Audience

My audience is different, it all depends on what I'm writing. If I'm writing my novels, which for the last 2 years has been fantasy (with this year being the third time, and last year and this year will both have more sci-fi elements); thus I'll have an audience based on that genre, maybe the general public will pick it up, but I suspect a majority of my audience will want to read it due to the genre. If I'm writing my philosophical essays or creative non-fiction pieces, the audience will be people who enjoy that content, people who want to learn about something different, change their expectations, and people who want to connect.

I remember during high school, I created a short film for my media class, (two actually, 1 for year 11 and 1 for year 12) and I had to write down my audience, and to not just think about gender, age and location because anyone can say "this book is for everyone, doesn't matter about age or where they're from!", but think about their interest, their lifestyle, etc. I think that aside from the interest in the genre, maybe people of all genders do enjoy my fiction pieces, and it's mostly going to be young adult fiction who live all over the globe. But again, that's very easy and simple to pinpoint. Other ideas might be that people who read my fiction are interested in that idea of life after death and reincarnation, or they might be interested in reading characters from different races, genders, sexual identity, they want own voices books, but also own voices characters. 

Whereas with my creative non-fiction pieces, it would be people who might've experienced the same things as myself. Stay Together for the Kids was a piece I wrote about my parent's divorce, so people who will read it are people who are going through or went through a divorce either themselves or their parents, people who want to know what it's like for a life post-divorce. My 3,000-word essay on The Home, Mum and Sex will see an audience of people who have moved often have a difficult or different relationship with their mother and people who might want to view sex a different way, or the idea of sex a different way. Viewing why people would read this is a good idea, who is going to read it and why? Of course, every person has a different reason as to why they read things, but that's my general consensus. 

If I'm writing collaborative fiction with others (a.k.a. roleplay) it would be the person/people who I'm writing with and anyone else who wants to read it, maybe people are interested in what I'm writing, or they're interested in the plots I have. I don't talk much about my geeky hobbies of roleplaying so onto the other audiences. 

If it's blogs, it's people interested in what I have to say, but I think that's for everything I've already said, so it's not really NEW INFORMATION!

Thus, my writing changes from the different genres, from fiction to non-fiction, from roleplay to blogs. I allow the changes to come, and I allow the different audiences to look at my work. I think that all of my audiences are online? Because I haven't posted my fiction and non-fiction (well the latter is a lie, non-fiction has been published but not to a wider audience), so the roleplay and the blogs are all online, and because it's online it feels more ... different, because you don't really know your audience, you don't know who they are. To be fair, you could not know your audience in regards to physical copies, but for the most part, at least you know the demographics of who's reading if your work is only published in Australia

For the most part, I think that thinking of your audience is tricky because you don't know them, you probably won't get to know them (though thanks to the likes of Twitter that changes) and thus the idea of an audience is almost an enigma? But the audience is the one that makes or breaks you, and really, maybe my audience isn't what I described and it's something different, but let's hope my audience enjoys my content as much as I do. Because really, that's all you can ask.