From 2003-2006, I wrote features for Spanish Playboy as well as an advice column. Through this experience (and writing for many other men's mags prior), I learned the importance of adopting a voice for a particular audience. In the case of Spanish Playboy, this was an 18- to 45-year-old middle- to higher-income male market. I spent a lot of time discerning who my audience was by how? Yup, reading the ads. Carefully! Who were the advertisers who bought ad space in the magazine? That helped me to piece together the voice I should use. Obviously, writing for a male audience, especially on such subjects as sex and relationships, is different than writing for a female one. The Spanish Playboy audience was either higher income, as evidenced by ads for cars, designer men's clothing, expensive alcohol -- or he aspired to be so. Et cetera...
Figuring out who your audience is is something that I apply when teaching how to write screenplays and novels -- or any other form of nonfiction. It is very important to pinpoint exactly who you are speaking to, e.g. selling to, through your writing. Beginning writers especially do themselves a disservice by proclaiming that their book or movie is "for everyone." Even bestselling books that appear on Oprah have a target audience, as do blockbuster movies. Of course, blockbuster movies do try to get in something for everyone -- but if they do so, it is with a conscious effort, by engineering a script that has characters from a range of ages and ethnic backgrounds and one that has highly universal story elements. (But also think about how hackneyed and dumbed-down those movies that are targeted to EVERYONE can be.) Even then, think of the quibbles over Avatar before it was released, that it didn't have a built-in audience as it was not based on any comic book. Lord of the Rings, although it was highly profitable, also had a target audience of young boys and men. Romantic comedies have the target audience of women. If men do go to see them, it's often on dates, along with whom? Women! Sure, my husband wanted to come along to see Sex in the City with me and a girlfriend, only to find himself bored to tears throughout the whole film. (Well, I was pretty bored too.) But this is because he was NOT the target audience of the movie!
The message: know your audience and embrace them; write for them. They are the ones who will have the final say as to how successful you are.
