Target Audience: Why are you publishing a book?

Many people want to publish their own book. In the old days, few were selected. You had to petition a potential publisher after much research into which publishing house was the best fit. You had to craft an enticing letter to convince said publisher to read even a small portion of what you had written. And it helped if you knew someone. After several rejections, if you still were adamant about publishing, you could go to a vanity press and pay them to publish your book. If you took the second route, you would only have a stack of books in your closet to show for it. Marketing is the sole reason to target a traditional publisher, and it is a very good reason. However, marketing is expensive and so traditional publishing companies are necessarily selective.

Today, you can simply go on Amazon and upload anything and call it a book. You can even give digital versions away for free and claim that you wrote a best seller because of all the free downloads. The problem is that if I buy a tiara and scepter and call myself a queen, that doesn't make me one.

There are many things to consider before you publish a book. Here I want to focus on your target audience. {Please note, the details in the following example have been altered to prevent anyone from identifying a specific individual}. One job I had involved a minister (as a Christian, I prefer writing for other Christians). This man wanted his sermon series published as a book. I eagerly approached the subject, converting each sermon into a readable chapter. Unfortunately, this man was a minister and not a writer.

Each sermon had an opening and closing prayer. I had deleted this because they didn't really work at the beginning and end of all 30 chapters. You would read the prayer at the end of the first chapter and then move on to the prayer at the beginning of the next chapter. In many cases, the opening prayers were almost identical. Instead, I placed one prayer in the prologue, and the end of each chapter had reflection questions that reflected what he was saying in his closing prayer.

In some cases, the minister wandered off topic during his sermons. He even talked about things he would later mention in detail in another sermon. Needless to say, I deleted these or moved them to the correct chapter. There was also a lot of repetition that I deleted. There is nothing wrong with these things in a sermon, but for a book, all of this was bogging it down and making it boring to read.

When I presented him with my first chapter he rejected it. He didn't want me to turn his sermons into a book; he wanted me to put his sermons in a book.

Here is where target audience is important. It was my opinion that the minister was targeting the audience that would be listening to his sermons: average lay church goers who might want to take time and ponder what he had told them on Sunday morning. This type of book would appeal to a wide range of people and therefore have the biggest audience.

However, if he just wanted his sermons in book form, he immediately limited his audience. The primary audience would be one person- himself. Now, some of you may protest--what about other ministers who might want to use his sermons? The problems are as follows:

(1) This is a huge sermon series. No one wants to cart around a 750 some page book to preach a sermon from. In fact, I don't think any minister would want someone to know he was using another person's sermon.

(2) Most sermon books are outlines. This allows your target audience to be from most denominations. His sermons were basically transcripts of his sermons. That means they were very specific and would need to be changed if they were to appeal to ministers outside of his denomination.

(3) Sermon books come with random sermons. This is so if the minister is in a pinch- say he had to perform a funeral for a person he was close to and just couldn't focus on creating something original that week- all he has to do is use a sermon outline from a book to preach. This, however, was a sermon series. That means that no one could simply take a sermon out of the book and preach it without preaching the entire series.

When you write a book, you want it to appeal to the largest market available. My husband and I self-published my magnum opus. It is a literary tome similar to the Lord of the Rings and is in need of us to finish the next books that complete the series. It is huge. It uses ancient languages. It is based in a pre-flood steampunk world. Few will ever buy it especially since we don't have a good marketing department behind us. But it was worth publishing because I feel it has exceptional literary value and if some time in the future my other books ever become popular, that is the one that I will always hold as my greatest. Art for art's sake, if you will.

Should everyone choose to do this? No. Everyone can write something, but not everyone is an author. My book has a very small audience-and that audience could potentially grow if my other books do well. In many cases, people do just want to publish the book for themselves. These should not be offered on a public market for free because they simply bog down the market for the few good authors who have not yet been discovered or who, like me, choose not to go through the traditional publishing route.

Think about your audience. Think about who you want to reach. Then write for them. In this case, my opinion is that the minister should choose the church audience. However, I have a feeling he will choose the smallest audience (other ministers) and then attempt to get his Church audience to buy it. This is probably the worst thing he could do sales-wise. Why? Because he will waste all his time marketing to an audience that isn't interested in a book of sermons.