Mechanics books fit into this. When I was writing that first book, I was aiming squarely at the steampunk community. I figured it would be right up their alley. There were characters who actually were “steampunks.” It was a subculture within that world. There was fun costume potential. I even came up with a plot reason to put gears on things as a decorative element. I had all kinds of fantasies about the steampunk crowd at conventions wearing gears on red ribbons and it becoming a thing.

But the adult fantasy publishers all rejected it, saying it was “too romancey” and suggesting I submit it to romance publishers. Instead, since the characters were all pretty young, I did another edit on it to tighten it up, added a bit more romance and emotion (yes, the version rejected as being “too romancey” had even less romance than the version that got published) and submitted it to YA houses, where it sold. That publisher marketed it to the YA segment (schools and libraries) but didn’t market it as fantasy or as steampunk, so the steampunk crowd didn’t really find it. A few people in that community found it and have loved the series, but it never seems to have spread or caught on there. I never see it mentioned when people ask for steampunk book recommendations.

In spite of what I had in mind when I wrote it, I suspect that the core of my “ideal reader” is probably the same there. Possibly less Harry Potter (though the Fantastic Beasts movies are getting closer) and more of the Jane Austen/Jane Eyre interest, but still a very similar-looking Venn diagram intersection. There would probably be more outliers who don’t fit in that central overlap, like the few steampunks who found it, and there’s the big circle of the actual pre-teens and teens. Some of them might fit a number of those key characteristics (they’re the younger versions of the “ideal reader”), but I think the big factor there was that the kids found the books through teachers and librarians, and most of the teachers and librarians I’ve heard from fall right in the target zone for my “ideal reader” demographic. For YA books, I might spread my promo to hit a younger audience, but I think my core “ideal readers” would still be my main target.

The trick will be finding a way to communicate with a broader audience of this readership to reach more people who might like my books. A lot of the things I’ve been doing or have been thinking about doing probably won’t do a lot of good. Since these aren’t hard-core fantasy readers, I doubt they’d be reading the SF&F magazines, so trying to sell short stories might not bring me new readers. They might read anthologies, though, so that may be something to focus more on. There are a lot of aspiring writers in that group, so writing tips might be good. I might need to be more active on Goodreads and get back to posting reviews. That seems like a place my ideal reader may be likely to hang out. Pinterest seems to fall right into that area, so I might want to explore it. Science fiction conventions might be a waste of time unless one of the other guests is someone who’s a really big name that would lure people who might also like me, but speaking to library associations or teachers groups would probably really pay off for me. I should probably talk more about books on my blog (alas, I’ve been in a reading slump and haven’t read anything I’d strongly recommend lately), possibly discuss some of the other things my core readership is into.

Having this hypothetical reader in mind actually makes me feel better about a lot of things. I’ve hated going to science fiction conventions and feeling invisible, but knowing that my readers aren’t likely to be there makes that make sense. I’m also less likely to be someone considered as a special guest at these cons because that’s not where my core readership is. I likely won’t get nominated for the big genre awards because my readers aren’t likely to be members of the relevant groups. A lot of the things I’ve considered career yardsticks are probably not realistic. Not getting them doesn’t mean I’m failing. It just means my readers are elsewhere. Now I just have to find where they are.

My Books

Finding my Ideal Reader

I spent a lot of yesterday reading various things about publishing, marketing books, etc., and I had a big “Aha!” moment that led to a hypothesis that I now need to test.

One of the books talked about having an “ideal reader,” the hypothetical person you write your books for. There will obviously be outliers who don’t fit the profile, but this is the core readership you’re targeting. This is the person you have in mind when you write, so that you’re writing books that appeal to this person, and this is the person you target in your marketing efforts. One way of testing whether you’re doing this the right way is by looking at the “also boughts” for your books on Amazon. Are these books that you think your ideal reader would also be interested in? If not, you may have problems because the people who bought those books are going to be the ones Amazon will promote your books to.

My “also boughts” are kind of weird. Aside from my own books, there’s a bit of contemporary fantasy, then there are the cozy paranormal mysteries with cartoony covers, and then there are a lot of vampire and shifter romances. I can see there being some crossover, but generally, people who are into sexy vampire and shifter romances probably aren’t going to find what they’re looking for from my books. But then I remembered that my publisher keeps promoting Enchanted, Inc. as paranormal romance. Whenever they do a BookBub, that’s the category they put it in (no matter how many times I beg them not to). The number of people who buy the book during a BookBub has probably totally skewed things. The cozy paranormal mystery thing may be more organic. There’s likely some crossover with the paranormal romance market, but I think that readership is also drawn to my books because there’s a “case” in each book while the relationships develop over the course of the series, and like a cozy mystery, there’s no graphic sex or violence.

But this doesn’t really fit my “ideal reader.” When I started writing Enchanted, Inc., it was essentially for people like me, adults who enjoyed the Harry Potter books but wanted something like that for and about grown-ups, applying the magical whimsy of the Harry Potter universe to the adult world of work, with bad bosses, office politics, and office romances.

Digging deeper into that, and considering the readers I’ve met or talked to, I would say that my target ideal reader is probably a woman (95 percent of my author Facebook page followers are women) who’s a big reader, but not necessarily a hard-core fantasy fan. She really loves the Harry Potter universe (either read the books as an adult or was a teen fan who’s now grown up) and wants more stuff like that, but has a hard time finding it. She’s probably also a Disney fan, both of the animated movies and the live-action remakes. She may like romance in books, but her tastes tend more toward Jane Austen than the kind of thing generally sold as “romance.” She’s possibly more likely to read YA fantasy than adult fantasy because she’s not so into the heavy, grim stuff. Normal life is stressful enough! She’s more concerned with a world she enjoys visiting than in the intricacies of worldbuilding, and the characters are the most important part.

That doesn’t mean that other readers aren’t welcome, just that this is the center of the Venn diagram of all the various types of readers, and it’s who I tend to write for. Now I just need to find a way to reach this reader. When we were launching the first Enchanted, Inc. book, I tried to convince my publisher to go after the adult fans of Harry Potter, especially since one of those books was coming out a month or so after my book. They told me, “We want people writing about you, not writing about Harry Potter,” and I told them no one was going to be writing about me, but they would be writing about Harry Potter, and if I got included in that, it would give me a boost. I did go a little rogue and sent a review copy to a local reporter who was writing about Harry Potter, and I did end up getting an article about “What moms can read while waiting for their kids to finish the new Harry Potter book,” so it might have worked on a broader scale. I also sent a review copy to one of the big Harry Potter fan sites that also did reviews of books their fans might like. But I’m not sure my “ideal reader” is someone who’s that kind of fan. She probably doesn’t have a lot of time for “fandom.” She just reads things she enjoys. She may buy some merchandise, but probably isn’t spending time on fan sites.

So, how close does my “ideal reader” come to hitting the mark? Does this sound anything like you or someone you know? Of course, the fact that you’re reading my blog probably puts you deeper into “fandom” than the majority of people who read my books, so that’s going to skew any feedback.

Publicity

Reaching My Readers

I spent the weekend doing some research and study as I delve into some business planning. I need to get smarter about the way I do things, and I’ve realized that I’m doing for my own books what I complained about publishers doing for my books — just putting them out there and hoping people find them. The trick is to figure out how to get the word out.

One thing everyone suggests is having a mailing list and a newsletter of some sort. I have resisted because that’s something I’m really not into as a reader. I feel like there’s newsletter overload. You can’t visit a web site without getting a “sign up for my newsletter” pop up. On the other hand, that is a list that I would control. Facebook throttles the reach of things on my page, so even people who’ve signed up to get them aren’t seeing them unless I buy ads. There’s a lot of clutter and noise on Twitter. People don’t seem to be reading blogs anymore (though I guess if you’re seeing this, you’re the exception). People may drop out of platforms like Facebook or Twitter for reasons having nothing to do with me — protest against the companies’ policies, taking a break from social media in general. Having a list of people who’ve said they want to receive information from me makes it more likely that these people will get that information.

So, what do you think about author newsletters? Do you sign up for them? Would you sign up for one from me? Do you just want to be notified about releases or do you want other info on things that might relate to the author’s life and work (things like recipes, knitting patterns, book/movie reviews, etc.)?

Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out where to go next after I get the next Rebels book done (don’t worry, that’s at the top of my list). I’m still playing with that idea of a series of holiday-themed fantasy romances, but I also have some other ideas in the works. One is a fantasy series that’s more of a “world” series, in which there’s one world that all these stories take place in, while each story is self-contained (with some overlap). You could read them in any order and still follow the story, but those who’ve read them all might get a little more out of them. Think Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. The other idea I’ve been playing with is a cozy paranormal mystery series. I’ve noticed that most of the “also boughts” for my books on Amazon are this kind of book, and it’s something I enjoy reading. I have the beginnings of an idea for the characters and setting.

So, what are you most likely to read? Did you come to my books from the paranormal mystery side of things, the fantasy side of things, or the romance side of things?

That’s what makes a lot of this planning difficult. I don’t fall neatly into one area I can really focus on, and my fans seem to be all over the place.

TV

Fall TV 2019

It actually kind of feels like fall today, but there’s still something missing. The fall TV season is under way, and yet there doesn’t seem to be much going on. On broadcast TV right now, I’m just watching the PBS Sunday-night lineup, and then I’m watching The Good Place on NBC on Thursday nights. I’m giving Perfect Harmony, right before it, a shot because I really should love a series about a church choir, but it has one more week to get its act together. Right now, it seems like a show about a church choir written by people who’ve not only never been in a church choir but who also have never been to an actual church. In two episodes, we haven’t seen this choir sing in a church service, which is the primary role of a church choir. They’ve gone to a competition (I’ve never heard of a competition for church choirs) and to a town festival (okay, that one does happen). But this church choir doesn’t seem to sing in church.

My lack of TV viewing isn’t just because I ditched cable. One reason I decided not to keep going with cable when the HOA dropped it as part of our membership was that so little of what I watched was on cable. There are maybe two series I’ve missed, and those are only on a few months out of the year (I’m planning to get the DVDs from the library).

I am watching The Tick on Amazon, and I’m planning to watch Carnival Row. Otherwise, I seem to be rewatching a lot of stuff online or catching stuff that I might not have seen in the first place.

I used to watch a lot of TV, a couple of shows just about every night. I spent a lot of time on TV-related message boards or newsgroups. Now, though, there’s not a lot that really catches my interest. I think that the kind of things I tend to be into have migrated to various streaming services while broadcast and even cable TV has devolved to be very generic middle-of-the-road stuff, mostly crime shows (most of which are reboots of other things) and reality shows (which I refuse to watch).

I am enjoying using the streaming services to catch up on Masterpiece Theatre type stuff I missed the first time around and digging up quirky little gems from Canada or Britain, but the down side of watching things like that is that no one else is watching them, so there’s no chance for discussion.

Otherwise, I’m spending a lot more time listening to the classical radio station and reading. I’m just a few books away from hitting my reading goal for the year, so I imagine I’ll go way over. I don’t really mind not paying as much attention to TV, but I do miss having a fictional world I look forward to visiting every week and then chatting about it. The problem with streaming is that you lose the fun of anticipation for each new episode, though it sounds like Disney+ will be doing one episode a week, which may be fun with all their Star Wars series.

Is there anything on US broadcast TV that I should be watching this fall? Any hidden gems on Amazon Prime Video?

Lazy Day Excuse

I got my flu shot yesterday, and I feel kind of blah today, which I had planned on. I scheduled the shot when I had a couple of days with nothing going on. I’m never entirely sure if the blah I feel the day or so after the shot is psychosomatic — I expect to feel that way, so I do — if I’m just ascribing ordinary tiredness to the shot, or if it really does make me feel a bit icky. Last night, in spite of all my sleep preparations, I didn’t sleep well, and I woke up during the night feeling a very mild form of the kind of aches I tend to get with the flu. Today I just feel like I could fall asleep at any moment. So I’m taking it easy today. I’d already planned to mostly do some work-related reading.

I know of people who resist getting flu shots because they believe the shot will make them sick. I’ve had the flu, and it’s hundreds of times worse than the mild ick from the shot. Plus, I look at that mild ick as a feature, not a bug. It’s an excuse to have a lazy day or two. Is there something you’d really rather not do? “I just got my flu shot, so I’m not really feeling up to it today.” It’s permission to spend a day or so lying on the sofa and reading.

And this is supposedly going to be a pretty brutal flu season.

I just wish today were going to be more the kind of day when it would be ideal to lie on the sofa with a book. It’s hot and sunny. Fall is supposedly on the way, and I hope I didn’t jinx it by buying supplies for fall baking and cooking yesterday. I have ingredients for a couple of different soups and some breads and muffins. I may even declare the first somewhat chilly day a holiday.

writing life

Narrating my Insomnia

Some of my author friends have been discussing sleeping problems and what to do about them, and it seems that it’s pretty common for writers to have difficulty sleeping. It’s hard to shut off the brain, and whenever you’re quiet and still with no outside stimulus, the brain goes into overdrive.

What I’ve noticed while I’m between books is that if there’s no active story for it to be working on, my brain still doesn’t slow down. It just starts narrating my life. I’ve always tended to think in narrative. As a kid, I was a lot like Calvin in the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes” when he has his “Spaceman Spiff” adventures that he mentally narrates in third person. A long car trip might have turned into an intergalactic voyage, being kidnapped by pirates, or journeying across the frontier in a covered wagon, all mentally narrated as though it was in a book.

I don’t do that so much now, since I’m usually writing a book. If I’m not actively focusing on something else, I will tend to start mentally composing a scene for whatever I’m working on. If I’m sitting still, I’m generally writing in my head. I had to take up knitting so I could manage to focus enough to follow a TV show, and I take notes in church so that I follow the sermon rather than drifting off.

It’s only when I’m not working on something that’s taken over my brain that I go back into “Spaceman Spiff” mode, only instead of making up crazy adventures for my imaginary alter ego to go on, I find myself just mentally narrating my life, as though it’s a blog post or women’s fiction novel. This week it got particularly bad because not only was I between books, but the book I was reading was a first-person women’s fiction novel, so it was way too easy to fall into that mode. The craziest thing came when I decided to try long, deep breaths to settle myself down so I could sleep, and then immediately there came the mental narration, “I decided to try long, deep breaths to settle myself down so I could sleep.”

One of my childish coping mechanisms is starting to make more sense to me. I used to tell myself stories in order to get to sleep, usually based on whatever thing I was really into at the time. Either I was a self-insert character in that fictional world or I was in the role of one of the characters, and at some point in the story, that character would go to sleep — either having to rest out of exhaustion, passing out for some reason, or hurt and having to rest. When the character went to sleep, the narration stopped and I could go to sleep. I think I stopped that somewhere along the way when I started writing fiction professionally and learned that having your characters asleep all the time makes for a boring story, so even mentally writing that sort of thing offended my novelist sensibilities. And there’s not really any fictional world that I’m that into right now. I’m not writing mental fanfic for anything.

I am trying to do better about settling down at night. I was listening to the classical radio station, but some classical music is really stirring, so it doesn’t always work well. Instead, I switched to CDs of calming music, like chant or music for Evensong services. For the last fifteen or so minutes before I turn out the light, I switch from reading a novel to reading a magazine, so I’m less keyed-up about what’s going on in the story. But my real problem isn’t so much falling asleep at night, but rather getting back to sleep when I wake up at about three in the morning. I’m not awake enough to follow the advice to get up and do something instead of trying to sleep, but I’m just awake enough to be aware that I’m awake and for the narrative to kick in: “I’m lying here, not really awake, but not really asleep.” Maybe I should try creating a character I can put to sleep all the time, like I did when I was a kid.

writing life

Resetting

I ended up not going on that trip, but I did let myself function kind of on a vacation schedule yesterday. When I checked the hotel again over the weekend to make the final decision, the rates had really shot up, and I didn’t want to go that badly. I’d only picked that place because it was one of the few places I could get to in an easy road trip distance where there might be things to do in summer-type weather. Now that fall might be almost upon us, finally, for real, starting next week, I think I’ll just do more of a fall trip a little later. I’ll go up to the mountains in Oklahoma and do a little hiking.

Instead of going somewhere, I’m treating this like a reset week. I’ve got a short story started that I want to finish, and then I’m doing a lot of work-related reading, both research for a book and some business-related things that I need to figure out and learn to do better. If I don’t want to have to resort to a day job, I need to find a way to make more money from the books I’ve already written, which means more publicity. And I need to figure out good ways to do that in today’s environment that I can live with, and I need to make plans and schedules to actually do things. Just as I do with travel, I make a lot of plans, but then don’t get around to carrying them out. Putting the plans on a schedule may help.

Meanwhile, there’s housework, and I’m trying to remember to make time for fun. I want to keep up a good work schedule throughout the fall, but I don’t need to push myself so hard that I don’t have time to enjoy myself some. I’ve almost reached the number of work hours I had for all of last year, so I’m doing pretty well, but I want to keep going instead of slacking off.

The plan for the rest of the year is to keep working but also let myself breathe since I’m not on a tight deadline. I have a lot of stuff to figure out about my career and what I want to do next. I’m coming up on one of the deadlines I set for myself to make some decisions, and I haven’t reached some of the milestones that I set as conditions for what decisions to make. Now I have to decide if I want to hold myself to those conditions, and that means figuring out what I really want and what I can reasonably do.

Life

Travel Planning

I’m more than halfway through my copyedits, so it looks like I’ll have that project off my plate before the weekend, and then I won’t have any deadlines or obligations. Whee! I won’t know what to do with myself.

I’d been thinking about taking a little road trip vacation early next week. We’re still having summer weather, so it would be more like a delayed summer vacation, only with weather not quite so miserably hot as it actually is in summer, than like a fall trip. There’s a town on a lake about four hours from here, and there’s a hotel actually on the lake. I’ve been thinking about heading down there, going to one of the state parks nearby where they have cavern tours, and generally just relaxing. I know that if I stay home, I’ll probably just end up falling into my usual routines and habits, and I’ll feel like there’s something I “should” do. The timing is good, since there’s no children’s choir this week, so I wouldn’t have to worry about lesson plans on the day I return. The choir isn’t singing the following Sunday, so I could even skip choir entirely and take a night off (though I’d probably go and go to the dinner before so I wouldn’t have to cook on the day I return).

But at the same time, there’s a big dose of inertia going on and a reluctance to make the long drive. Once I’m out of the metro area, it’s not so bad, but to get to the country part of driving, I have to cross most of the metro area. The weather isn’t entirely cooperating. There’s a good chance of rain on part of the day I’m planning to do most of my outdoor activities there. Then again, it’s been so long since I’ve seen rain that it might be worth it to travel just to see rain. And every time I check the forecast, it changes.

My problem is that I love planning trips, but taking them is often less fun than the planning process. Maybe I should have been a travel agent. I could plan trips all day for other people and not have to actually go on them.

TV

Looking Back at Deep Space Nine

At last weekend’s convention, I got to see the documentary about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, What We Left Behind, and it reminded me of how much I loved that series. I’ve been around Star Trek my whole life (my mom said she fed me when I was an infant while watching part of the original run of the original series) and have watched all the series, but when Deep Space Nine came on, it resolved a lot of my issues with the earlier series. I’d been bothered by the fact that there were few consequences for events — something drastic and dramatic might happen in one episode, and then in the next episode it was like nothing had ever happened. Nothing changed, and no one was affected. Even before DS9 became more serialized in the storytelling, they were already doing character arcs so that we saw how the characters were affected by events. The main plot might have been a bit episodic, but there were character arcs as the characters and relationships progressed. When something big happened in an episode, the characters were affected by it in the next episode even if the main plot was something entirely different.

But looking back on it now, it’s astonishing how prescient they were about how things might develop and what things might continue to be issues. I haven’t watched the series since it went off the air, but I think I’m due a rewatch.

I do feel a bit old, seeing how the actors have changed since then, compared to how they looked when the show was on. They were all such babies! One of the things I liked about the series was the sense that these people did actually like each other, even if there were conflicts. It was a “found family” kind of cast of characters, where they were isolated from everything else and found community with each other, and the documentary makes it plain that the actors really did bond like that, and some of them are still close.

Part of the documentary involved the writers sitting around and brainstorming a hypothetical first episode for a hypothetical revival of the series — the same characters and cast, taking place the same number of years since the series ended. I’m annoyed at all the reboots of older series that have been coming up lately, but I’d be in for that one — continuing the story, not telling it all over again with a different cast.

writing life

And Back to Work

I was just feeling weird about not being in the middle of working on a book, and then I got copyedits on another book, so I guess I’m set for something to do. Fortunately, I got my house mostly tidied yesterday.

I’ve had overlapping projects for about a year now — I was drafting a book, paused to write a proposal, was working on another book, went back to drafting, then wrote another book, then while waiting on copyedits and edits on two projects started researching another book, then was bouncing around between production, revision, and writing on three different projects. Finally, one of them got finished and published, one was in the editor’s hands, and then Monday another one got done (for now). So for a whole day, I wasn’t really working on anything, and it felt weird. But now I’m back to normal with something I should be working on.

It’s actually quite good timing because I was just starting to ramp up research on something else, and research and copyedits fit well together because research makes for a nice break.

I think I am going to reschedule my flu shot plans, though. I’d been planning to do it tomorrow, then take the weekend to recover (because it always leaves me feeling tired and crabby). Since I’ll need to be alert the next few days, I’ll just do it next week.