Society
The Reader I Thought Would Buy the Book Wasn’t the One Who Actually Did
One of the most surprising lessons I’ve learned in publishing had nothing to do with editing, printing, or marketing. It had to do with readers. More specifically, it had to do with how often authors are wrong about who their readers actually are. When I first started working with books, I assumed authors understood their audience better than anyone else. After all, they wrote the manuscript. They knew why they wrote it. They knew who they hoped would read it. That seemed logical. Then I started watching what happened after books were published. Again and again, I noticed something unexpected. The people buying the books were often not the people the authors imagined. At first, I thought these were isolated