While on a stay-cation with my family this summer, we listened to an Anthony Horovitz Alex Rider audio book in the car. If you haven’t read any of this series, Alex Rider is a English school boy who moonlights as a spy for MI5. His adventures in this collection included Alex infiltrating an enemy base in Afghanistan and stopping a prison break.
I’d read one of these novels to my son before, but hearing it as audio book I was stunned by how laser-targeted precisely these books were tailored to my children’s imagination. Listening to these stories, allowed them to imagine themselves as brave, fearless spies, always sure to win in the end. It was pure wish fulfillment, pure escape.
I read kids books and I feel driven to write them, but, up till now, I haven’t thought much about my ideal reader or the impact I want my books to have on children. I want to know more. So for this new series of blogs conducted entirely through Twitter DMs, I decided to begin by asking the hyper talented author, Pádraig Kenny, about his thoughts on writers and their audience. Here goes!
Thank you to Pádraig for taking part. He can be found on Twitter at @padraig_kenny
orandoyle.com 
Great blog post Oran. Really resonated with me, my 8 year old daughter just started reading Tin last night with the book and the audio-book combined! She is loving it, so engrossed. On my Creative Writing for publication course I did a few years ago in the novel writing module we were all sent of with a pen and notebook to go outside and to describe our ideal reader, we had to picture him/her reading our novel. When we all returned and read the descriptions we had all without realising described ourselves, which of course was the exact point our tutor wanted to get across to us! I think all good writers somehow write for themselves. Great interview Oran, I think I’ll have to share it with my students in school. I really like the DM format of it too!
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I never heard of that exercise, but it makes total sense and sounds really worthwhile. I tried to decide for my current WIP who the target reader was after hearing those two audio books and certainly there were elements of me in that reader other than the age 🙂 Thanks a lot for your thoughtful response. Thrilled it connected with you.
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