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Fantastic—based on the quotes, images, and your creative framing (especially the monastic, literary, and metaphysical climax of The Name of the Rose), here’s a complete audience profile and storytelling strategy using Lisa Cron’s “Story or Die” template, with inspiration from Sebastian De Grazia and Umberto Eco:
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🎯 Target Audience Profile for The Name of the Rose (Book)
✨ This is what matters most to my audience right now:
Reclaiming the sacred experience of thought in a distracted, commodified world.
This audience feels increasingly alienated by algorithmic culture, clickbait, and the loss of sustained attention. They seek resonance, not reaction. They want time to contemplate mortality, truth, and authority without being interrupted by notifications.
Think: someone who posts about “Slow Reading,” photographs marginalia, and tweets excerpts from Walter Benjamin or Monastic Rule.
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🌀 This is what my audience most desires in order to become their most authentic self:
To become a kind of “lay monk” of intellect and discernment.
They aspire to live meaningfully in ambiguity, to surround themselves with books, candlelight, mystery, and language. Not for escape, but for ethical and epistemological grounding. They are drawn to the idea of mystical literacy—to know something not just because it’s written, but because it echoes through history and paradox.
“They want to know how to live when the library burns, and still leave behind a page that glows.”
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😨 This is what my audience most fears:
That they’ll never recover the ability to think slowly, or that the truth has become too fragile to matter.
They fear not only the rise of lies and noise but their own internal erosion—of not being able to hold complexity. They fear their attention has been permanently fractured, and that they will be forgotten by the very traditions that once formed them.
Think: late-night Googling “best translations of Aquinas,” but still scrolling Instagram ten minutes later.
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🔁 This is what my audience is doing now instead of the ultimate thing I want them to do:
Consuming YouTube explainers, spiritual podcasts, and TikTok book talk instead of committing to difficult, cloistered books.
They long for immersive worlds like Eco’s but instead reach for shallow approximations. They might romanticize medieval imagery or follow “aesthetic Catholicism” trends online, yet avoid the rigor of engaging with actual texts like The Name of the Rose.
They are playing at wisdom rather than risking despair to discover it.
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🧠 Call to Action: “Read this book not to solve the mystery, but to live in it.”
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✅ How will my call to action benefit my audience based on their specific worldview?
It will reintegrate their craving for beauty, truth, and mystery with the patient, sacred labor of thinking. The Name of the Rose gives them the language of gems, the thrill of semiotic puzzles, and the ache of moral ambiguity—all inside a story that invites contemplation, not content.
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⚔️ What beliefs do they have that I’ll be butting up against?
• That truth must be either fully knowable or not worth the effort.
• That beauty is ornamental, not epistemological.
• That reading slowly is a luxury they no longer have time for.
• That history is inaccessible unless packaged for them.
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💎 Based on their worldview, how will the change I want them to make help them become their most authentic self?
It will affirm their suspicion that meaning takes time, and that the very act of enduring through the book’s slow, echoing labyrinth is a form of resistance to modern intellectual erosion.
By choosing to remain with the monk’s last words, with William’s failed optimism, and with Adso’s luminous regret, they fulfill their longing to belong to a sacred lineage of seekers—not by blood, but by curiosity, humility, and doubt.
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✍️ Summary Sentence (Audience POV):
“I want to be the kind of person who reads slowly enough to grieve a burned library and still trust in the unfinished work of ideas.”
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Would you like a one-page poster-style persona based on this? I can create a character profile (“Wanda for Monastic Maximalists”) or write a promotional epigraphic blurb in Eco’s voice.
