Meeting a reader where they already are...

Aloha Reader,

The longer I do this work, the more I notice how specific a reader’s reason usually is for opening a book. Most of us start with what we know and want to share. Readers begin somewhere else. They begin with the worry, or the question, that made them reach for the book in the first place. Answering that particular felt need, before offering anything else, is often what decides whether they keep reading.

I’ve seen this up close in a project we’ve been building with Nil Buckley.

Nil wrote The CARE Method, a highly effective counseling program that helps people break domestic violence patterns and build healthier relationships. Underneath, the program is the same for everyone who uses it: understanding what drives the behavior and doing the slow work of changing it. That shared foundation began as one book, written for male clients.

The people who open it, though, don’t all begin from the same place. So rather than change the program, Nil changed the way in. Each edition adds prologue chapters that name what that particular reader is facing before the shared work starts. There’s now a women’s edition, a military edition, and this month she released the Spanish edition for Spanish-speaking and immigrant clients, which opens with the felt needs those readers know well: the stress of migrating and starting over, adapting to a new culture, gender roles shifting inside the family, and fear of the legal system.

The accompanying counselor manual for each edition do the same, opening with the culture and lived experience behind domestic violence that rarely show up in a police report or an evaluation form.

There’s a fear that writing for one kind of reader shrinks your audience. The opposite tends to happen. The more precisely you name what one group is living through, the more readers recognize something true and lean in. Precision is what makes a book feel personal, even to people you weren’t picturing when you wrote it.

So it’s worth asking, “Who is really going to open this book, and why did they pick it up?” That is usually where your reader is waiting.

A reader gives you a page, maybe two, to show them you understand. Spend those first lines on what brought them to you, and the rest of the book has room to do its work.

If that’s a question you’re asking about your own book, we’d love to help you answer it.

Me ka mahalo for the care you bring to who is on the other side of the page.

Heather

COO, Ghostwriter, Aloha Publishing