Day Four: Identify Your Audience. We often create posts hoping that a specific person (or persons) will see our work. Who is your ideal reader? Today, publish a post you would like your ideal reader to see.  Here’s how: First, brainstorm the kind of person you hope will read your blog. What do you want to say to them?

It took me a couple of days to actually think about this and come to a real answer. I could be flippant and say I want them all. (Insert Queen’s ‘I want it all’ song) And in that there is some truth. As a storyteller I want… no I need an audience. And I need to know if the audience was affected by the story/piece I just shared.

When I was posting fanfiction there was a term “feedback junkie” it was a kinda mean spirited jab at authors who would beg for feedback. The worse thing about it … was that it was done by other authors. Who might have said differently but they wanted feedback just as much. See feedback /comments allow us to know if we have interacted with the reader and to what degree. How much the reader invested in the story.

Authors that sell books can tell what story they told. The have the metrics of book sales, fan pages, book signing and all those other things that go with professional publishing. We the internet author (via blog, fiction, poetry) are left begging (for lack of a better term) to know what the audience thought and are they going to come back to read something else I have written.

You don’t know how many times after posting a piece of work I have gone to the stats page to see how many readers, hits, reviews, comments I have gotten. And when there is none I am left feeling devastated. Maybe devastated is a little over extreme but not by much. I start looking for the failure in the writing, the presentation, characterization or any number of writing devices. Sometimes I get to the point where I wonder why I post when no one reads. But of course then I go ahead because I have to share.   And the time I get two reviews or two follows I am on cloud nine ready to put my next work out there.  I think in that way all artist are caprices held hostage by our perceived failures and success.

This dithering that I just rambled on about doesn’t exactly follow the lesson and yet in a way it does. Because the audience I want on a surface level is everyone that I can get. I want to impact even if it is only for ten minutes everyone in the world. Hey if you are going to dream… make it big. I have wanted to tell random people … Oh this story I wrote and posted “….” You should go read it. But on a deeper level I don’t need everyone. Want as many as possible but not need. My audience should be readers who want to be entertained by the work. I would like them to be invested in the work enough to comment.

So what I want to say for those who read thank you. Playing in an imaginary world (whether you create or not) is never fun by yourself. And a double scoop of thanks to those who are brave enough to comment/post on what is written because I LOVE going into details about my creations. There have been several times when discussing my work that they have said something and it get the juices flowing and a new work is created. This is an authors platform and I haven’t quite got the handle of what to post but Please keep coming back for new adventures and continuing sagas.