Most authors want their book to reach as many people as possible. That’s a fine wish.
Unfortunately, it’s a terrible plan, and if you write to it you’ll end up with a book that reaches almost nobody.
So the first real work I do on a book, before the outline and long before chapter one, is figure out who the reader is. One person. We give them a name, a job, a bad Monday and a problem they can’t fix, and every page of the book gets written to them. I call that person the reader avatar, and I won’t start writing without one.
Open your mailbox and you’ll see the problem. A letter with your name on it gets opened. A flyer addressed to Current Resident goes into the recycling with the rest of the junk, unread, however good the offer inside. A book written for everybody is that flyer.
The avatar puts a name on the envelope.
What is a reader avatar for a book?
A reader avatar is a written profile of the single person your book is for. It’s pretend, of course. The person doesn’t exist. You build them from the people you know you want to reach, and you make them specific enough that you could pick them out of a crowd at a conference.
Marketers call this a buyer persona. Novelists talk about an ideal reader. For a book, the avatar does more work than either, because it reaches past the ads and into the manuscript itself. It sets the length of your sentences, the stories that make the cut, the first page and the last chapter.
If you hire me, you’ll hear early that we’re nailing down your audience to a person. That can sound like overkill if you’ve never written a book. Watch what it does to an outline, though, and the case makes itself.
Why a book aimed at everybody works for nobody
I’ve said this to clients in almost these words: you have to aim the book at something. It cannot be aimed at everybody.
Take a book about marriage. Aim it at men and women and it isn’t going to work. Your husband reader and your wife reader want different things from the same chapter, they carry different complaints into it, and they’ll put the book down at different pages. Write for both and you get something so soft that neither one feels seen. Pick one, and the other can still read it. They’ll know it wasn’t written to them, and a good book survives that.
Three audiences is worse. You’ll find it almost impossible to write for three groups that want conflicting things without splitting the book into parts or into separate books. My rule is short. If you have two goals, you want two books, and ignoring that rule sinks a lot of the business books that don’t work.
Narrowing feels wrong to a lot of authors. I get it.
Choose one reader and it feels like you’re turning everyone else away, and nobody paying for a book wants to hear that their market just shrank. It didn’t shrink. It got real, and a real market is one you can sell to.
The CEO isn’t browsing the bookstore
For a business book, I first ask who’s going to physically pick it up, in a bookstore or on Amazon at eleven at night.
Ask a business author who’ll buy the book and the answer comes back: the CEO. Fine, but a CEO probably isn’t cruising around Barnes & Noble looking for a book on your subject. The person browsing sits a level or two down: the manager, the comptroller, the director who got told to go figure something out. That person reads the book, finds the chapter that matches the problem on their desk and walks it into the boss’s office.
Whether the book pays off depends on that hand-off, and deciding whether a business book is worth the investment starts with knowing whose desk it lands on first.
So for a lot of business books, your avatar is the person who recommends, and the executive who signs is the second reader. Get that backward and you’ll pitch the whole book over the head of the one person who was ever going to buy it.
That makes me crazy, because it’s so easy to avoid.
I’ve made a version of this mistake about my own business. I thought my audience was entrepreneurs. Then I went back through every client I’d had, and there wasn’t an entrepreneur among them. Check the reader in your head against the people who’ve shown up before you trust it.
What goes into a reader avatar for a nonfiction book?
Start with the plain facts: job title, rough age, the stage of career or life they’re in, and the kind of organization they work for. Pick one age and one title. If you write “leaders between 30 and 60,” you’ve described a demographic, and a demographic has never bought a book.
Then go after what lives under the facts. Paint me a picture of the person who needs this book the most. What does their Monday morning look like? What conversation are they dreading? What keeps them up at night that they’ll never tell their boss? I ask authors those questions in follow-up sessions, so anyone preparing for ghostwriter interviews should expect them, and the answers go straight into the avatar.
Write their problem down in their own words. Then ask yourself the harder question.
Do they see their problem? Your readers don’t see the root cause. They blame something else, and a book that opens by naming the root in language they’d never use loses them on page one. The avatar records what the reader thinks is wrong next to what you know is wrong, and the book has to walk them from one to the other.
Add what they already know, so you don’t explain the basics to an expert or skip them for a beginner. Add where they buy books and what they’d type into a search box, or ask an AI, once the problem gets bad enough to look for help. Add how they read: straight through on a plane, or a chapter at a time as a reference when something breaks.
That last detail changes the structure of the whole book. A reference book needs chapters that stand alone, while a straight-through read can build from one chapter to the next.
Give the avatar a name, even though it feels silly. “Would Dana read this paragraph?” is a question you can answer at your desk. “Would our target demographic engage with this content?” is a question for a committee, and committees don’t write books.
Two pages is plenty. An avatar that runs twenty pages is a research project nobody rereads.
What the reader should feel when the book closes
Once you know who the reader is, work backward from the end. You don’t plan a trip by getting in the car and asking where you’re going. You pick the Grand Canyon, then you figure out how to get there. For a book, the destination is the moment the reader closes it.
First, decide what emotion they should feel on the last page. Angry? Hopeful? Should they think, I can do this, or should they think everything’s hopeless? You want a feeling there before you want a fact. Feelings are more important than facts, and readers remember how a book made them feel long after they’ve forgotten what chapter seven said.
Next comes what they should do. A reader who’s stirred up needs somewhere to put it. You’ve got them angry, or you’ve got them thinking they can conquer the world. Well, what are they going to do with that? Every chapter gets a to-do, and the book gets a big one at the end. Otherwise, why are they reading?
Last comes what they learn.
I put those questions in that order on purpose, the feeling first and the knowledge at the back, because a reader who feels nothing won’t stay long enough to learn anything.
A book aimed at everybody is a flyer addressed to Current Resident, and you know where those end up. – Richard LoweShare on X
None of those answers exist without the avatar. You can’t decide what Dana should feel until you know what Dana is afraid of, and you can’t give her a to-do until you know what her week looks like. The same goes for the hook at the top of each chapter and the push at the bottom that drags her into the next one, and readers who never feel that push put books down at chapter three.
How does a reader avatar change the way a book is written?
The avatar sets your reading level. I want most books written at about a seventh grade level. That’s the usual recommendation, and eighth or ninth is the ceiling. Go higher and you lose people. A book for specialists in their own field can run more technical, and the avatar tells you when you’ve earned that. Microsoft Word will show you a Flesch-Kincaid grade level for any chapter once you switch on readability statistics in the proofing options, and it takes seconds.
A lower reading level can make a book longer. A reader who needs things explained costs you more words, built from shorter sentences and shorter words. People who already know the field need fewer. The avatar settles which book you’re writing, and it’s part of how I match a client’s voice to the people who’ll read it.
Then comes focus. Keep the reader’s problem in front of you all the way through. Your problems are interesting and fun, I’m sure, and the reader didn’t pay to hear about them. What’s their problem, how did you solve a similar one, and how does that help them? Memoir is the exception, because a memoir is chronological and it’s about you. Everything else is about the reader.
I hate business books that open with the author’s life story. I don’t want to know how you got here. I want to know what’s going to work. Your story belongs in the book, but it belongs there as proof, the been there, done that, I’m old, I fixed it part. I’ve run off that cliff fourteen times, so you don’t have to. Readers will take that from you all day long, as long as the cliff is one they’re standing near.
People don’t buy books because it happens to everybody else. They buy because it’s happening to them.
How do you test a manuscript against the reader avatar?
AI is good at this job. Paste a draft into Claude and ask who the audience is. If the answer doesn’t match your avatar, the draft is aimed wrong, and you can ask how to bring it back in line. I’ve run LinkedIn posts through the same check before they went out.
The second test is to have the AI play the reader. Tell it to pretend it’s your avatar reading the book, then ask whether it would read top to bottom or use the book as a reference, and where it gets bored. It’ll tell you. Then you look at what makes that spot boring and fix it. You’ll find a handful of prompts like that in my list of Claude prompts for getting unstuck.
The client is the third test. When I hand over the first sections of a book, “I don’t like it” tells me nothing I can fix. “It’s written to the wrong audience” helps, as long as the client can say which audience it sounds like instead. Give your writer feedback measured against the avatar, and they can use it the same afternoon.
How does a reader avatar shape book marketing and PR?
PR doesn’t work with everybody. It works if you aim it at a person, a particular person or type of person. Every pitch, every interview and every ad is a letter, and the avatar tells you whose name goes on the envelope.
Any PR or marketing firm that doesn’t ask who your audience is doesn’t know what it’s doing. I mean that.
At a minimum they should ask what you’re trying to accomplish and who you’re talking to. If the first call is all packages and pricing and nobody asks about your reader, walk away. A firm that skips that question is guessing with your money, and guessing is on the list of what sells books and what wastes your time.
Your own posts follow the same rule. Don’t start publishing articles about your book until you know who the audience is. You won’t write effective posts until you know who you’re talking to, and once you do, every article should aim at the same reader as the book, with the same feeling and the same to-do behind it.
Speaking works the same way. Speaking notes can come out of each chapter while the book is being written, since the outline is already there and it’s a little more work at most. A talk built from those notes still has to start from knowing who’s in the room, and none of the marketing in Sell Your Books works until you know who you’re selling to.
Let the avatar change before the writing starts
Don’t be surprised if the audience shifts during the first weeks of interviews. It should.
A change costs nothing while we’re still talking, and once the writing starts every change costs time and money. We go over the same questions again and again until the clouds clear, and by the end we both know who the reader is and it feels right.
Push hard on this stage, because if the audience is wrong, the whole book heads in the wrong direction. The outline can flex later. I do not want to get to chapter 10 and find out that wasn’t our purpose at all. You can see how that front-end work feeds the structure in what the outline does. A finished book the client says doesn’t do what they wanted would be silly, and it would be my fault for skipping the step that prevents it.
This isn’t a game for the weak of heart.
Nailing down a reader takes a whole hour of hard questions, plus more work over the following weeks, and some authors get impatient and want to skip ahead to the writing. Don’t. The avatar is the cheapest decision in the book and the most expensive one to get wrong.
Name the reader before you write a word
I’ve got no patience for books written to Current Resident. They waste the author’s money and the reader’s evening, and they end up in the same place as the junk mail.
Build the avatar first. Give the reader a name, a Monday morning and a problem, then write every page as a letter they’ll recognize as theirs. If you’re planning a book, start with chapter 3 of the Ghostwriting Hub, and if you want help putting a name on the envelope and writing the book that goes inside it, look at my ghostwriting service.
