Write for Your Audience: Family or The World?

Always write for your Audience. The first consideration? Is this just for you, for your family and friends, or do you want the world to have access and buy it?

If you're writing just for you, anything goes. The main consideration is how to keep it private - and whether you want it to be discovered when you're gone! If you do expect it to be read by others eventually, you probably want to keep them in mind as you write.

If you're writing for family and friends, you can be somewhat relaxed about form and grammar - but you want it to be readable, so some editing is advisable. You also have to consider how your content will be perceived by them - and how that may change their perception of you. Will you damage relationships by sharing this?

If you're writing for the world, it's a lot more work. Even if you're thinking of it as a hobby, you need to meet professional standards of editing and format - as well as expectations particular to your genre - if you expect the world to buy your work.

So, before you begin: Who are you writing for?

Profession or Hobby?

You’re writing a book. Are you approaching this as a profession or is it a hobby?

Given how difficult it is to be successful, it might be healthier to approach writing and self-publishing as a hobby, something you do for fun.  However, are you approaching it seriously enough you don’t harm others?

Self-publishing is gaining respect because of writers who are approaching writing and publishing professionally. They make sure their books are edited. They pay attention to genre and industry standards for formatting. The hobbyist who publishes a rough draft rife with errors and formatted poorly hurts every serious self-publisher, not only by putting a dent in the self-publishing image, but by making it that much harder for a reader to find the good books.

You can approach writing and self-publishing as a hobby and still produce a well-written, professionally-produced book. It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money.

A good critique group can help you polish the writing. Your library, book clubs, and English teachers at a local college may be able to suggest good editors and proof-readers. When it comes to formatting, you can buy templates or do it yourself using your word processor—if you know how to use styles, show all formatting marks, paragraphing, and other tools. If you don’t, head back to the library and local college and ask for a word processing guru. In any case, make sure you have copies of traditionally published books in the same genre to use as examples of how it should look. Pay attention to details.

This takes more time and effort than throwing up a rough draft, but friends who buy it may actually read it, and you won’t be hurting other writers.

www.sherimcguinn.com www.amazon.com/author/sherimcguinn

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