October 7: market... ack...

Wednesday, Oct. 07
*Bullet* Required: Market Definition ▼

Describe your target audience. Identify a demographic profile including gender, race, age, disabilities, mobility, home ownership, employment status, education, income level, marital status, location and other commonly evaluated data. Explain in detail what aspects of your novel will appeal to this particular audience and why.


1. ♥♥♥ Readers of fantasy, possibly sci-fi.
2. Race unimportant. My characters aren't blond... bland... and try not be boring.
3. ♥ Age... possibly teenagers, twenties.
4. ♥♥♥ Disabilities: anyone who is outside the normal
5. ♥ Mobility? People who travel.
6. Home ownership? Are you kidding? Unimportant. I'm selling fantasy not a plot of soil.
7. Employment status. Not a clue.
8. ♥ Education. Unimportant. YA should be sufficient, although some knowledge of the world is best and curiosity better.
9. Marital status... this isn't for two car two kids Utahn suburbanites.
10. Income level. No investment advice...
11. ♥ Location: Portugal, Brasil.
12. ....

Essentially, the folks on the fringes... who read books... dream... imagine... travel. My characters are no joke and must convince the reader they are real... some are. I'm looking for curiosity. Fantasy readers, maybe even sci-fi or mystery readers might be attracted to a serious non-mocking approach to a misunderstood slice of humanity.

What this isn't: Stereotypical white suburbanites who live their own fantasy based on living according to cultural norms. If they twinkle at twilight they should be warned... I don't.

My attitude: demographics are nice if you're writing pulp-fiction to a pulp-audience or if the writing fits nicely into a specific genre. Or... if it's a serious academic work.

I'm not a marketer; I'm a writer. So, I'd have to leave the demographic details to others.

Genre: FANTASY vampires.

*Bullet* Bonus: Query Letter OR Narrative Voice Synopsis ▼

Query Letter: Draft your query letter . Here's another article about queries.
Narrative Voice Synopsis: Write a synopsis of your novel using the same narrative voice you will use to tell the story.

Hook:

João wants to travel. He jokes that he wants to find vampires. Be careful what you want, Johnny! He's 20, naïve, innocent... when he starts out. He goes to Portugal to find his roots, those roots that make him avoid the heat, leave him anemic and hungering for raw meat.

Mini-synopsis:

João's grandmother encourages him to visit her ancestral homeland in North East Portugal, an area of well-kept secrets. But, João wants to be a beach bum, party in Lisbon, taste port in Porto, follow the pilgrim path to Santiago de Compostela. And he does... joking that he'd like to meet a vampire someday. He doesn't, of course. Vampires are myths. Everyone knows that. But, there are those who encourage him to not go to Évora because vampires don't live there. So, being young and contrary, of course he does.

And meets a vampire. No... João, vampires don't live in Évora... the real vampires of Évora aren't alive.

Biography:

Kåre Enga is a fiction writing poetry, mostly unpublished, of various ilk but usually lyrical. His prose is lyrical too. Bless him... he can't help it. Now in his 60s he wishes he hadn't waited so long to write. He's heard that vampires cant bestow extended life; but, unfortunately, he's the wrong blood type. No MFA, his background was biology, linguistics and geology and now refuses to fit into a single genre. He never liked labels. As a person-of-color (black, brown, yellow, red, rainbow... does it matter?) he eshews labels.