Back at the start of the Indie Publishing movement, a colleague of mine asked me if I’d be willing to look at a short book he’d written and give him my opinion. He was already an accomplished writer in adventure genres, but this venture was a new genre for him and he wanted a second opinion, since he thought he could knock out books like this one pretty easily and wanted to see what I thought.

“Sure”, I said.

And forthwith I sat down with it. Our hero went a-wandering through a fantasy sort of park. When he crossed a dainty footbridge, he was greeted by a very friendly young woman with whom he dallied for a bit. Then, as he continued along, there at the crossroads was another young lovely with the most amazing shoes, with whom he spent some time… His stroll encountered (and climaxed) through the adventurous twins, the scantily clad nymph, the buxom Bavarian barmaid, the shy bewildered girl.

You get the idea. There were perhaps a dozen or so encounters, one after another, as he wandered through the landscape, each one an exemplar of a particular appeal or fetish.

Now, this isn’t my sort of thing, but the style was witty, light-hearted, inoffensive (ignoring personal tastes), and really very well done from a story telling and narrative voice point of view.

There was just one writerly problem, in my view. When I hit the first scene, I blinked and shrugged. At the second one, I blinked harder, suspecting what was coming. Now, I’m not a guy, but I find it hard to believe that a person with fetishes, or even just simple preferences, would be engaged by all of the scenarios that appeared. Surely erotica preference is somewhat specialized — no one is excited by everything, as if the bordello served up a smorgasbord, all of whose entries were equally appealing.

So, who would the reader be? I couldn’t picture the generic reader by anything other than gender. Age, occupation, personality… I couldn’t bring him to mind. Even references like Lothario or Don Juan failed to apply.

When I delivered my thoughts to the author, he commented he’d just done it for a lark, to see if he could. He wasn’t concerned about my “reader?” point.

What about all of us here? Do we have a clear view of our readers?

I mostly write for myself-as-reader, to tell myself a story that I want to read. Since I hold my own reading to certain standards, pride keeps me working on my writing craft and professionalism so that I don’t feel my products to be inferior to other books of the type I enjoy.

But who does read my books? I have some idea, but there’s a lot of guesswork. How’s your knowledge?

In my case, I’ve made some (costly) effort to create and maintain a mailing list, but age and health have interfered with my ability to run that smoothly. As a techie, I built complex on-ramping systems for the purpose, but they’re getting to be more than I can handle, with hard-to-quantify effectiveness, and I will have to grossly simplify, while I still can.

Worse, like many of us, the whole newsletter thing goes against the grain — too much of an introvert.

Early in the mailing-list phase, I issued questionnaires to a few dozen readers querying them about what they liked/disliked about my books, and was comforted to find that their responses made perfect sense to me — they liked the kinds of things in my books that I like when I read. Since I don’t experiment across multiple genres and styles, I feel like I can rely on that general view of my readers.

At this point, I’m resigned to word-of-mouth/blog and paid advertising for 1st-in-series/new-in-series entries. There’s not enough runway left for me to fine-tune the process, and I only saw marginal results when it was at its most sophisticated.

What have you done to try and identify your readers? How do you communicate with them? Do you target different reader communities with different products?