"a perfect reader and a potential friend"

April 4, 2022 12:28 PM

"I’ll be remembering her for the rest of my life. I never met her." Author Celia Lake grieves a reader and critic who deeply understood her work, writing of "this tremendous gap in my life now that feels impossible to find words for".
posted by brainwane (5 comments total)

Wanting to be this kind of reader for authors is why if I really connect to a book I try to drop the author a direct email.
posted by potrzebie at 1:27 PM on April 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

This is such a lovely tribute. It reminds me of the article posted here a few weeks (months?) ago by a music reviewer who write a memorial post about a longtime reader he had connected with.

It must be so nice to feel seen as an author (as she puts it). It can be so isolating to toil away at your book and then send it out into the world and wonder how your readers feel when they read it.

A few months ago, on a total whim, I wrote an email to the author of a book I had read in 2021 and . He has his personal email address on his official author page, so I just wrote him an email and told him how much I loved his book. To my surprise, he emailed me back and expressed genuine happiness that I had liked his book so much and that I had taken the time to write and tell him.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 3:29 PM on April 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

As an occasional author (working on books 19 and 20 right now), more than half of my books have gone out into the world--some from major publishers--to no response at all: no reviews, no feedback, no emails from readers, just silence. Sometimes some royalties. And then I might go to a convention and meet someone who tells me that one of my titles, out of print for a decade, means a lot to them, and it's an amazing feeling tinged with nostalgia and regret, because they probably remember more about the content than I do. And then I accidentally spell their name wrong as I'm signing it and ruin everything.

Back in the early 90s I wrote several books about Sonic the Hedgehog. They were done to corset-tight deadlines, some under pseudonyms, and flung out onto the market by publishers who seemed eager to see the back of them. I thought they were decent tales, but I always suspected I was the only person who did. I did receive letters from maybe three or four readers, and I'm pretty sure two were written as part of primary school English assignments.

Then last year--almost thirty years later--a contact on Twitter mentioned that they'd bought a copy of Sonic in the Fourth Dimension by Martin Adams (one of mine) on eBay, on the recommendation of a Sonic podcast. They had no idea I'd written it. It turns out that the book did find an audience, to the extent that two podcasters were creating content for their Patreon backers by reading through it and commenting on it, a chapter an episode, partly because it had been a book they'd loved as kids. The very last thing in my mind as I was writing those books was any inkling of posterity or legacy but it seems that against all odds they've found a place in a footnote of popular culture. Maybe they are decent tales after all. And it's wonderful to know that they were read and enjoyed and have stayed in people's minds, but if I'd had more of a sense of that back in the day then I might have written more books and developed my style and technique, and made more of a career of it.

So yes, if an author you like has their contact details on their website, it is a quiet invitation to drop them a line and I recommend you do.
posted by Hogshead at 4:56 PM on April 4, 2022 [22 favorites]

I wrote exactly one fan letter in my teenage years, to an author whose work spoke to my soul in this way. A month later I got a handwritten thank-you letter from him in the mail. I still have it somewhere.

So it was something a little more than disappointing when a couple decades later he was publicly revealed to be gross.
posted by catesbie at 7:40 PM on April 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ah, that was lovely. I spent about 15 years contributing and editting distributed community [one work, one home] newsletters; getting better at writing book reviews and commentary in the 700 word = 5 min aloud range. To the nearest whole number these pieces were never acknowledged by readers . . . unless they came out a few days before the community facetime AGM. I worked the room at those events, trying to persuade my peers that what they had to say had to go in the newsletter; but few paid heed. It took a while to appreciate that doing the writing was its own satisfaction [being editor was great because I'd always accept my own copy] and that any external validation was icing. I try harder now to write/say thanks when I like something.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:11 AM on April 6, 2022