When writing, you don’t necessarily need to do full-scale market research in order to know your audience. All you need, really, is a few friends who fit the general description of the audience you’re writing to.
While one writer/editor/publisher I once worked for was so unsure of his own artistic vision that he tested, re-tested and re-re-tested anything and everything he wrote. His focus was children’s poetry. Yet never in all his years did he ever write anything that went over as big as Harry Potter.
J.K. Rowling didn’t need to spend hundreds on testing her material on public school kids and parents; she wrote for an audience of one: her son. As long as he was entertained, that’s all she really ultimately cared about.
Considering Rowling’s one of the wealthiest writers living today, guess whose method works better?
