A book publisher gave me one of the best pieces of advice I ever was asked, "Who is your audience?" My husband and I had just written a book about a teenager sleuth, modeled after Nancy Drew, but geared towards women babyboomers, not teenagers. We almost got a book deal based upon a misunderstanding of how we were marketing it. Our book,
"The Ghost in the Plantation," is about a precocious 16 year old who gets involved in trying to track down the murder of a docent at Oak Alley Plantation. The PG-rated scenes and jokes would never go over well with teenagers. The opening scene of our book has Nancy and her girlfriends talking about, not Justin Beiber or One Direction, but about Don Draper from Mad Men and Vampire Bill from True Blood--men who women might find attractive, not my teenage nieces.
Our teenage sleuth has a very permissive aunt and father who both give her a lot of freedom as she goes about her search for the killer. They are the opposite of "helicopter parents" and she gets in all sorts of dangerous situations. My husband and I have our Nancy running through Bourbon Street while being chased by a guy in a hoodie, and dodging into a gay bar, only to be rescued and brought home by The Lady Chablis from "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." Our humor is PG-rated--this is not your Grandmother's Nancy Drew. We have Nancy trying to bond with her aunt by mixing up Hurricanes and serving them to her and her girlfriend. Construction workers admire how well Nancy looks in her shorts and ask her aunt, "Who's the little cupcake?" "
The Ghost in the Plantation" is a gumbo of a whodunit, not for the fathers of teenage daughters nor for teenage girls. It's for the ladies--gentlemen, step aside. We wrote this book with a deep love of the city of New Orleans and all of the wonderful experiences we've had there. I'm grateful to that publisher for teaching me a very valuable marketing lesson: who is your audience? Never forget to make that foremost in your mind when marketing your books--you writers out there. The last thing we want is for our readers to be disappointed after they've bought our book, hoping for something entirely different.
