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Baby Bear scratched his furry chin and looked at the class. “How many of you want your work to be read by millions?” Every student in the room raised their hands. “And what’s the best-selling novel series of the last twenty years?” Baby Bear asked. Mrs. Hubbard scowled. “It was those dreadful books about that Harvey Potter child. Witches and wizards and all sorts of wickedness.” “A very stupid book,” growled Little Pig. “I stopped reading after the first page, when I saw how that woman maligned those respectable Dursleys.” “And who was the target audience for the Harry Potter series?” asked Baby Bear. Nobody said anything. Goldilocks timidly raised her hand. “Wasn’t it … eleven-year-old boys?” Baby Bear began jumping up and down, clapping his fat little paws. “Yes! Boys, aged eleven. The smallest niche market you can imagine. Everybody knows that boys don’t read. Everybody knows that eleven-year-old boys absolutely, positively won’t read anything. Especially a book written by a woman. And yet …” “Harrumph!” Little Pig snorted. “Lots of people read the Harry Potter series. Although God only knows why anyone would read such nonsense.” Baby Bear scratched his ears. “The author wrote her books for a very tight niche market. Eleven-year-old boys. But she delighted those boys, and they talked about it to eleven-year-old girls. They were also delighted and talked about it to twelve-year-olds. Who talked about it to thirteen-year-olds. And so on, until everybody was talking about it. What made that work?” “A wicked spell?” said Mrs. Hubbard. “Great marketing of an inferior product,” said Little Pig. “Good writing that delighted her target audience?” said Goldilocks. “Exactly!” said Baby Bear. “So when you go to write your story, you are not going to write for the whole world. You are going to choose your target audience and define it as tightly as you know how. You are going to write your story to delight your target audience. You will not care about anybody else.” “But what if other people … hate my writing?” Goldilocks said. She couldn’t bear the thought of anybody not liking her novel. “You. Don’t. Care.” Baby Bear got so excited, he began running in tight little circles.
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Randy Ingermanson (How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method (Advanced Fiction Writing, #1))