How much does your audience factor in to what you write? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

If a writer isn’t thinking about their audience when they write, we have to ask: What are they thinking about? The answer, usually, is “nothing” or worse, “themselves”.

Not having a clear read on their intended audience is not just a commercial problem for a writer, it is an artistic one. It leads to self-indulgence and sloppy thinking. The critic Toby Litt could have been talking about all bad art and bad products when he said that “bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self”.

And some writers might say, “Yeah so what? I do this just for me.” But that isn’t true nor is it practical. No one is actually creating their art for themselves. As Chuck Klosterman wrote, even the most pretentious and elitist artist would not be satisfied if no one saw what they were making—if he was, “he’d sit in a dark room and imagine he wrote it already.” Our expression, if it is to have impact or justify the time spent, must reach other people.

In my own writing, I think about the audience a lot. It’s not that I sit around and scope out topics like some SEO arbitrager, instead when I find myself obsessed with an idea or a topic and have decided to write about it, I then spend a lot of time thinking about the best way to communicate it with my audience.

Think about it like this: A lawyer has their case and then they must structure their argument to best convince a judge or a jury. Or, if you remember 9th grade, you outline your 5 paragraph essay before you start writing — not while you’re in the middle of it—and you have to think: What is the teacher looking for? You’re not doing this in a vacuum obviously. Writing and publishing operates along similar lines. You have to figure out the best way to arrange and organize the information you are going to give to the reader.

The best strategy I’ve found is to identify a proxy from the outset, someone who represents your ideal audience, who you then think about constantly throughout the creative process. Stephen King believes that “every novelist has a single ideal reader” so that at various points in the process he can ask, “What will ______ think about this?” (For him, it’s his wife, Tabitha.) Kurt Vonnegut joked that you have to “write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” John Steinbeck told the Paris Review, “Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person—and write to that one.”

An easy trick on this that I’ve used before is to write to a younger version of myself and my friends. Because I know this audience well—obviously since it used to be me. What did I need to be told when I was 22? How would it have needed to be explained for me to “get” it? What was my life like? These are questions that help guide the writing process well.

In Perennial Seller, I tell the story of a young Jerry Weintraub who was considering putting on an event at Yankee Stadium for a celebrity softball game with Elvis. On a day the stadium wasn’t in use, the owner of the Yankees took Weintraub out onto the field and forced him to look at all the empty seats—each one symbolizing someone who would have to be marketed to, sold, and serviced. It was a formative lesson, he said. “Whenever I am considering an idea, I picture the seats rising from second base at Yankee Stadium. Can I sell that many tickets? Half that many? Twice that many?”

When the project was just an idea, Yankee Stadium was an abstraction. But seeing it, interacting with it—it made it real. He had to get serious about the project fast if he wanted to succeed.

The same thing actually happened to me when I was writing Perennial Seller. Originally, it was going to be a book about book marketing but the truth is that this audience was mostly an abstraction to me. I knew lots of people were interested in the topic and was just assuming any old book would be able to fulfill their needs. Then in mid 2015, I was speaking at a conference in Puerto Rico to business executives and entrepreneurs from all over the Caribbean. As I left the event after my talk, chatting with the audience and getting a couple pats on the back, it occurred to me that a book about book marketing would be too niche to ever get in front of an audience like this. Not everyone wants to write a book, after all.

From this breakthrough, the book pivoted. Instead of being for authors it would be about authors and for everyone engaged in a creative field. It’s obvious when you think about it: Who doesn’t want to make something that sells and sells for years? Who doesn’t want to be responsible for a classic? Thus, Perennial Seller was born.

The point is if you don’t know who you’re writing for or who you’re making for, how will you know if you’re doing it right? How will you know if you’ve done it? Hope cannot be a strategy. You are unlikely to hit a target you haven’t aimed for.

And again, this matters not only in terms of the quality of the work—you don’t want to put out an egotistical love poem to yourself—but also the commercial viability of what you’re making. Nabokov, a writer’s writer if there ever was one, said it best: “Literature is not only fun, it is also business.” To survive in business, you must make other people (and yourself) money. You must serve customers. To believe otherwise is bad business.

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