Finding an Audience

I write because I have things I want to say. I want to be read. My words might soothe. They might articulate the complex. They might provide escapism into other’s lives. They might have an emotional truth. They might make people laugh.

I need an audience.

But how do I find one?

Do I just put out words and hope people will find them?

I am a cynic. Or at least I have a cynical side. When I was engaged with academic writing, I had goals to reach, journals with ‘impact’ to aim for. But I wondered if those words were ever really read or did they just get thumbed through, cursorily referenced by another academic, never really troubling the world outside. Reach and impact became meaningless metrics. Systems to be gamed.

But I still wanted my words to be read.

And who do I want to read my words? Who is my audience?

Is it versions of me? Middle-aged women struggling to be seen or believed? Am I providing cautionary tales for others? Or am I an oddity? A niche?

Can I be all these things?

I don’t want my writing to be some sort of narcissistic black hole. Some way of fooling myself that if only the world had listened to me we would all be better off. I just want it to be read and considered alongside others.

I’m writing these thoughts because recently I’ve been in audiences where I wasn’t the ‘target demographic’, and yet I still found pleasure in the events.

Death of a Unicorn – a comedy horror with a message that points out the perils of out-of-touch wealth and how nobody listens to the smart, teenage girl. No quibbles from me about that moral. It is a well-crafted film with excellent performances. However, with a unicorn at the centre of its thesis, I couldn’t help feeling it wasn’t for me.

A book launch about the seminal British sci-fi TV show – The Quatermass Experiment. I had to read up on it before I attended, because it was outside of my area of interest or expertise. The good friends with whom I attended the event knew it and cared about it. The event was for them. But I got something from it too (besides their excellent company). I got something from listening to research and detail and passion. How Nigel Kneale wrote science fiction using the elements of a ghost story. And this let me think about genre and how haunting infuses my work (without ghosts or spirits) but as a proxy for trauma.

I have also watched films where I was surely the demographic. Mr Burton – a bio pic of Richard Burton’s formative years and the relationship with his English and Drama teacher. A film about British theatre and teaching is a sweet spot for this Drama graduate bought up by teachers. I liked the film and how it refused to prettify poverty. But I’m not sure I learnt anything.

The Penguin Lessons – a gentle comedy about grief and love manifested as a penguin. Steve Coogan was excellent at playing with the edges of obnoxious grumpiness. I laughed and cried. But the film offered few surprises.

In all of the above cases, I was happy to be ‘audience’. I was glad for the experience.

But still who is my audience? How do I capture their attention in a busy world?

And in a world of fake audiences, bought followers, robot responders, can I be sure that my words make any difference? That they are being read by humans?

I know I can’t be passive in the search for an audience. I need to use social media and I’ve learnt to target some of my posts to specialist pages when I write about Classic Hollywood. But I also find the idea of marketing myself, well, ick… But it is part of my job as a writer. It would just be nice to move past the point of saying ‘this is cringe’ to ‘I’m talking to people who get me’.

I want an audience. And I want it to be a genuine human populated audience. I will take small numbers of genuine engagement over bloated robot numbers.

I don’t know who my audience may be. But does that matter? Audiences aren’t static. My writing doesn’t have to target a demographic. Even though sometimes I think it would be easier if it did. If I could say, this is for you – this is for your niche. Read me – our values align perfectly.

But we all stumble into things that are not designed with us in mind and love them anyway.

If I only watched, read things that reflect me I would become bored. I would lose the part of me that seeks an emotional truth outside of my own experience. And then I would struggle to make connections within my life and to articulate the difficult, complex and funny to others.

So for now, I’ll keep writing. I’ll keep putting in the work to find my audience. Any tips you have on how you have found yours would be gratefully received.

In the meantime, tonight, I’m going to watch a vampire, horror blues-musical movie. I am sure the writers of it never thought of a middle-aged, white women living in the North of England, who loves Doris Day as their target demographic. But I’m willing to surprise them and I hope they surprise me.