Writing.Com General Discussion

this is a variant of "write for somebody" or "write the book you want to read" tactic. It's a valid strategy if your goal is for somebody to want to read it. Writing books for yourself or for "writers" tends to be self-indulgent and faux-high brow, so pick readers, not writers.

Steven King says he writes for his wife. Basically envisioning the parts she'd chuckle at and such.

I'm writing a sci-fi take on Urban Fantasy about a Technomage. People who like scifi, urban fantasy, or more specifically, The Dresden Files are my audience, because it's kind of like those kind of books. It's easy when you story is like something else but different.

In your case, if it's not fiction, it sounds like a kind of memoir or survival/inspiration story (like the guy who had cancer and became a world champion biker until we learned he did 'roids). You know the story arc already, and that's generally better reading than 6 months of chemo and fear by itself. The cancer is the complication, not the story itself.

What kind of people like those stories?

A writer in my local guild is telling a fiction story about recovering from brain trauma. But she's recently learned that 13 chapters of "her parents suck", "her brain runs slow and can't keep up with scenes" and "nobody understands her since she can't respond fast enough" isn't compelling reading. So she's re-working it to be a love story, with the brain trauma as the complication. It's more complex than that, but you can see the shift it strategy to make a compelling story while being true to presenting the experience of having brain trauma. Without it, it wasn't clear who the audience was, other than brain trauma victims or their family. It wasn't quite inspiring, only insightful. It shifted scenes to when things change or got interesting, instead of more "my life sucks" examples.

It also shifts who the audience is. There are people who enjoy love stories. It's like The Fault In Our Stars, but different. Who's the audience for that? Same audience would likely buy that.

I don't know enough about your book to advise on an audience, but hopefully this has shown you some ways to think about it.

Feel free to explain more about your book for a more pointed opinion :)