Takeaway: It doesn’t matter what “audiences” want. It matters what your audience wants.
Publishers should be wary of trend analysis that doesn’t take demographics into account because it can lead to a skewed understanding of the audience and their preferences. For example, Booktok might seem like a great way to get “crowdsourced” information about what people want in books, until you look up the demographics of Booktok, which may not represent your target market.
A publisher may think that a certain topic is trending based on data from a specific demographic, but that trend may not be applicable to the publisher’s market as a whole.
In the same way, “understanding Generation Z” seems a little silly to me. The alleged characteristics of an entire group are less relevant to a publisher than the subpopulation the publisher wants to target.
For example, nobody really writes a magazine “for women.” They write a magazine for English-speaking women, in a certain age range, probably of a certain socioeconomic status, who read magazines. And they probably define their market much more carefully than that. So even though “women in general” might trend in a certain direction, a given “women’s magazine” might go in a different direction.
Prefer to listen? I discuss all the articles in the latest Krehbiel Letter in my Krehbiel Letter Podcast.
