The Reader You’ll Never Meet

You will never know most of the people your book reaches. Writing for them is an act of faith — and the faith is justified.

I wrote a book I never planned to write.

For years, I hosted a radio show in Alaska called Alaska Outdoors. Each show ended with a 90-second short vignette about fishing, hunting, the land, the weather, the animals, and the people who lived close to both. When the show went off the air, I gathered a hundred and twenty of those vignettes into a book called One Last Cast.

It was an afterthought. A way to preserve the material. I expected the audience would be the same people who listened to the show — sportsmen, outdoor enthusiasts, Alaskans who recognized the rivers and the ridgelines.

The book sold well among them. No surprise there.

The surprise came from the parents.

The Audience I Never Imagined

I started hearing the same story, over and over, from people I never expected. Parents were reading the book to their children at bedtime. Not toddlers. Tweens — ten, eleven, twelve years old. Kids growing up in Anchorage and Fairbanks and the Mat-Su Valley, lying in bed listening to ninety-second stories about a moose standing in fog on a riverbank, about the sound a reel makes when the line runs out, about the way winter light turns the mountains purple at three in the afternoon.

I did not write those vignettes for children. I did not imagine a parent’s voice reading them in a dark bedroom. I did not picture a twelve-year-old falling asleep to the rhythm of sentences I’d written for adult listeners driving to work.

The book found them anyway.

This is what books do when they are written with honesty. They travel beyond the author’s intention. They reach people the author never pictured, in rooms the author never entered, at moments the author could not have predicted. The author writes for one reader, and the book finds another. The author writes for one purpose and the book serves a second one the author never knew existed.

 

The Invisible Audience

Authors measure reach by what they can see. Sales numbers. Reviews. Emails. Social media mentions. These are the visible signs, and they matter. But they represent a fraction of the book’s true life.

For every reader who tells the author what the book meant, dozens read it and say nothing. For every parent who mentioned the bedtime ritual to me, how many others did the same thing and never thought to say so? The visible audience is the tip. The invisible audience is the body of the iceberg, silent and vast.

Books travel in ways no marketing plan can predict. A copy donated to a library enters a circulation system reaching readers for years. A book left behind in a cabin finds someone who needed it at exactly the right moment. A title passed from mother to daughter carries a meaning neither of them discusses with the author.

The work is happening. The author just can’t see it.

The Faith the Work Requires

Every author faces a moment when the numbers feel small, and the silence feels large. The temptation is to measure the book’s value by what can be counted. But counting captures only what is visible, and the most important work a book does is almost always invisible.

A book written with purpose does not stop working when the author stops promoting it. Purpose gives the book its own momentum. The honesty on the page continues to meet readers wherever they are, whenever they arrive. A book written to chase a trend expires when the trend passes. A book written from conviction remains available to anyone who needs it, for as long as copies exist.

Somewhere right now, a person you will never meet is reading something you wrote. They are underlining a sentence. They are pausing at the end of a chapter. They are lying in a dark bedroom listening to someone they love read your words aloud. They are not going to tell you about it. They are simply going to carry it forward into a life you will never see.

You will never meet most of your readers. You don’t need to. The book is your handshake. The book is your introduction. The book is the conversation you’ll never hear but started anyway, because you believed it was worth starting.

Write for the reader you’ll never meet. They are already out there.

Yours might be the voice they fall asleep to.

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose — and why the books worth writing are the ones written for readers the author will never know.

The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Start Your Publishing Journey with Expert Guidance.
Unlock Exclusive Tips, Trends, and Opportunities to Bringing Your Book to Market.

About Us

Kindly contact us if you've written a book, if you're writing a book, if you're thinking about writing a book, we can help!

Departments

My Account

Social Media

Payment

Publication Consultants Publication Consultants

Copyright 2023 powered by Publication Consultants All Rights Reserved.