When it comes to the success of your book, one person is more important than everyone else. He determines whether readers will enjoy your book. He determines if word of mouth will spread. He is ultimately funding your whole project. His name is Timothy.  Who is Timothy, and where do you find him? I talk about Timothy a lot, but somehow, I’ve never recorded an episode or written about him.  Avatar, Persona, or Timothy? Avatar Most companies have what they call a customer avatar, a fictional amalgamation of their target customer. Some companies even print out life-sized stock photos of their customer and bring her to meetings just to make sure they’re keeping her interests in mind.  Radio stations also have a listener avatar that the hosts and DJs talk to between songs. If you think the DJ is talking directly to you, I don’t mean to disappoint you, but they’re not. They’re talking to their avatar, and you happen to be smack dab in the middle of their target audience. Persona When I ran a web design agency, I took hundreds of authors through a persona worksheet. In a one-on-one meeting, I’d ask them to describe their target reader and ideal website visitor. I encouraged the author to print out a stock photo of their target reader and tape the photo to their computer monitor.  I no longer recommend this practice.  To create a persona, almost every author would simply describe themselves in generic terms. If I was talking to a 45-year-old man, he would say he was writing to “men between the ages of 30 and 50.” If I was talking to a 60-year-old woman, she would say she was writing to “women between the ages of 40 and 70.”  It turns out most authors weren’t describing readers at all. They were describing themselves. At the end of the persona exercise, they had created an imaginary version of themselves who liked everything they wrote. Creating an imaginary friend didn’t help authors make better marketing decisions.  And yet, personas and customer avatars are incredibly helpful for companies. So why didn’t the persona exercise work for most authors?  The Problem with Personas and Avatars I concluded that creating a reader avatar didn’t work for authors because they couldn’t afford the market research that big companies use to create good customer avatars.  Marketing-centric companies often invest in market research to develop their customer avatars. Sales-centric companies have salespeople who spend hundreds of hours talking to customers. Salespeople are well acquainted with customers and can help companies build an accurate avatar based on their experience. Market research and customer interaction give companies enough information to create useful fictional representations of their target customers. In contrast, beginning authors don’t spend much time talking to their target readers. Authors aren’t typically involved in book clubs. They don’t interview readers or buy market research data from companies like K-lytics (Affiliate Link), even though I highly recommend K-lytics. Instead, authors look inside themselves, searching for information that can only be found by looking outward toward others.