Know your audience, they say, in all of the “How to Write” essays and websites; then you can successfully market your books to that audience. But my audience keeps changing as I write. I tend to hop from humor, to poetry, to essays. My styles and subjects vary widely.
There is the horse-people audience; where I can reach out to our commonalities and our love of horses. My humorous memoir about living with horses sells best in a local tack shop.
There is my home-town audience. When I had a reading in my hometown of Blaine, Washington, I shared about what the town used to be like when I kept my horse in our back yard. I pointed out that the current grocery store location used to be a big hay field where one of my stories occurred.
When I had a reading in a Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, bookstore, I shared some of the humor from my book, and focused on the broader audience’s common love of animals, and what animals teach us.
Another time, when I joined a panel with more literary-style poets and writers, I read a short prose piece from my book, to better illustrate the many ways of writing about animals, and how our relationships with animals can be used as metaphors for other things. I also reached out to a more literary audience when I shared information on my short collection of fire poems in Triple 23. Poetry readers are yet another audience that can be different than humor or memoir readers.
I can’t decide if my eclectic writing style is a blessing or a curse. If I only wrote humor, I could market that humor and immediately jump into writing another similar book. Yet the poems and essays in my brain want to be written and heard, too. Recently I saw writing described as “an expensive hobby” where only a relatively few writers make a lot of money. I’ve decided to embrace that idea. My hobby of writing is a second expensive hobby after my hobby of horseback riding.
Like jumping my horse over fallen logs in the woods, I jump from audience to audience as my writing proceeds. Just as I explore different riding disciplines with my all-around horse, I explore different writing disciplines. I will be the all-around writer and rider. When mixing Western and English styles of riding, I use the term “Wenglish”. When I’m writing humor, essays, and poetry, I need a new term. Maybe “Hum-ess-try”? How about “Po-ess-um”? Oh, that last word can be condensed to “possum”! I think I need to write a poem about opossums.
[photo credit pexels.com]
Michelle Eames 