I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language, I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.
I’m not working on the Great American Novel. All I am doing, I hope, is entertaining readers.
When I began writing in the mid-1960s, I thought it was not important for readers to know whether I was male or female. Also, I was a great admirer of E.B. White, so I may have thought that it would bring me luck to submit my first manuscript as ‘E.L.’ But if I were starting out today, I would use my first name.
My intent is not to inflame Muslims but to entertain readers of great thrillers. At the end of the day, I want people to see a good protagonist struggle against serious odds and do so with courage and honor and integrity.
If chick-lit really is taking a commercial battering, I’d suggest it’s because the marketing has been done to death. Covering everything in girlie pink and putting chocolate in the title may once have been a clever Pavlovian device but now makes readers feel a bit sick.
Readers often bring a different set of criteria to the work based on the format.
I have been a reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy for a long time, since I was 11 or 12 I think, so I understand it and I’m not at all surprised that readers of the genre might enjoy my books.
It’s fun for me to try to write concise, compact things. It’s a very good exercise for me. And I think it’s important to try to do different things – change what I write about, and also the way I write. Otherwise, I’d just be repeating myself, which wouldn’t be good for me or fair to my readers.
My strips are not always funny, and they can be pretty grim at times, and I know I lose readers because of it, but I can’t do anything about it – my work is very much connected to something I need to do in order to feel stable.
Sonia Sotomayor has lived a remarkable life, and her achievements will prove an inspiration to readers around the world.
I have a variety of readers from across the diasporic community, not just from South Asia. I like to write large stories that include all of us – about common and cohesive experiences which bring together many immigrants, their culture shocks, transformations, concepts of home and self in a new land.
I have been commissioned to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974.
The number one reason I write is to come to schools and see my readers. I would do it for free.
The Web critic relies on his or her readers for attentiveness and approval.
Soon after publishing a book for kids, my mailbox began to fill with letters from children all across America. Not because my novels for young readers are bestsellers – they’re not by a long shot – but because today’s kids love to write to authors.
Both my mum and dad were great readers, and we would go every Saturday morning to the library, and my sister and I had a library card when we could pass off something as a signature, and all of us would come with an armful of books.
As white authors, bloggers, and readers, we must stop promoting diversity as a business opportunity or a chance to buy ally points with our disposable income.
For a genre that’s about looking to the future, science fiction has sure been looking backwards lately. Nostalgia is what sells best, with readers spending their money on movie tie-in novels and sequels to long-running series.
It feels wonderful to get praise from other authors who I admire, but with each new book, my confidence is always the thing I struggle with the most until I start getting positive feedback from readers.
What I care about is readers because without readers I can’t make a living… And I think it’s a bad thing for the world if people don’t read anymore. I want people to read a lot.
If you can pay enough people to buy your .99 ebook and review it positively, and crack one of Amazon’s bestseller lists, readers are going to check it out. Especially at a low price point like .99. Customers are suckers for the fallacy that the cream rises to the top.
However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory -not on the order of actual occurrence.
If I present a boring personal life to my readers, it’s going to be harder for them to think of my novels as thrilling.
I cannot just write a frivolous book, a la-di-da book. Everything isn’t la-di-da. There is something that’s going to pull you up short. I want to reassure young readers. I want to comfort them, to not fear the unexpected.
The most important thing is readers. I’ve got a huge Twitter following, but I don’t really think it sells books; I don’t think a huge Facebook following sells books – although these things aren’t bad, of course.
I really think that in the media world that we live in now, especially for writers, it has to be a conversation. With very few exceptions, it can’t be this one-way, ‘Here I am on the mountaintop preaching to all of you great unwashed readers in hopes of saving you.’ It doesn’t work that way.
I just have to trust that the story is going to shake out in such a way that’s going to be palatable to readers.
But because we’ve all been readers, we know what the experience is like, and we hope that what certain writers have given to us, we will give to someone.
An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while.
The problem with ‘Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark’ was that it was designed to be a PG-13 movie. It was literally a horror movie for a younger generation. I was trying to do the film equivalent of teenage, young adult readers, and when they gave it an R rating, the movie couldn’t sustain an R.
Sometimes people ask if my books have morals or lessons for readers, and I shudder at that thought. I always say that I have more questions than answers.
I’ve always been interested in setting my stories against a big event, the importance of which my younger readers are slowly becoming aware of as they move into their teens.
If you read in front of your kids, it’s very likely that they’ll become readers, too.
Whether it’s viewers of the show or readers of my columns and books, I’m consistently impressed with their wit, humor and insight. That goes for about 95 percent of the audience. The other five percent are why the ‘Delete’ option and restraining orders were invented.
People forget that writers start off being readers. We all love it when we find a terrific read, and we want to let people know about it.
For a lot of readers these days, a book is something you have to agree or disagree with. But you can’t agree with a novel. For my generation, it was assumed that a book is a dramatic thing, that the eye of the book is not telling you what to think.
I love connecting with readers!
I wrote for so many years in a bubble, the way everyone does, and there were large swaths of time where you think you’re doing this for nothing. An audience is crucial, a back and forth with the invisible readers.
Web publishing can create common spaces; it all depends on how we, the readers and sometimes the producers, react to technological change. If we sort ourselves into narrow groups, common spaces will be in big trouble. But there’s no reason not to have common spaces on the Internet. There are lots of them out there.
I’ve been told by readers that they love how my heroes fall in love fast, first, and with conviction.
Some readers may be disturbed that I wrote ‘The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson’ in Emily’s own voice. I wasn’t trying to steal her thunder or her music. I simply wanted to imagine my way into the head and heart of Emily Dickinson.
Again and again, Primo Levi’s work is described as indispensable, essential, necessary. None of those terms overstate the case, but they do prepare readers new to Levi for a forbiddingly educative experience, making him a writer unlike all others and the experience of reading him a chore. Which it isn’t.
I find my readers to be very smart, and there is no reason to write dumb.
Readers, like writers, are essentially amoral. Arm’s length will never do. We want to get closer.
I think that artists, at a certain point, can either become defiant and say that the audience is wrong, readers don’t get them, and they’re going to keep doing it their own way, or they can listen to the criticism – and not necessarily blindly follow the audience’s requests and advice.
I care a great deal about LGBT U.S. servicemen and women being able to serve openly and honestly. Since early in my career, I’ve included realistic LGBT characters in my books. The idea that a gay Navy SEAL had to hide who he was in order to serve was a terrible one – and I made sure my readers knew that!
Kids who are nine, 10 and 11 are pretty sophisticated readers; they know that there isn’t always a good outcome every time and that problems don’t always have solutions.
For the readers out there, if your girlfriend says she’s having a girls’ weekend, do not show up with a bottle of rose. No one wants to see your face there.
By helping readers understand these mechanics, I hope they will appreciate why freedom is for everyone, why it is essential for our security and why the free world plays a critically important role in advancing democracy around the globe.
