Date: September 16, 2014 To: Debbie Suzuki From: Rachelle Hayes Subject: Target Audience Report for Entangled Teen Booklet

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1 Memorandum Date: September 16, 2014 To: Debbie Suzuki From: Rachelle Hayes Subject: Target Audience Report for Entangled Teen Booklet Introduction In this report, I will discuss the target audience for the Entangled Teen Booklet. The booklet will have a primary audience readers of young adult literature and a secondary audience reviewers of young adult literature. This booklet will be for readers and reviewers who wish to find their next book. Characteristics of these two audience groups will be discussed, along with an analysis pertaining to how they use documents. Articles relating to my target audience, along with my own experience as a reader and reviewer, will help provide information about effective designs for the booklet. Specific characteristics of the target audience In the sections below I will describe the specific characteristics of the Entangled Teen Booklet s target audience. Both the primary and the secondary audiences each have their own characteristics. These characteristics, such as gender, age, and location, will influence how I create the design for my document. Primary audience There are three specific characteristics of my primary audience that I will discuss in this section: gender, age, and location. The primary audience of my booklet will be readers of the young adult genre. Readers will look through the booklet in order to become more acquainted with Entangled Teen s available titles. A large percentage of my primary audience consists of one gender female. Entangled Publishing produces fiction, typically romance-based, pieces of literature. National Public Radio writer Eric Weiner wrote in his September 2007 article, Why Women Read More Than Men, that When it comes to fiction, the gender gap is at its widest. Men account for only 20 percent of the fiction market, according to surveys conducted in the U.S., Canada and Britain. This statistic means that those perusing the Entangled Teen booklet have an 80% chance of being a female reader. Not only are Entangled s consumers generally female, but they are also slightly older than the target audience of the young adult genre. Publishers Weekly posted an article entitled New Study: 55% of YA Books Bought by Adults in 2012 about YA book consumers. The article explained who was buying YA books. According to a new study, fully 55% of buyers of works that publishers designate for kids aged 12 to 17 known as YA books are 18 or older, with the largest segment aged 30 to 44, a group that alone accounted for 28% of YA sales ( New Study ). This statistic is even more relevant to Entangled s readers when compared to Entangled Teen s Facebook page which lists the most engaged group of their fans as years old ( Entangled Teen ). With all of this information I can infer that my target audience is approximately years of age. While the primary audience is mostly female, and slightly older than the books targeted age group, they are also largely centered in one area. On Entangled s website there is a sidebar under the title Where in the World? with a widget provided by Revolver Maps, that highlights the amount of people who visit Entangled s site and categorizes them into their separate countries. The United States makes up 67% of Entangled s website viewership, with Canada, the United Kingdom, and 1

2 Australia respectively making up the next 17% ( Live Statistics ). This means that the booklet can be targeted towards U.S. citizens, but I will also need to keep those from the other English-speaking countries in mind. The above information ensures that the Entangled Teen booklet will need to be targeted towards females of about 20 to roughly 40 years of age in English-speaking countries, with major emphasis being placed on those from the United States. Secondary audience The Entangled Teen booklet will have a secondary audience. This audience also has specific characteristics, although some of them overlap with the primary audience s characteristics. The secondary audience will be young adult book reviewers. Book reviewers will search through the catalog in order to find titles that they can promote on their blog, channel, or other online method of communication. Based upon my own book-reviewing experience, I know the secondary audience has the same characteristics as the primary audience female, ages 20-40, and English-speaking with only one significant difference. Reviewers are not solely looking to read and enjoy the titles. They want to find something that they can easily promote on their blog that will attract their own viewers. This means they will want books to review that not only sound interesting for them to read, but that also will bring in attention from readers like the primary audience mentioned above. Although the secondary audience s characteristics are quite similar to those of the primary audience, they are not quite the same as readers. They already know the book publishing industry; they simply need a place to quickly find titles that will interest them, as well as their own readers. Document usage by the target audience In this section, I will be discussing how my primary and secondary audiences use and read documents. These document usage analyses will help me in creating design strategies for the booklet that will be touched on later. Document usage by the primary audience As stated earlier, the primary audience of this booklet will be YA readers. Young adult readers sometimes browse the internet for books they wish to read. As Whitney Quesenbery states in her 2001 article On Beyond Help: User assistance and the user interface from the journal Technical Communication, Browsers are explorers. They enter an information space without a clearly defined goal except to understand what is available in this space. In other words, the primary audience will be people who are searching for a document, or in a document, for no specific item. They are simply trying to look at what titles are available. Document usage by the secondary audience As discussed earlier, document usage by the secondary audience is very similar to that of the primary audience. They are both browsers. However, reviewers have a more defined goal in mind than readers. Reviewers tend to know what they are interested in as they peruse any book publishingbased document or site. 2

3 Whitney Quesenbery s article has helped me in determining the way reviewers can look through documents. According to her criteria and my knowledge of the reviewer mindset, reviewers could be considered either people who use finding strategies to locate an item or people who use query strategies to locate an item. These two differing methods of finding an item are simply different ways of reading and/or using a document. Reviewers could be considered a finder for many reasons. One of which is the description Quesenbery gives them in her article. According to Quesenbery, A Finder can identify the target and only needs help in locating it within the information space. She goes on to explain that finders know a lot about the item(s) they are looking for. In the case of this booklet, those items could be the author or perhaps even the genre of the book. If they already know a lot about the title, they need to be able to access it quickly without getting frustrated. A reviewer who uses the query method, might not have a specific book in mind, but they have a general description of the items they hope to locate (Quesenbery). These individuals know the type of books, or genre of books, they enjoy; they just need to have an accessible place to locate the books using their favored genre(s). Reviewers understand how to navigate a book publishing industry s website or even an author page. They use these sites to decide what books they wish to review on their blog, channel, et cetera. Design strategies based on target audience After identifying my target audience, their specific characteristics, and document usage techniques, I will implement design strategies based upon the primary and secondary audiences needs. The strategies for the design of my booklet will be discussed in detail in the following two sections. Design strategies based on specific characteristics My design strategy for the booklet will be based upon the specific characteristics I mentioned previously. These include the gender, age, location, and reviewer s prerogative of the reader and/or reviewer. Because my audience is typically female, I can design the document in a manner that could be considered more decorative than what I could do with a booklet targeted towards males. The design of the booklet will match Entangled s website. Their website can be considered feminine in style due to its heart decorations and romantic book title banners. They have a simple black, white, and red logo which will prevent the booklet from being too overly feminine. With an audience that is mostly older than the age of 20, I can create my document without having to worry about a younger audience that may not understand some of the wording or phraseology. Although this booklet is not intended for anyone under the age of 11, the language will remain simple because it will mostly consist of the books information, such as blurbs, authors, series name, page numbers, reviews, et cetera. Even the target audience of the young adult genre, ages 12-17, can effectively read this document since there will be no extreme concepts or language to throw the younger generation off. With the primary audience being located in English-speaking countries, I can design the document based upon my knowledge of the language and culture. The document can be designed with layouts 3

4 that are prevalent in these types of audiences. I can create columns, with sans-serif style typography since sans-serif is easier to read on a screen. Reviews can be copy-pasted giving proper tribute to the reviewer, of course on the booklet without having to worry about readers not understanding some of the terms and adjectives, such as fangirl, Man Crush Monday, and hawt. Because my secondary audience consists of reviewers who are wishing to promote their own sites, as well as find a good book to read, I will need to make the titles seem as appealing as possible. This can be done by giving the books cover images proper placement, such as in the left-hand, upper corner of the booklet, and emphasizing the cover. I will emphasize it by using a background color underneath to layer it. The titles will also be strong headings in order to catch the reviewers eye. I plan to create a feminine-looking document, using language simple enough for my prospective readers, as well as using typical design-methods that are predominant throughout English-speaking countries. These titles will also be made to stand out and attract attention so as to entice potential reviewers. Design strategies based on document usage I will need to implement design strategies in my booklet based upon my audiences document usage techniques. These include meeting the needs of those who use a browsing, finding and/or a querying approach to item location, as well as creating a document that reviewers can relate back to the publishing world. Because my primary audience can be considered browsers and as such may not quite know what they want, I will need to make sure that the information is easily accessible. To effectively achieve this, I will separate the Entangled Teen titles into a table of contents separated by genres that a browser could look through quickly to find what they believe would interest them. These genres would match the ones on Entangled s website, as I explained earlier in my proposal. These genres are YA contemporary, YA fantasy, YA with LGBT elements, YA paranormal, and YA sci-fi. They will be listed in a table of contents format with the book titles underneath their respective genre. All of the books will then be listed in alphabetical order by title for quick reference. This design strategy will also help those using the finder or query method. They will have a simple way to find the book or genre they are interested in, due to a system of categorization that is familiar to most individuals. Reviewers understand how to navigate publishing sites, author sites, et cetera. As such they will want the information provided in the booklet to be easily accessible and convenient. Because of this I will have the genres and titles bookmarked so that they can be sent directly in the PDF file to their respective genre or title. Hyperlinks will be another necessary feature in order to appeal to my secondary audience. These links will be to book-purchasing sites like Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes & Noble, itunes, and Entangled so that the person browsing, finding, and/or querying can quickly and easily find the title(s) they want on a purchasing site. Everything will be organized in a way that they are familiar with through the use their own blogs and publishers and authors websites. Chances are high that these reviewers have already had experience with Entangled Publishing in the past. In order for reviewers to understand that this document is an Entangled piece, I will design the document in a manner that is similar to Entangled s site. This means that I will need to have the booklet keep a black, red, and white color scheme, as I mentioned earlier. I will also need to include Entangled s logo and media information. 4

5 I plan on creating a simple and efficient document for my audience. The booklet will be separated by genres with easy-to-access bookmarks and links. Additionally, there will be a correlation between the Entangled site s look and the appearance of the booklet s design so that reviewers understand the booklet is an Entangled promotional document. Conclusion This booklet will be designed to meet the needs, and to fit the characteristics, of my primary and secondary audiences. Since my primary and secondary audiences are both typically female, ages 20-40, in English-speaking countries, I will need to design the document around their characteristics by having a more feminine design with a layout and language-scheme that is easily understood. Based upon the document usage of my primary and secondary audiences, I will need to have an easy to navigate document with external links and internal bookmarks. Creating a booklet that is easy to navigate through links and bookmarks may be difficult. Trying to make sure each piece of information leads the reader to the correct area will be a challenging, yet necessary, process. Despite challenges like the one listed above, researching my audience, as well as having personal knowledge of the YA book-publishing industry will aid me in creating an efficient booklet. Should you have any questions about the booklet, please contact me either by at Rachelle4@live.missouristate.edu or by phone at

6 Works Cited Entangled Teen. Facebook. 14 Sept "Live Statistics." RevolverMaps. RevolverMaps. Web. 15 Sept "New Study: 55% of YA Books Bought by Adults." PublishersWeekly.com. Publishers Weekly, 13 Sept Web. 12 Sept Quesenbery, Whitney. "On Beyond Help: User assistance and the user interface." Technical Communication 48.2 (2001): On Beyond Help: User Assistance and the User Interface - Whitney Interactive Design. WQusability. Web. 14 Sept Weiner, Eric. "Why Women Read More Than Men." NPR. NPR, 5 Sept Web. 14 Sept new-study-55-of-ya-books-bought-by-adults.html Quesenbery, W. (2001). On beyond help: Meeting user needs for useful online information. Technical communication, 48,

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