What If You Never Figure Out What Readers Want?

How do you write what people actually want to read?

I could probably produce a list of techniques, study search results, examine analytics, look at successful writers, and pretend I have discovered a formula. The problem is that my own experience would contradict me. I have not figured out what people want to read, and I am not going to pretend otherwise simply because pretending would make the answer easier to write.

My books do not sell in high volume. My website does not generate the subscription numbers that would allow me to claim I have built some great audience-development strategy. I have not made meaningful money from my writing, and I do not receive enough feedback to know consistently why one piece reaches someone while another disappears almost unnoticed. If success is measured primarily by traffic, sales, subscribers, comments, and recognition, then I am probably the wrong person to teach anyone how to write what people want to read.

Yet I continue writing, which raises a more interesting question for me. If the audience is uncertain, the money is limited, the feedback is scarce, and I have never found the magical niche writers are constantly told they need, why do I keep doing it? That question gets much closer to what writing has become in my life.

Feedback Matters, but Validation Is Something Else

I do not write because I need strangers to tell me that I am intelligent, talented, profound, or worthy of being heard. Recognition would be pleasant, of course, and I am human enough to appreciate it when somebody tells me that something I wrote mattered to them. But if validation were the fuel, I would have run out a long time ago. There simply has not been enough of it to explain why I continue producing articles, manuscripts, notes, dictations, and books.

Feedback is different because feedback gives me information. A reader can show me that something I believed was obvious was never actually explained. Someone can disagree with an argument and expose an assumption I failed to examine. A comment can reveal that a sentence I considered minor was the sentence another person remembered. Even criticism can become useful when it tells me something about the distance between what I intended to communicate and what another human being actually received.

I sometimes joke that no feedback must be good feedback because, if the books were terrible enough, surely somebody would have complained by now. I know that is convenient reasoning. Silence does not tell me whether someone loved the work, disliked it, abandoned it halfway through, downloaded it and forgot about it, or carried one sentence with them for months without ever telling me. Metrics can count certain behaviors, but they cannot completely explain what happened inside another person after reading.

That leaves me with an uncomfortable balance. I cannot worship the numbers, but I cannot use philosophy as an excuse to ignore them either. If people consistently leave a page early, if a title attracts nobody, or if readers cannot understand what I am trying to say, those are publishing problems worth examining. Wanting better distribution does not mean I suddenly need validation. It means that if I believe something is worth sharing, I also have a responsibility to learn how to share it better.

My Biggest Publishing Problem May Be My Curiosity

One of the first pieces of advice given to anyone building an audience is to find a niche. I understand why. A reader should have some idea what they are going to find when they return, and a website becomes easier to explain when its subjects fit neatly beneath a recognizable category. My problem is that my curiosity has never behaved very well inside categories.

I read philosophy, psychology, technology, politics, economics, religion, leadership, history, and whatever else happens to interrupt something I thought I understood. Recently I can move from Dostoevsky to Aristotle or Plato, then find myself reading about nature or horses, and later spend an hour thinking about artificial intelligence. I have read the Bible multiple times in English and Spanish. I have spent weeks examining the life of a fruit fly, and I once spent most of a day thinking about the value of zero because somehow zero became more interesting the longer I thought about what nothing actually means.

That range is useful to me intellectually, but I recognize that it complicates publishing. A person who discovers me through an article on leadership may not care about Dostoevsky. Someone interested in psychology may have no interest in theology. A reader who comes for philosophy may wonder why I am suddenly examining organizational systems, technology, or economics. From a marketing perspective, I can see the problem clearly.

The difficulty is deciding what I am supposed to remove. Life itself does not remain inside one discipline. Psychology touches philosophy. Philosophy reaches ethics. Ethics enters leadership. Leadership affects economics, organizations, families, and politics. Technology changes how all of those systems operate. Once I begin following a question honestly, I often end up somewhere I did not expect when I started, and forcing the answer back into a predetermined niche can become another way of deciding the conclusion before completing the examination.

Perhaps that breadth will always limit my audience. I have to be willing to accept that possibility rather than turning general curiosity into some heroic claim that being broad automatically makes the work better. It does not. Breadth can create incoherence just as easily as insight. My responsibility is to make the relationships understandable enough that the reader can follow why I moved from one subject to another.

The More I Learn, the Less Finished I Feel

At forty-two, approaching the completion of a Bachelor of Arts in psychology with a concentration in industrial-organizational psychology, I have reached a strange place in my education. I know considerably more psychology than I knew when I began the degree, but increased knowledge has not created the feeling of intellectual completion I might once have expected. In many ways it has done the opposite.

The scientific side of psychology matters to me. Research methods matter. Evidence matters. Definitions matter because changing a definition halfway through an argument can completely change the conclusion while making it appear that nothing changed at all. Yet studying psychology has also made the philosophical questions more difficult to avoid because understanding a theory about human behavior is not the same thing as understanding a human being.

That distinction follows me into my own life. I can know what I should do and still remember times when I did something else. I can understand consequences and still recognize decisions I made despite knowing those consequences. That leaves me with a question I cannot solve simply by reading another textbook: Why, when we know what is right, do we sometimes still choose what is wrong?

I can study another theory, learn another concept, read another philosopher, or examine another psychological explanation. Each one may give me another angle, but none of them automatically closes the question. The deeper I go, the more visible my own failures, assumptions, contradictions, and incomplete conclusions become. That is probably one of the reasons writing continues to generate more writing.

Writing Gives My Thinking Somewhere to Fail

Writing has become therapeutic for me, and I mean that as a description of my own experience rather than a clinical claim. Thoughts can move very quickly inside my head, especially when one subject connects to several others at once. Writing slows that movement enough for me to see what I am actually doing with the thought.

Once an argument is on the page, I can examine it in a way that is much harder when it exists only internally. I can notice that I changed the meaning of a word. I can see that I judged someone by a principle I have not consistently applied to myself. I can discover that something I called knowledge was actually familiarity, or that something I defended as certainty depended on an assumption I never questioned.

That is where writing becomes more than communication for me. Sometimes I begin a piece believing I know where it is going and discover halfway through that my original conclusion cannot survive my own questions. I would rather experience that discomfort than preserve an idea simply because it belonged to me first.

The strange part is that this makes writing harder rather than easier. The more I learn, the more often I have to revisit earlier ideas because I understand them differently now. I do not see that as evidence that the earlier writing was worthless. It is evidence that the person who wrote it had not stopped developing.

Publishing Something and Reaching People Are Different Skills

I have published six books. Three were eventually removed from the market, while three remain available now. Some have had international ebook downloads and some sales, but I have never invested heavily enough in advertising or distribution to pretend that the commercial results measure the full value of creating them.

For me, publication itself has carried meaning because I know what existed before the book existed. There were scattered thoughts, voice dictations, unfinished arguments, corrections, abandoned versions, questions, research, and moments when I realized I no longer agreed with something I had written earlier. Bringing all of that into a completed manuscript is an accomplishment even when the finished book never becomes commercially successful.

Distribution is another discipline, and I am still learning it. Writing the work, packaging the work, helping people discover the work, and convincing someone that the work deserves their time are related activities, but they are not identical skills. My mistake would be assuming that because I value the writing, readers are somehow obligated to find it.

That also explains why I still hesitate when calling myself a writer or author. After six published books and years of academic writing across computer science and psychology, the evidence is beginning to make that hesitation somewhat ridiculous. What I may actually resist is the idea that accepting the word author requires believing I have mastered writing, because I know how far I remain from that conclusion.

So What Do People Actually Want to Read?

I still cannot answer that question for everyone, and perhaps that is where I went wrong whenever I tried. “People” is an enormous category. Different readers arrive carrying different experiences, questions, needs, interests, patience, education, fears, and expectations. Trying to discover what everyone wants may be so broad that the question becomes almost useless.

I can answer a different question. Once another person gives me a few minutes of their life, what do I owe them? I owe them an idea that has been examined rather than merely announced. I owe them enough clarity that they can understand what I am trying to say, enough honesty to distinguish what I know from what I believe, and enough humility to admit where the answer remains unfinished.

I also owe them the possibility of correction. If new evidence, better reasoning, or a deeper understanding shows me that something I published no longer survives examination, then protecting my previous words cannot become more important than learning from them. I would rather have a body of work that shows intellectual development than a perfectly consistent record created by pretending I never misunderstood anything.

So I still do not know the magical way to write what people actually want to read. I am learning how to make titles better, how to make ideas easier to find, how to understand distribution, and how to recognize what readers respond to without allowing those measurements to determine every question I am permitted to ask. Perhaps the question that matters most to me is more manageable anyway: How do I make what I write worth the time of the person who chose to read it?

That one I can continue working on.

By Orlando J. Alvarez | The Resilient Philosopher