Reader question: How to think of Audience?

Hallå my pals!

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

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In last week’s issue I asked y’all if you had any questions I could help you answer (or at least attempt to answer). And quite a few of you sent in questions! So I had to choose which one to start with, I’ll run with this one first and try to answer it in a personal way.

Question #1: How to think of Audience?

Keep in mind that I’m someone who’s been sharing stuff online for more than 10 years and still haven’t “made it” yet. But I’ve tried a bunch of things and there’s a couple lessons I’ve learnt. This question was sent in by Hasse (I wish you had something I could link people to buddy).

“How about this: what is the best way to think of an audience as you're doing something creative? Should one even consider an audience? Should one just create for oneself and see if others will go with it?”

I used to think that you shouldn’t give a crap about audience. Now I think it’s a question with two possible answers.

#1: START WITH THE AUDIENCE

When I worked as a concept artist at Toca Boca, I designed a cast of about 50 characters with an audience of children in mind. The characters were bizarre, surreal, cool, cute and fun. I remember one I liked particularly, it was a cool-looking, poetic dude with long arms stuck in an apartment, the apartment was pretty much his clothes. I predicted that this one would be one of the kids’ favorites. I discussed this with one of the Creative Leads and he suggested I add some new characters based on everyday things. So I did that.
We decided to do a test to get a reality check of what the audience really liked. Someone printed out all the characters and cut them out individually, then the kids ranked the characters by which ones they liked the most. At the top we had a Christmas tree with a face, somewhere at the bottom was my poetic-apartment-dude.

This was completely contrary to my expectations. I thought they would find the everyday objects boring, but they consistently rated those new characters higher. The Creative Lead knew through experience that kids found stuff like that more relatable.

I believe this is the traditional way to think about audience.

It comes with questions I don’t know how and don’t like to answer. Like how the heck do you define an audience? Because ‘kids’ definitely does not all group together. If you pick two random kids from the same school they might have vastly different preferences. To me a psychographic, instead of a demographic makes more sense, but the whole idea of going with audience first makes me a bit dizzy, if you take it too far you might not be able to make any decision at all without verifying with research.

Even worse, if you have no audience at all, or no way to reach them, then it might be impossible to have correct assumptions about what they will be into. That’s why I lean more towards this second approach.

#2: ATTRACT YOUR AUDIENCE

I don’t do creative work because it seems like a good way to make money, there are smarter ways to do that. Spinning a roulette wheel to pick a target audience doesn’t ignite me in the slightest, to me that’s not helpful. I get strong impulses and ideas for projects that I can’t help but to follow, chasing after them makes me feel alive. If I can’t do that, then I might as well not do creative work at all.

Thinking about target audience at every step of the way is the advice of product designers and entrepreneurs. It’s important to think of how people will receive what you make, and it’s applicable and useful for any creator in different scenarios. But for me it’s paralyzing as a starting point. It’s just too calculating, creativity doesn’t work like that, not to me.

A couple of years ago I was working on one of my biggest passion projects ever, it was a romantic comedy disguised as a wholesome detective story in a post apocalyptic wasteland. I spent a few years preparing it and then I started posting it weekly as a webcomic. The initial reception was pleasant. Lots of positivity and probably not an insignificant amount of readers for a new comic from an unknown comic artist. I kept publishing consistently for a couple of months and then the audience growth slowed down quite drastically, the comments got fewer and more negative. The lack of audience enthusiasm slowly choked my passion for it.

My passion was the fuel for that project. Either readers feel that same passion by looking at what I’ve made, or they don’t. In this case, my ambition for the comic declined for some reason, the readers noticed, and eventually the lack of passion from both sides made the project unbearable.

my passion + reader passion = steady project

When people talk about Approach #1, I mostly hear them mention the audience. But on a small scale, if you’re just one or a few people, you need passion on both sides of the equation to make it work.

It’s not important whether you start with yourself or audience in the equation, cause it’s still supposed to add up to the same thing. For me it mostly makes sense to start with my own passion, because that’s something I understand. And I don’t think I’m a great predictor of whether the audience will care until I see it.

If you have a lot of innate passion for a project then you might be able to keep going for a bit longer to find that audience. But if you’re lower on passion, then you probably need to find an extremely passionate audience. By that I mean you could try to make something simpler that your passion can carry more easily, like a comic strip instead of a graphic novel.

I don’t think finding an audience is about making a very smart decision that guarantees success. What really matters is to put in the work, to be consistent and to have something to show.

Make it and share it until your passion isn’t in it anymore.

THE BARE MINIMUM

It’s easy to poke a few holes in what I’ve said so I’m just gonna point those out here. Regardless if you go with approach #1 or #2, you will need to think of your audience to an extent. You have to make sure they understand what’s going on, and that it makes them feel something. “Thinking of your audience,” sounds pretty boring to me, I prefer to to think of it as simply being an emphatic person. You wouldn’t want to bore or confuse someone during a conversation.

You also gotta share what you make in places that favor what you’re making. For instance Instagram is pretty horrible for sharing game development stuff, it’s better to go with TikTok, Twitter or Youtube.

SUMMARY

The short answer is that you should absolutely think about your audience. But I’ve found that it doesn’t mean what I used to think it means. I used to think that everything about audience was about creativity, such as the types of creative decisions I make, “should I write this story,” or “maybe I should add romance because I know teens like that more.” The answers to those questions are all about what my gut says, it’s not something I like the audience to dictate. Because to be honest, there’s no way to know what the audience likes, I think even for that experienced Creative Lead at Toca Boca, we still had to do that test to get a better idea of reality. I think we’re all probably pretty bad at making predictions, it’s a skill you build through experience. I’m a terrible judge of what people care about. My own taste is my best guess.

And finally I’d like to wrap this up by saying that a big audience does not necessarily equal a better audience. I could panic about how many people are not here or I could just appreciate and care about the people who do show up.

You should definitely care about your audience. Thank you all for being here!

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Mini Notes

🎧 Podcast - 4 Step Process to Turn Strangers into Super Fans

An episode of Creative Pep Talk that is about this exact subject. Told by someone who has much steadier projects than myself.

🪑 Design - 50 Manga Chairs

Yongmin Park (Indie Notebook reader) shared this in a recent issue which was all about fun product design. I love how it touches on and demonstrates both design, comics and animation, all in one thing. Thanks for the recommendation!

🎨 Art tip - Using color temperature for contrast

I noticed this before in some people’s art but I never thought of why they would do that. I didn’t even think it was intentional. I might give it a go some day.

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I didn’t expect the answer to be so long. I will try to get to the other questions too, but not sure when! Thank you all for sending them in, feel free to shoot more questions my way any time. It’s a lot fun!

And thank you for reading Indie Notebook! The best way to support me right now is by sharing this newsletter with a friend.

Take care and have a creative week.