Find Your SAM - The Perfect Reader For Your Book.
Finding Your Perfect Reader
Hi fellow writer. If you’re here and reading this, then you’re likely struggling to find your perfect reader despite pouring your heart and soul into your latest book. Writing is a labor of love, and your biggest hope is for it to connect with your readers in a way that it really sticks with them.Â
You want them to enjoy it, to feel it like you do and for them to stick with you when you write your next book. For them to trust you can give them the kind of entertainment they want to read again and again.
That’s the dream, right? I know it’s mine.
So, how do you achieve that? Well, first, you need to find your ideal reader. If there’s one person who’ll love every single thing about your book, it’s your SAM. Your Single Audience Member.
What Is A SAM?
SAM stands for Single Audience Member.
Your SAM is the person your book is made for. They’re two halves of the same puzzle, and you’re trying to bring them together.
I came across this term recently actually. I do work in marketing, and it is a marketing tool, but we tend to use client personas in my 9-5 instead. Which is broader and more generalized than a SAM. I think SAM is more appropriate for us authors, because you can go deeper into what your specific reader wants, not just readers in general.
Think about deeply moving one reader. This one person you’re trying your absolute best to please, not anyone else… Who are they?
Why We Should Know Our SAM
As we all know, publishing is competitive. Attention is hard to get and even more difficult to keep.
If you don’t know who your SAM is, then you run the risk of creating a story that’s too generic to fully grip anyone.
Let’s imagine you open a restaurant, but you can’t decide what kind of food to serve, so your menu ends up with vegan starters, the main courses consist of four different kinds of BBQ meat for those on keto and one flavor of diabetic dairy free ice cream for desert.
Who were you trying to cater for? Everyone, right? But now no-one with any of those dietary requirements is going to leave satisfied, are they?
If you know your SAM, you can dive deeper into what she wants and needs.
Let’s use the restaurant analogy again. Instead of the previous menu, you change things up to match what you know your SAM wants from an eatery. She’s vegan, but also allergic to nuts, and she can’t always find places to eat out.
Now imagine you’ve adjusted your whole menu from start to finish. You’re serving well crafted delicious vegan food prepared in an entirely nut free kitchen. Your SAM is in heaven! She’ll tell her vegan or nut free friends. She’ll come back every time she’s in town. She’ll leave you amazing reviews! Your restaurant is a hit!
Do you see now, how, trying to please everyone satisfys no-one. Intead, you’ve focused on your SAM and got a loyal customer who loves everything about your restaurant.
How Do You Find Your SAM?
If you already know some of your comp titles, great! That’s going to help you. If you don’t know yours yet, I have a comp title video, or you can read my post about comp titles instead, but I will also include some methods you can use without knowing comp titles too. If you don’t know your comp titles just now, you can start off by googling “typical readers of x genre.”
Now this isn’t foolproof, so use it carefully. For example, our SAM from the example earlier. Maybe she loves mysteries, but the typical mystery reader is older than her and likes their mysteries to be full of hard faced male detectives who curse and swear a lot. Our SAM specifically likes cozy mysteries, with cutesy towns, cats and usually a female amateur detective trying to figure something odd out.
Do you see how only googling based on broad genre alone can lead you up the wrong path?
That’s why you really should go deeper and base it off of who reads your comp titles specifically.
Now look up your comp title on Amazon or Goodreads or somewhere like that. Next, go to the review section, take notes of anything that could be important, or any trends you notice.
- Who’s reviewing books similar to yours?
- What do they say they love?
- What do they really not like?
- Are there any commonalities?
- What gender do the majority of them present as?
- Do you get a sense of their age, either from their photos, or their language?
- Are they in certain careers?
- Based on this, where does that type of person hang out?
- Are they on TikTok or another social platform primarily? Once you know where they are, you’re going to listen to them.
- What made them DNF a book like yours?
- Is there a specific trope that seem to be a firm favorite of your readership?
- Or do they fly through different ones like it’s fast fashion?
- Do they prefer pretty language, or do they prefer their books straight to the point?
You Found Your Perfect Reader, Now What?
Now you pay attention and you listen. You can tailor your marketing to use similar language to the kind your perfect reader uses. You can actively make sure your book doesn’t have any dealbreakers that your SAM hates. They might even lead you to more comp titles as you discover more about them!
For instance, my SAM hates violence to animals purely for shock factor. It’s a hard no for them. So I know now, that I shouldn’t lean hard into those aspects of my book, or they won’t enjoy it.
Now I’m not saying that you need to rewrite your whole book to be a certain way just for a theoretical SAM. Not at all. But, if you feel like something isn’t quite hitting right with your book and you aren’t sure what, maybe listening to your SAM could help you find the answer.
Your SAM is meant to help simplify things for you. When you write, you can image you’re writing just for her. If you have a gift bundle with your book release, design it specifically for her. (Vegan and nut free, of course)
What If Someone Outside Your SAM Likes Your Book?
That’s a great thing! And there will always be readers that are different from your SAM, but they key thing here is that we aren’t writing the book for them, and we aren’t marketing the book to them. Again, if we try to please everyone, we’ll end up with something that’s too spread out.
Maybe the typical older mystery reader picks up your book and they like it. It’s not their normal cup of tea, but they give it a shot. They enjoy it, it might be a bit to fluffy for them, or maybe they were a little bored by the lack of gritty action that they normally find in their usual mystery. But over all they found it a good read. Great.
But do you see here how if we had also included the gritty mystery things into our book, it would no longer be a perfect 10/10 for our SAM. Now it’s diluted. SAM enjoys it except for the gritty parts, and the average mystery reader likes it but its still a little too fluffy for them.
Neither is totally happy, and it’s suddenly much harder to market to your readers, because if you go on too much about one aspect versus the other, you might put off one kind of reader vs the other. Then we have conflicts, difficult decisions to make with marketing, and book covers, etc.
Knowing your perfect reader should help guide your decisions and save you from those kind of dilemmas.
Still Not Sure Or Stuck On Your SAM?
No worries! It’s really not something that’s easy for everyone, and it can take time and that’s okay.
Some genres might have more obvious SAMS, like in romantasy. It’s easy to find the typical romantasy fan on TikTok and hear about their likes and dislikes, you know, while some genres might be a little harder to pin down.
You can try making a moodboard or pinterest board of your SAMs life. What makes them happy? What scares them? Let instincts guide you until you have time to do more research.
If your main comp title has very mixed reviews, and you are struggling to find a common thread there, pick two or three books like yours and just simply ask yourself, what do they all have in common? Do they all have beautiful prose? Do they all have a great plot twist? You’ll find some common ground between them.
SAM Data Points Example
No one book is for everyone, but if you really dig into your SAM and write with them in mind, your book will be unforgettable to that one specific reader.
To finish up, here’s what I discovered about my perfect reader. I hope this helps you to explore who your own SAM and understand what kind of data points might be useful!
- Name: Eve
- Gender: Female
- Location: She lives in Urban or Suburban types of places, but dreams about rural life
- Education: University level
- Profession: Science fields, education, creative
- Lifestyle: Sustainability is something she cares about, tries to shop local, worries about climate change
- What she cares about in a book: Enjoys science grounded storytelling. The science has to feel believable, but not a textbook. Needs tension and humanity. Wants to feel immersed in the setting. Personal stakes of the POV characters matter as much to her as the plot. Doesn’t want jump scares, prefers believability.
- Doesn’t like: Splatterpunk or over the top gore for the sake of it. Unrealistic plot twists, shallow tropey characters, animal death for shock value with no real meaning.
- Where I find her: Leaving reviews on Goodreads, browsing #climatefiction tags on instagram and tiktok, reddit r/climatefiction r/books
Tell Me Who Your SAM Is Down Below!
Think you might just fit the profile of my perfect reader? Check out my upcoming novel, Dying Tides.
