Writing to Attract Boy Readers

 

Now that my murder mystery is with beta readers, I’m returning to middle-grade historical novels. But this time I am trying to attract a male audience as well as a female one, and it will be my first attempt to use a boy as one of the point-of-view characters.

There is no such thing as a “typical” boy reader, anymore than there is a typical girl or a typical adult reader. Every reader is different, and an individual may even find enjoyment in a book he or she would never have expected to like. For example, a boy who won’t normally read books without a male protagonist may make an exception o\if the story is interesting enough.

I know I can’t reach everyone, and I’m not trying to. Still, I would like to expand my audience to reach more boys.

Conventional wisdom says boys are attracted to bathroom humor and high adventure, and my book will have neither. Fortunately, I have a number of books on my shelves that attract middle-school male audiences without using those techniques. And it isn’t that my book will be totally devoid of action and adventure, but the situations they face will be the type that boys often encounter in their everyday lives rather than the Robert Lewis Stevenson sort.

I also have to stay true to myself. My personality and abilities inform my writing and my style. I will never be as quirky as Lemony Snicket or Roald Dahl, as intriguing as Louis Sachar, or as suspenseful as Rick Riordan or J.K. Rowling. And that’s fine. My goal is simply to capture my audience’s attention and make them keep reading until they reach the end and close the book with a satisfied sigh.

With rare exceptions having nothing to do with genre (unless 007 is a genre in itself), unrealistic POV characters don’t attract readers. I’m going to make my male POV character more authentic by using period slang, and my next two posts will talk about the challenges that imposes.

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The picture at the top of this post is a painting by Italian artist Gaetano Lodi, who was born in 1830 and died in 1886. It is in the public domain because of its age.