Teenagers are in some ways the best readers because their imaginations haven’t been narrowed down by boring things like jobs and the realities of money and capitalism.
A huge potential audience, great interaction with your readers, the ability to see what people like and what they don’t, the ability to see how people respond to what you’re doing in real-time – there’s just tons of great stuff that you get by being online.
I’m looking forward to coming to SleuthFest I’ve heard so many good things about it from my writer friends. I’m looking forward to seeing my buddies and talking to readers who want to know about the way I work.
For commercial books in a genre, readers’ and editors’ expectations may be fairly rigid. Some romance lines, for instance, issue fairly detailed writers’ guidelines explaining exactly what must happen in a book they publish (and what must not).
My readers often tell me that what they admire about my books is my ability to write from so many points of view. My challenge to myself is whether I’ll ever be able to write a novel just from one point of view. It seems impossible.
I do have to earn a living, so I’m conscious of probable reactions from readers, but the most important one is still the awareness that if I’m not enjoying a story, the reader won’t either.
Misconceptions about Young Adult fiction aren’t new to fans of the genre. From being dismissed as mindless fluff for ‘Twilight’-obsessed tweens, to constant warnings that the genre is dying, kerfuffles between the media and readers occur with alarming regularity.
I think you become a writer when you stop writing for yourself or your teachers and start thinking about readers.
‘The Sisters Brothers’ has endeared so many prize juries because the Western format has more of a broad appeal and is familiar to readers.
If writers learn more from their books than do readers, perhaps I may have begun to learn.
I use these senses – touch, sight, feel and smell – as triggers that invite readers or propel them into the scene. The trick is not to make it obvious. I’ve written an entire chapter about this in my book, ‘The Successful Novelist.’ I’ve lectured about it extensively, but have yet to see many people pick up on it.
I like to spoof the original Gothic classics, so there is also good dose of comedy in the ‘Parasol Protectorate’ – giggling readers are good.
There’s an obvious marketing component to doing something digitally where you’re reaching out to new readers that you can’t do in the existing print marketplace, or that it’s difficult to do in the existing print marketplace.
‘Castaways’ was a play on what if a reality show like ‘Survivor’ was unknowingly set on an island inhabited by a sub-human race of creatures? Readers have often asked me to consider turning the short story into a full-length novel. So I did.
I like to write about things that fascinate me because I believe that they will also fascinate my readers as well.
Readers would email me and say, ‘Please write a novel about so-and-so,’ but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.
Thank you to the readers of the ‘Huffington Post’ for voting me the ‘Hottest Freshman’ of the 111th Congress. It’s about time politicians from Illinois were known for something other than bad haircuts or having the ability to walk on water.
The fundamentals for me are character and conflict. I put character first because readers will be indifferent to conflict if they are indifferent to the character who is experiencing it.
I am stunned by how much time and effort I must spend marketing my book and interacting with my readers. With social media, you don’t just publish a book and figure you’ve done your part; your fans want to talk to you, have a conversation.
All readers are tourists. We want to make sense of what we see and hear, to find the balance between what is unknown and what we can call ours.
I’m a fan of meeting readers face to face, at reader events, where we’re able to sit down and take some time to talk.
If you don’t go talk to your boss, if you don’t go talk to your mentors, if you don’t go talk to people who can influence where you want to be, then they don’t know. And they’re not mind readers.
Because even very young people are expert readers of pictures, you can convey very complex and subtle messages through pictures that you’d need loads of words to explain. Making a picture book is also a bit like making your own film – and you can make anything you want happen, however impossible!
Why does it appear that interested readers so often attribute flaws to ‘the press’ rather than taking particular issue with particular reports?
The ways in which readers encounter and relate to information is dramatically influenced by their education as well as their awareness of the pitfalls relating to the information source.
Other kids’ parents wouldn’t let them read magazines like ‘Weird Tales,’ but my folks were big readers themselves, so they didn’t mind.
A playwright must be his own audience. A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.
The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.
Readers who claim a preference for short-form over long often tell me it’s because they don’t have time to commit to a book-length chunk of writing.
One of the biggest complaints readers have about my work is that I don’t tell them often enough what they can do. I do think this is an area where journalism sometimes falls short. We describe a really grim situation but don’t really explain to people what they can do about it.
I’ve put everything I had and I’ve given my readers 120 percent, and that’s the truth.
A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
The columnists have a very personal relationship with their readers, and the readers deserve to hear directly from the columnists.
With Jack Abramoff under indictment, a number of readers have suggested that now he might flip and try to offer the feds some figures higher up the food-chain.
All writers I know are readers first and foremost, and that’s why you become a writer.
Lord Chamberlain’s readers or controllers, which were a handful of people working directly to him, were a very assorted group of people and some of them tried very hard to be as liberal as they could.
Inevitably, most readers come to John Cheever’s ‘Journals’ via his fiction. Whatever value they might have in their own right, their viability as a publishing proposition was conditional on the interest of the large readership of his novels and stories.
As society diversifies, the number of people who read literature is decreasing. It will be difficult for readers to digest my ideas through literature.
You have to have passion for a subject to write about it. You can’t expect your readers to feel any excitement if it’s nothing but a boring writing exercise for you.
It’s interesting with my blog, because it feels to me less like a blog and more like a forum, because my readers are so funny and leave hysterical comments. And I’m not being humble when I say that very often, the comments are so much better than the post originally was.
If the characters are compelling, readers will follow anywhere.
America is full of readers of all different sorts who love books in many different ways, and I keep meeting them. And I think editors should look after them, and make less effort to please people who don’t actually like books.
I might seem biased, but I use Evernote every day. It came to me through my readers, who I’d asked for software recommendations via Twitter and Facebook. For seemingly every function, the answer was ‘Man, you have to use Evernote.’
The distinctions of what makes a book one genre or another can sometimes be a bit muddy, but generally it’s a matter of projecting who the audience will be, which is a judgment that’s based on the subject matter. ‘Mainstream’ is the cleanest label for a book that draws readers of both sexes and from a wide age-range.
One decision I made in writing ‘Henry and Clara’ was that I would keep Lincoln’s appearances and any dialogue by him to an absolute minimum, because I think readers don’t quite believe it when novelists have Lincoln walking around and saying things. They just know they’re in the presence of stage machinery.
Readers can read what they want and easily switch to other books, so we’re seeing a lot of reading behaviors. Some verticals attract different usage than others. We can spot reading patterns.
Readers in general are not fond of dialect, and I don’t blame them. I’ve read books myself that I’ve had to put down because sounding out every speech gave me a headache.
Indie bookstores love writers as much as they love readers, and there is something about a community store, where you walk in, you feel known, and the delight in books is just infectious.
I always like to entertain, first of all, and if the readers take anything away from it that helps them with their own lives, well then, that is a bonus.
Newspapers with declining circulations can complain all they want about their readers and even say they have no taste. But you will still go out of business over time. A newspaper is not a public trust – it has a business model that either works or it doesn’t.
