Lou: This is episode 55 of Write While True.
Write While True is an infinite loop, and that’s because we think of writing as an infinite game, a game we’re playing for fun and to get better at, like a game of catch.
So in each episode, we’ll tell you something we learned about writing, and then we’ll throw you the ball with a writing challenge or a prompt.
I’m Lou Franco.
Brian: And I’m Brian Hall.
Lou: Ok Brian. Today, I would actually like us to look back two episodes where we talked about reader profile, so writing towards a specific reader, and to maybe double-click on that a little and talk a little bit more about the archetype readers that you might be writing towards.
How does that sound?
Brian: Yeah, let’s do it. There’s a lot there. It’s really important.
Lou: Okay, great.
So a lot of the way I’ve come to think about this came from Amy Hoy. If you don’t know her, Amy Hoy is, she’s one of the proprietors of the 30×500 e-course and, you know, methodology of product making.
The idea, you know, her idea is that if you have a $30 per month product, and you find 500 customers, that that would be enough to build a small business. And the way that she wants you to get towards that product is by creating educational content for the audience that you intend to serve with the product. And then you’re going to, along the way, find your product after having done this educational content.
And what she wants you to do first, and I think a lot of people would say something like this is, you know, who are you writing for? Who are you writing for? So she believes in the same things that we were saying, like pick a single reader and focus on that, that one reader.
And in her case, a single, a small, a niche audience.
So in her way of thinking, she breaks down, like if you can’t come up with some, if you don’t have an idea of who your audience is, she really tries to convince you that one, you should pick an audience that has a community and that it’s a community that you’re in or that you know very well.
So she would not, she would say like, if you’re a software developer, you shouldn’t be writing like, for example, educational content for decorating houses, unless that was also something you were an expert in.
She would want you to be thinking about what you are. So a designer, write for designers and so forth, but she breaks it down even further.
So she wants you to think about it in three ways, one of three ways, either it’s someone who wants to be like you, someone who is already like you. And the third one is someone who would want to hire you.
Those are the three archetype readers she picks.
And I was wondering if you could think about like maybe something you’ve written, Brian, and how you, you know, how does your reader fit into that profile? Yeah, absolutely.
Brian: I wish I’d had this in my head a long time ago. I love it. I love a good, simple, reductive framework for thinking about what you’re doing, who you’re here for.
Sure. This is a great one. I think it’s really useful and I’ve totally messed it up in the past. As soon as you explained this to me, I realized, oh yeah, I’ve gotten completely wrong with this approach.
So when I first started consulting, I made a website and started blogging about A-B testing. And I was basically writing for the first of the three options, someone who might want to be like me. I was in teacher mode, right? I’m going to explain to you the basics and how to get started.
But my goal was to get hired as a consultant by someone who would hire me. And, you know, it didn’t particularly work, I guess, as you’d expect, right? I did make some friends and gained the chance to mentor some people.
And oddly, and this is something I want us to talk about a bit, when you do violate this or go off course, it doesn’t mean the end of the world because I did actually end up getting hired to teach and train based on, in part on some of this writing. So even though I messed up strategy wise, I just did the thing, I wrote the stuff and ended up getting brought in by some agencies to teach their teams how to do it.
So it’s not the end of the world if you’ve written with a mismatch to your intended audience, but being conscious about it, I think is much more effective, I guess.
Lou: Yeah. I would say on my blog, I would say I’m completely all over the place. I probably write for all of those audiences, but my blog is just my personal thoughts. So I’m not too worried about that because otherwise, I mean, honestly, if I didn’t broaden, I probably wouldn’t write as much.
Brian: Yeah. Let me ask you, would you say you’re all over the place on the blog as a whole, or would you say within a single post, you go all over the place?
Lou: That’s a good point. That’s a good point. On the blog as a whole, I sometimes I’ll sometimes write things that are definitely for junior developers. I’ll sometimes write things that are definitely for more of a managerial type or a senior developer type.
And I like to think in the past four or five years, I have very much tried to make each piece for a single reader. But before that, I was all over the place. I honestly just wasn’t as good a writer and didn’t know enough, didn’t have enough of these skills. But since I did get the advice to concentrate on a single reader, I always read it.
One of my editing passes is to make sure it’s at the, that the whole thing, paragraph to paragraph is for the same person.
Brian: Yeah. Seems fine. Seems fine to me. If the, the unit of reading is focused enough that it’s okay to be all over the place in your entire corpus. I don’t know.
Lou: I think, I think that’s, I mean, I’m going to have to be because otherwise I wouldn’t, honestly, if I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t have enough content. And, and it’s, you know, I kind of don’t have a goal in the, in the blog.
I don’t have a strategic goal except for me to get better at writing. It’s kind of thinking out loud. So I’m kind of, I’m okay with it.
And, but for other more serious things like my book or articles that I’m writing for other people, or even, uh, you know, I’m going to say even this podcast, I am, you know, when I started this podcast, I am thinking of a specific listener and that person is probably someone who is more wants to be like us.
So probably hasn’t written a book yet, but is thinking about writing a book.
And we’re also, I try to take the stance in the podcast of, of, uh, I’m learning this too.I’m not necessarily an expert. I’m just, I have done it once and I’m sharing, sharing what I learned. I am trying to keep a, a pretty consistent tone there.
And, um, and so that, but for the blog, I just haven’t done that. It’s all over the place and I’m okay with it. As we said.
Brian: To be clear, the goal of this podcast is not to get hired as a ghost writer or neither one of us is after that. We’re hoping to be instructive, but can we come back to your book? Who was your book for? And how do you think you did?
Lou: Right. So again, this, I’m running into the same kind of problem you ran into. Strategically what the book is supposed to do is bring clients to me, right? Like that’s the purpose of the book.
So I should have wanted to write it mostly expecting my reader to be someone who hires software development, consultant, advisor, facilitators. And, but I didn’t do that.
Instead, I wrote it more to someone who’s like me. So a senior, independent contributor, IC programmer and, or frontline manager like that, a senior influencer on a team.
Now that person might be part of the buying decision. So maybe it kind of does work out right, but they’re probably not looking for people like me. They’re not going to be the person who, honestly, I don’t think they’re going to be necessarily looking. I think the impetus would come at a higher level, but then they would be the one vetting me.
So it’s not totally lost, but, I didn’t really think it all the way through to that.
And honestly, I’m going to just say, the way I write and the way I think I probably can’t get off that reader profile very easily because I’m writing to myself, you know, like to a person more like myself is just the easiest way for me to write.
But, uh, yeah, I think, I think strategically I’m having a similar problem to you where, um, the person who’s making the buying decision or hiring decision is the one I want to influence. And so it wasn’t perfectly geared towards that though.
Brian: Yeah. Well, let me throw this out there and tell me if you think it makes sense.
Even if you’ve written for someone who’s like you and you ultimately want to get the attention and I guess gain credibility with someone who might hire you, the fact of having written the thing for someone like you coupled with, especially in the space of technology, your CTO, your VP of engineering probably came up through the ranks and was like you at some point.
I think it can work. I guess. I think they’re not going to read the whole thing and dive into all the details, but they’ll skim the beginning, skim through. They’ll see, wow, this is a whole book. This guy seems to know what he’s talking about and it still can, can do the job of convincing them that you’re worth talking to.
Do you think I’m just, am I just making things up or you can work that way?
Lou: I guess time is going to tell on that. And actually I, one of the problems I’m, I have right now, even thinking it, it’s like, what would that, what is this book I’m even describing? Like, what would it be? I feel like it’d be too handwavy, honestly.
Brian: Yeah.
Lou: And, um, I, I, which can’t, I’m not saying it can’t work sometimes, you know, attitude, an attitude book could be like, just get you in the, you know, yeah, yeah, we gotta do this thing, but it’s just not the one I’m going to write. That’s not going to be the book I’m going to write.
Uh, I’m going to, I’m going to have more nuts and bolts and that’s going to always be more for the individual contributor / manager of individual contributors is going to be the one who gets the most out of that because it’s going to, I am going to talk about, you know, what you’re, what I literally think you should do and.
There is some mindset stuff. There is some attitude stuff. There’s a whole section that I think is more about the leader leadership’s role, but I can’t imagine that section, which is the smallest section being the whole book.
Um, but you know, maybe the strategic thing to do is take that whole section and just make that free and just like send it to, send it to CTOs or VP engineers, but, or something like that, or a good synopsis of it.
Brian: Yeah. There you go. I think that’s, that’s a good point.
When you choose that audience, you have to think about how much they’re willing to read in a sitting and yeah, you’re not going to write the whole book for them.
Lou: Right.
Brian: So maybe don’t, maybe write the book for people like you or people who want to be like you and then go on LinkedIn and write the pithy summary for people who would hire you and you can do both.
All three.
Lou: Right. Right.
Brian: At different times in different media, I suppose. Yeah. I mean, maybe brings us to a takeaway.
Lou: I don’t think either of these, any of these choices is a bad choice, but what might be bad is trying to mix them.
So if you, if that I’ll use that as a way of jumping into the takeaway here, what I would do, if you have writing, if you’ve been blogging, if you’ve got some articles or ideas or even first drafts or whatever, take a look at it and see if you’re honing in on more of a single reader.
So, well, one, I would say is, is it a person in the audience that, you know, really well, because you’re in that audience somehow? So if it’s, if it’s not, then this is not going to apply to you, but maybe think about writing towards that audience.
If, even if you’re in that audience, are you sticking with a single one of these archetypes, someone who wants to be like you, someone who is you, or someone who wants to hire you? If you’re mixing that, think about rewriting the draft towards one and maybe towards the other and seeing what the difference is in between those.
And if, if you are sticking with one, think about whether that’s the one that you want and maybe try to recast it as one of the others.
Each of them has, you know, strategic reasons as we’ve seen here. And each of them will probably have like, you’ll have an affinity towards one or the other and write more than one draft and try to see what, uh, what, what the difference is for you.
Brian: Absolutely. And possibly publish them both readers. I mean, just don’t cram them together.
Lou: I’m actually thinking about this as a way of generating something.
Like I could look at posts of mine that are 10 years old that were written with, in one way and try to think of it, well, update it and try to think of it another way, another point of view.
And, you know, I can reference back to that, but give me a new idea for a new piece of content.
Anyway. So, so that’s our suggestion. Pick one of these archetypes and make sure you’re sticking to that in your draft. And if you’re not pick one or the other and rewrite it towards just a single archetype.
And we’ll see you next week.
This was episode 55 of Write While True, a podcast where we love infinite loops as long as they’re fun.