What are we offering our readers
I don’t always fit neatly into a box.
Over the years, lots of people have tried to fit me into their boxes. It just never really works all that well, though.
Maybe it’s my inability to fit in other people’s boxes that has led me to feel the need to encourage you, as authors, to stop stressing about your imaginary avatar.
Years ago, when I started this writing journey, I read a ton of articles, watched some videos, took some courses, and kept hearing that I needed to create an avatar of my ideal reader.
Some of the teaching I heard—okay, most of it, if I’m being honest—wanted me to go so far as to name my avatar and write to them every time I wrote a post.
Before I get any further, I want to make something explicitly clear: it is 100% necessary that you know who your reader is. I am not arguing that at all.
What I am arguing is that creating an imaginary human, assigning them a collection of demographic details, and writing only to them doesn’t automatically mean we understand our readers or what they need from us.
Knowing Susan’s Beverage Order
When I first started writing, I was writing to survivors of spiritual abuse and religious trauma to help them reconstruct their faith. I knew the problems, and I was confident in the promises. It never sat well in my soul to assign a gender to my reader.
I wasn’t writing to women in midlife OR men in their 30s. I was writing to people who had survived spiritual abuse and religious trauma, who wrestled with their faith after acknowledging that abuse and trauma, and who were attempting to rebuild a faith of their own instead of living a faith that had been handed to them.
I wasn’t confused. I wasn’t wishy-washy.
Demographics did not figure into my ideal reader. Experience did.
So, I bucked the system. Quietly.
Why? Because identifying my reader as a 37-year-old named Susan who drinks half-caff, half-sweet chai lattes with oat milk from her local coffee shop before she shops at Target on Tuesdays, then picks her cat up from the groomer, didn’t help solidify the point or purpose of my writing at all.
Understanding how my writing could help someone who had survived spiritual abuse and was healing from religious trauma learn how to honestly and authentically rebuild their faith was much more important to determining how my writing needed to take shape.
If imagining a particular person helps you write, go for it. But knowing Susan’s beverage order isn’t the same as knowing why she needs your writing.
What Do Our Readers Need from Us?
I’d love to start this discussion by giving you some of the reader descriptions I’ve seen as I’ve worked with clients or been in community with author friends:
Women whose husbands have porn addictions
Women who have been unfaithful in their marriages
Women in midlife living in the messy middle after divorce
Professional women in midlife struggling to balance work and home life
In conversations with these authors, finding their readers, building relationships, and getting engagement on their posts often come up as struggles.
I’m not suggesting an avatar is responsible for all of that. But I have noticed a gap between how clearly some authors can describe their reader and how clearly they can explain what their writing offers that reader.
They have a picture of the person, but they don’t necessarily have a clear picture of the problems their writing addresses or the promise it consistently offers. They can write all day to this imaginary avatar, but if they don’t understand what their writing offers hope for, it becomes much harder to explain why someone would want to read it.
By naming their readers this way, these authors identify a specific situation without necessarily identifying what those readers need from them. Are the readers looking for answers? Are they looking for permission to set boundaries? Do they need permission to stop blaming themselves?
We can know someone’s circumstances without stopping to assess what they need from us and what we’re equipped to offer.
And that’s the distinction we have to make:
Who are we as authors?
What do our readers truly need from us?
What promise can we make that we can actually fulfill?
Since I began writing, I’ve struggled with this model: attaching demographic information to readers first, then addressing the problem. When I pick up a book, I pick it up because it speaks to something important to me. Not because I’m a middle-aged woman who is a small business owner, mom, wife, caregiver in the sandwich generation, who suffers from religious trauma and spends too much time on Substack and on Meta watching cat videos.
I pick up a book because of the promise it is making to offer hope for a problem I am seeing either in my own life or in the world around me.
How different would our author world look if we started thinking about what our readers need before we label them as this, then that, then something else? Yes, knowing our readers’ demographics may help us understand parts of their lives. But those details alone don’t tell us what our writing needs to offer them.
From Describing a Reader to Serving a Reader
If you’ve been struggling to find your readers and build relationships with them, maybe you need to pause today and reassess the problem your writing addresses and the promise you offer. Maybe today is about thinking through what your reader needs from you more than where they’re spending their Tuesday afternoons.
For example, consider my author friend who is writing for Christian women who have been unfaithful. Think about how much clearer her purpose becomes when she moves beyond describing her reader as “an unfaithful woman” and instead digs into this question:
How can my writing help someone take responsibility, face shame, and pursue repair without expecting forgiveness or reconciliation?
Or consider the author who writes for the woman whose husband has a porn addiction. What happens when she moves from naming that circumstance to asking:
How can my writing help a betrayed partner recover her voice, establish boundaries, and make decisions without carrying responsibility for someone else’s choices?
Those questions give the authors something to write toward. And they also help readers understand what they might find in that writing.
Moving from Problem to Promise
Once we know the promise we’re writing toward, we can focus on the process of moving our reader from problem to promise. That movement is important, and it can give our manuscripts, chapters, and articles direction.
That doesn’t mean every piece of long-form writing needs to deliver a life-changing transformation. Sometimes we’re helping readers consider a different perspective, understand something more clearly, or feel less alone in what they’re experiencing. But these are transformations as well. And every single piece of our long-form content should offer our readers that kind of movement.
Finally, let me encourage you to make sure you are being honest about the promises you make. We can offer perspective, practical resources, language for a difficult experience, or companionship along the way. If we promise them, we have to provide them.
What we can’t guarantee and what we should never form our promises around are someone’s healing, a repaired marriage, or a reconstructed faith. We can provide tools and support, but those outcomes involve circumstances and choices beyond what our writing can control.
Before you spend another afternoon filling out an avatar worksheet, take some time with these questions:
What is my reader experiencing, wrestling with, or trying to understand?
What can my writing honestly help them explore, understand, or do?
How can I communicate that clearly enough for them to recognize themselves and their needs?
You may discover that your writing speaks to people outside the box you originally drew. You may find a clearer path moving forward in your writing, or you may find that you’re already writing to the people you want to serve, but you haven’t clearly articulated what you’re offering them.
Each one of these discoveries gives you something useful to work with.
A Little Reflection for Your Writing Life
What do you know about your readers’ needs beyond their demographics?
What transformation do you want your next piece of writing to offer?
What do you need to include in that piece to deliver on its promise?
