This may sound boring or antithetical to being a creative writer. I mean, why should an author need to do research, right? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of following your passions and writing the story that resonates with you?
The truth is, unless you’re only writing for yourself for your own entertainment (which is perfectly fine to do), if you expect others to read your writing, you need to write what they want to read. But who is “they”? Your audience! The people who like your writing! Which is a bit of a Catch-22 since you don’t have anyone who likes your writing yet and to grow a following of people who like your writing, you need a following of people who like your writing to spread the word—at least if you want to grow your audience at any reasonable rate.
This begets two issues you’re likely to face:
- How do you know what your audience wants to read, without knowing who the audience is?
- How do you know who your audience is, without already having an audience?
Luckily we’re not alone. There are many other authors out there with plenty of books already written with an audience of their own. We simply start our research by doing the following:
- Read in the same genre and with the same general type of story you’d like to write.
- Analyze which of those stories performed best with readers and why.
- Determine which other stories those readers enjoyed.
Simple, right? Definitely not. If it were easy, there wouldn’t be failed authors out there by the thousands.