Writing mistake 2 – writing for too many audiences in one book
Mixing your metaphors as a writer can lose something for the reader. Batting for the same root and branch just doesn’t make sense, and as you nourish the leaves and shoots of your cricket team the anchors weigh heavy and you lose the will to read. Haven’t you.
Just as mixed metaphors become confusing and disengaging, so too does a book which is trying to reach too many readership groups. Writing works because it sucks people in, like a vortex, building rapport through meeting the needs of its readership and communicating in a style they can relate to. So if you attempt to make your work ‘be all things to all people’, it can end up being either over complicated with multiple examples and the reader is overburdened with minute details and long sentences which seek to cover all possible eventualities given the extensive range of possibilities likely to be encountered by readers ( hoep you get the gist). Equally it can end up being so general as to be vague and obtuse, meaningless and difficult to relate to.
In short, use the rule of one plus two:
1 Who are your CORE readership?
Subsidiary readership 2 Subsidiary readership 3
Decide who your core readership is: eg It might be a textbook of ideas for how to teach secondary school history
Decide who your two subsidiary readership groups will be, but these must be closely related to the Core eg Trainee history teachers and History Teaching Consultants would be a close subsidiary pair. Choosing the subsidiaries of History Lecturers in Universities and Parents of Students in Secondary Education taking history, would be asking the book to do too much.
Always make sure however as you choose your audience that there are sufficient numbers of interested parties out there to make it commercially viable if publication is your desire. A publisher faced with a manuscript for a book on “the likelihood of the mutation of B1 alpha insulin genes in the western Mongolian Jerboa during January and February of the year 2017” is less likely to have a substantial Core readership let alone subsidiary ones. Such a title might need to be re-purposed or shelved!
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