Writing for Yourself Versus Writing for an Audience

When I was in my MFA program, I embraced—and my teachers encouraged me to embrace—Toni Morrison’s famous advice for writers: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

Working in solitude with Morrison’s words in mind, the only person I wrote for was myself. Typically, an imagined younger version of myself: that awkward teenage introvert not at home anywhere but in the world of books, that queer kid growing up in a repressive normative suburb, that first-generation college student bucking his working-class background and taking on debt at an expensive liberal arts institution—someone who would take comfort in what I was creating and feel less alone. On a deeper level, Morrison’s advice spoke to me as a ’90s youth steeped in grunge and hip-hop, both of which scorned selling out and pandering to the mainstream marketplace at the expense of authenticity.

After thirteen years of writing professionally, there have been times this hasn’t proven a successful strategy, publishing-wise. The gatekeepers of the publishing industry—the agents, editors, publicity folks, and publishers—are, in my experience, passionate about art and literature, but they are also beholden to a bottom line. They value work that appeals to them personally, but it must also hold the potential (at least in the gatekeepers’ assessment) to sell in the marketplace—and that means reaching readers. I’ve struggled with the latter, for both essays and book-length projects.

For instance, last year, when a genre-bending novel I wrote went out to editors, a common response was that while it was an interesting and well-wrought narrative, there’d be no audience for it. Literary editors said the novel had too many science fiction elements to appeal to their readers, while genre editors thought it not sci-fi enough. This was challenging feedback: getting notes that praised my craft but being told that the book would not succeed as a product in the marketplace. On the other hand, it wasn’t surprising, seeing as I had deliberately, arrogantly, and stubbornly neglected to contemplate the marketplace while composing it.

Was I being selfish and foolish by spending seven years composing the book I wanted, without considering why someone other than me might care? How does that even work creatively, holding both your personal vision for the book in your mind while also thinking about a readership—especially when the idea of performing for an audience might make you feel anxious, self-conscious, or unsure you have anything to say that might be worthwhile to anybody else? For someone who was never “popular” or made friends easily, even considering the word marketplace drained me of creative confidence.

When I emailed Christopher Gonzalez, author of the short story collection I’m Not Hungry But I Could Eat, about this quandary, he replied, “When it comes to an editor passing on a project because there is ‘no audience’ for it, what I hear is, ‘I don’t know how to sell this’ or ‘I like this, but maybe I’m not the right person to sell this.’ Both are fair answers, because the ultimate goal is to find an editor or agent who is super passionate about your book and will champion it in-house through acquisitions and sales, etc. It’s a business built on subjectivity.”

In a separate message, Lincoln Michel, author most recently of The Body Scout, agreed. Because publishing is a business like any business, trying to survive in tough economic times when everyone’s attention is pulled in a million directions, publishers tend to be cautious and conservative. That says nothing about the merits of the work itself. “There are countless books that were passed over because they ‘had no audience’ that eventually became big hits when someone took a chance. No one knows what will sell.”

I found this comforting to consider, in part because it affirmed my initial instinct. Knowing what the world will think of your book is impossible, so you might as well write for yourself—writing is art, damn it! Have fun with it.

On the other hand, as Annie Hwang, an agent at Ayesha Pande Literary, put it: “I get where the ‘audience be damned’ thing comes from, but book publishing is at the intersection of art and commerce. If you’re looking to be published, it can be nearly impossible to successfully place your book without giving thought to audience/readership.”

However, she continued, that doesn’t mean an author shouldn’t cultivate a concept of the book that they feel personally invested in. The marketplace is always evolving, so to think about the market before having a vision of the book is, in Hwang’s words, “like trying to build a house on shifting sand.” She advises her clients to nurture their vision for the book, which she will then help shape into something that might be sellable. If they’re not prepared to do that, “they probably still need more time figuring out the vision.”

Hwang went on: “Just as nothing is written in a vacuum, nothing is published or read in a vacuum. It’s important for an author to be able to talk about what existing conversations they’re entering into with their book and what new, fresh dialogue they will be contributing to those conversations.” She admitted that this can be challenging for authors who have worked in an intimate, isolated manner for many years on a project.

Knowing what the world will think of your book is impossible.

Jennifer Baker—author, podcaster, and senior editor at Amistad Books—used almost the same language when describing how she works with the writers she acquires. “I don’t think, ‘How do I balance the author’s vision and demands of the marketplace?’ I think, ‘How does this book find the audience it inherently has, and how do we expand it, while also finding the titles this work is in conversation with?’”

The word conversation resonated, as I’ve long imagined the books on my shelf chattering to one another when I’m not around, like the toys in Toy Story coming to life when alone. From a theoretical perspective, it also seems to me that a conversation is, at least in part, how art happens: as writers, we talk with, or talk back to, or rage against the books we’ve read and found moving, perplexing, upsetting, or astounding. Almost everything I’ve ever penned has been inspired by something I’ve read, and it’s helpful to think that by doing so, I implicitly considered an audience of readers who, like me, appreciate the work that sparked my own.

Knowing Baker both professionally and personally, I trust she guides her authors through this literary conversation with verve and sensitivity. There are publishing folks, though, who might discourage dialogue and encourage imitation. Within the publishing industry, comparative titles (comps) are used as a form of prediction—since book X was successful, book Y, which is similar, will be too. I once had an agent propose I revise my genre-bending novel in the vein of a popular book she’d recently read, because that would make for a compelling comp and be easy to sell. This suggestion didn’t seem in line with my vision at all and struck me instead as a marketing ploy.

Not only can comp titles feel intellectually and creatively hollow from a process perspective, as Gonzalez says; they also have a politically oppressive effect on what books end up making it to the market. “Publishing relies heavily on familiar books with a history of doing well and places too much importance on comp titles, which disproportionately affect marginalized authors, who can sometimes only point to the same handful of titles similar to theirs, if that.”

Writing with an awareness of your readership and writing to be viable in the marketplace can be two very different things, even if, in the business of publishing, the concepts seem synonymous. Baker told me that the idea of the “marketplace” itself can be reductive. “The ‘marketplace’ is a term the industry uses to define a particular kind of reader; however, I know for a fact that the marketplace is very broad, ever-changing, and not monochrome.”

Novelist Crystal Hana Kim, author of If You Leave Me and a recent recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award, addressed this directly. Over email, she told me that she does indeed think of an ideal reader when writing, but that reader is not the one publishing has traditionally targeted. “My ideal reader is intelligent, moved by poeticism and impressionism, is drawn to character-driven narratives, and also, they look like me. They are Korean and Korean American and connected to our history. I write for them. This means that I do not explain Korean terms, nor do I italicize them. Why would I, when my characters know these words and terms intimately?”

Kim’s words prompted me to reflect on how my whiteness played a part in my inhibition to consider a specific readership beyond myself. Historically, most books published have been aimed at white readers generally, and white male readers specifically. Thinking that if I liked my work then surely everyone would is a product of that white default. Carefully and critically considering who you are writing for can challenge and change what you’re writing about and how you’re writing, and it can bring you to that most important question: Why are you writing this particular piece?

As Baker says: “I think when we write for audiences and understand who those audiences are, we also come to understand ways we may pander, ways we may stereotype, ways we may experiment. When I read material from BIPOC authors to acquire, I want to know the writer isn’t overexplaining things—so they’re not inherently defending their existence—and also that they recognize the ways we need to continually decolonize our mindsets and thus not present our pain for the sole sake of revelation rather than dissection and interrogation.”

In Kim’s case, she found there were agents and editors who did not connect with her debut novel, either because they weren’t the right reader for it or because they considered her audience too narrow. “The literary agent and editor I did choose—Katherine Fausset and Jessica Williams, respectively—understood me, my book, and my greater intentions.”

Why are you writing this particular piece?

When I reached out over email to Katherine Fausset, an agent and vice president at Curtis Brown, about how she works to help authors like Kim, she mapped out a gentle approach that was less about “the market” and more about her role as an advocate for the reader. For example, when working with a client who had a particularly brutal story to tell, Fausset told me, “My advice to her was not to rethink the subject matter but, instead, to consider the reader’s experience of the subject matter. I asked her to consider ways she might create moments of respite for the reader along the way.”

Kim said that it’s important to have an agent like Fausset, who isn’t dictating what will work and what won’t work based on the best-seller list but is “open and willing to learn, to grow with me as we navigate the publishing process together.”

In my experience, finding the right people to work with professionally has meant so much. There are, sadly, shysters and cutthroats out there. But when you find an agent or editor interested in open-minded collaboration, those people become early readers, working with you to help your project find its ideal audience.

Gonzalez took this idea even further, rejecting the words readership and audience and instead replacing them with community. “There is some mutual sharing of work that happens when you’re in a community, but it’s also about challenging each other to grow with regards to craft, the work itself. You can’t control who finds your work; you can only control your art, and what you’re putting out there.”

Over happy hour beers in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Nadia Owusu, author of the memoir Aftershocks, concurred with Gonzalez: Considering community was ultimately a more productive, helpful concept than readership as she wrote. “In my community, we’re not all writers. But my book is concerned with things that we’re wrestling with and reckoning with together, like, ‘What is identity, actually? How do we think about how we fit into our families when, for example, we’ve lost our mother tongue, or we didn’t grow up in our family’s cultures?’ I was so engaged with other people about those questions as I wrote—that was my way of thinking of potential readers.”

As we talked, Owusu returned to Toni Morrison, who once described the invisible little white man who sits on our shoulders while we write and whom we must try to flick off. Sometimes, Owusu said, the publishing world can function in that same way—as a censoring, oppressive force. There are plenty of communities out there that publishing, as an industry, doesn’t see, value, or understand. But you as an artist can find those people yourself. “If you are in conversation and in community with people, then you know what moves them. If you write for them, then while I may believe the industry might not know how to sell your book, I would not believe that there isn’t a readership for it.”

Owusu’s phrasing—“the industry might not know how to sell your book”—hit me hard, as some years back, I experienced just that. While an at-home parent to my toddler son, I curated and edited an anthology of essays about fatherhood entitled When I First Held You, which sold to a now-defunct imprint of Penguin Books. Though I imagined the collection appealing to readers like me, interested in introspective and formally inventive essays about gender, family, and caregiving by literary authors like Peter Ho Davies, Anthony Doerr, and Rick Moody, when I met with the marketing and publicity team, they had a radically different idea. “We want this book to appeal to midwestern moms,” they told me.

That wasn’t an audience I was familiar with. Instead, I pointed to a variety of anthologies that had inspired me, like Jenni Ferrari-Adler’s literary/foodie Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, suggesting we model our marketing approach on those. If we did, then I was sure I could interest online literary venues to cover the book—those were the publications I read and wrote for.

Ultimately, the publisher disregarded my requests. They designed When I First Held You’s cover and promotional plan to reach a readership I had no connection with and, by doing so, made it harder for me to appeal to the audience I did know. The book garnered little coverage, its sales tanked, and it went out of print.

So yes, I thought, listening to Owusu. The publisher does not necessarily know more than you do when it comes to selling your work in the marketplace! In fact, they may know less, or they may have purchased your book with an entirely different sense of who it is for than you had imagined while creating it.

Often, when writing, and teaching writing, there are points where craft and therapy run together. For me, these conversations are a good example of those moments. I’ve come to understand that the dichotomy between writing for yourself and writing for an audience is, like all dichotomies, a false one. Instead, just like there are people in your life who see, accept, and celebrate you, there are readers who will do the same. That’s what matters—and that’s something you can, to some extent, control, unlike your work’s performance or positioning as a product in the capitalist marketplace.

Finding a community of readers may require effort and emotional risk, but I’ve witnessed it happen. I’ve had students who, when they gel in a workshop, continue sharing work years after the class has ended. I have been at events where I found myself so moved by someone’s reading that I’ve then bought their book, sent them an email, and found a new friend.

Writing may happen alone, but it is not solitary. Your readers are, perhaps, not as anonymous or scary or abstract as you might think—or, at least, as I once thought.

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