Writing To Be Read

If you’re a writer, consider the available time, needs, and reading abilities of your audience and write accordingly.

It's no secret I consider reading books to be an important pathway to learning and growth. The book reading habit has certainly served me extremely well my entire life.

But as a writer, knowing current adult reading trends is important. I might want to nudge people to read more books, but I also realize many people read just a few or none each year.

What’s a writer to do? Whether it’s a book or another form of writing, if a writer wants their work read by the reading public, what sort of strategy should be employed?

While it's unfortunate more adult Americans don't on average read as many books as I'd like to see, perhaps the reading market is shifting, and we need to pay attention to that if we’re to optimally reach as wide a reading audience as possible. For example, I've noticed over the past few years that the average length of books is getting shorter.

In “The Year of the Slim Volume,” Kate Dwyer explains how the publishing industry is realizing reading habits are changing.

Conventional wisdom in the publishing industry says that books either too long or too short won’t sell to the general reader, but the viral tweet’s sales power shows a desire among general audiences for the concise, intense books that have been gaining momentum in the literary fiction and nonfiction categories in recent years. Thanks to factors like dwindling attention spans, less leisure time, and price hikes across paperbacks and hardcovers, short texts—novellas, standalone short stories, poetry collections, plays, and experimental cross-genre works—are finally getting their due.

Personally, I’m a huge fan of short books. This is especially true for nonfiction titles but I’m also an avid consumer of shorter fiction writing in all its forms.

As a writer who now has access to data analytics for some of my own writing, it’s clear that often my shorter posts and articles are read more frequently and in greater depth (length of reading time per post or article) than are my longer pieces. This is valuable information.

Writing is about communication. Communicating to tell story. Communicating to deliver information. Communicating to inspire or motivate. Communicating to instruct. Communicating to sell. We write for so many reasons, but ultimately there is usually one imperative – get as many people as possible to read your work. If shorter forms or writing do that best, that’s the strategy I’m going to employ.

The YouGov site analyzed some data about the American public’s reading habits.

If you read or listened to only one book in 2023, then you read more than 46% of Americans. Reading five books puts you ahead of two-thirds of U.S. adult citizens. Readers of 10 books are in the 79th percentile, while Americans who read 20 or more books read more than 88% of their peers.

So, what’s a writer to do?

Always take a moment to decide who you’re writing for and adjust your writing accordingly. If it’s for the general public, realize not everyone reads at a high level. The National Literacy Institute offers this grim statistic.

54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).

I’m not happy about that and wish we had a more educated and literate country, but reality is what it is. If you’re a writer trying to reach as broad an audience as possible, consider simplifying your language to accommodate shortcomings in reader literacy.

If you do an online search for “writing for busy readers” or “how to simplify your writing” or any similar search combination, you’ll seen an abundance of advice, much of which boils do to “keep it simple.” Simple language. Simple and short sentence structure. Simple formatting.

All this said, especially for the more creative type of writer, if you want to write what you want to write because that’s what moves you artistically, go for it. Let your audience find you. There are times when a writer needs to create what they create as they wish to create it without reading audience constraints considered. Writing for the pure beauty and creative process that it is can be all that’s necessary. But if you’re writing with a purpose beyond that, make considering your likely reader’s time, needs, and abilities a part of your writing process.

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