If there is some blood on the pages then you have some readership.
The thing that makes stories memorable is the experiences they impart onto the readership and the emotions that they make those readers feel. The audience will forgive an incredible amount if you deliver them a powerful emotional experience - and, conversely, if your story is emotionally false, no amount of pyrotechnics will save it.
A blog is a message in a bottle, both in purpose and likely readership.
My readership seems to be the sensitive people, for the most part. Then there are the occasional fans who are like, "Ah, video games!"
Tad Homer-Dixon is a rare kind of public intellectual, who combines real expertise with a commitment to communicate to the widest possible readership. In The Ingenuity Gap he wants us all to wake-up to the fearful possibility that our blithe trust in science and technology may be misplaced. Human ingenuity may not be capable of coping with two emerging crises of this century and the next: population growth and environmental despoliation. Read Homer Dixon's wake-up call and you will see the future very differently.
For so long I didn't have any kind of readership at all - I'd get published, but not read - the idea of writing for an audience is so anathema to me, it's never bothered me.
I've always assumed from the beginning that I had relatively few contemporaries among my readership. Not that I was consciously writing for a younger audience but that what I was doing interested a younger audience, or at least threatened them less.
Obviously Feministing is kind of a women's space in a certain way, even though we have a lot of male readership and people who don't identify as women.
I am glad to have found a readership, but one can’t write only what is likely to sell. A writer is not a shopkeeper. A writer creates an imaginary world that he transmits to others.
I certainly want people to read what I've written. Yet, and here's that question of economic position, because I have a secure job, I don't need a wide readership to survive. I'm a participant in the indirect economy, what sociological critic Pierre Bourdieu would call the "economic world reversed. " I get "paid" by writing whatever I choose. That's a pretty good position to be in, but I don't pretend for a moment that it is not a privileged one.
The fuzzy boundary lines between different readership ages have always puzzled me, so these days I just write what comes, and assume I can fix the mess later with an editor's help.
The diversity revolution [in the news media] was supposed to increase readership and enhance credibility. Just the opposite has resulted. How long will it take the business to figure this out?
I think it's important to recognise that 'The Da Vinci Code' opened up a vast new audience for a general readership interested in historical detective stories and research into history.
The breadth of the potential readership is also a factor.
I'd like to emphasize that when a reader finishes a great novel, he will immediately begin looking for another. If someone loves your book, it increases the chance that he or she will look at mine. So there is no competition between writers. Another writer's success helps build a larger readership for all of us.
It wasn't until I started to do 'Poison River' that the readership started falling. 'Poison River' started out very slowly and simply, but then it got really dense and complicated. I don't know, I think the readers just got fed up or burned out. They started dropping off.
Newspaper readership is declining like crazy. In fact, there's a good chance that nobody is reading my column.
There are different reasons why people write: for themselves, or for other writers, or to get prizes, or keeping an audience in mind. In my case, it felt really nice that a certain type of readership read the book and liked it, even though my readership is not as wide as certain popular books.
I think it's the next thing, getting out of the comfort-zone readership, that at some point you have to try and break out of that and see if you can go in new directions. I wanted to do something that felt a lot bigger than a book that's going to sit on a toilet.
I have no precise idea of who makes up my readership. I'm surprised when I discover people have read my poems at all.
