♦Welcome to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop!♦
Topic #79
Write a letter to your fans.
Welcome back to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop! If you’re new to the series, the authors included are grateful for your reads and appreciate, even more so, when you share our writings with your friends. If you’re new to the series, welcome aboard. The authors engage and impress weekly. Be prepared to become a regular reader.
I’d rather address this letter to a wider swath, my readers. You each deserve my thanks, whether you liked my work or not. You took the time to review my work, the work I poured hundreds of hours into, if not thousands. It’s through you those words I filed onto a page become living breathing things. Ultimately it is up to you what each character looks like and if they’re sympathetic or not. I can only say so much to persuade your opinions. Each of you, dear readers, comes to the table with your own backgrounds, intertexts, and rationality. I cannot force you to see things my way, and that wouldn’t benefit either of us.
The feedback from these moments, when our lives touch, have been nothing but beneficial to me. I hold your praise and your criticism on balanced scales. There are times when criticism is more necessary to my endeavors than is praise, but praise is the food that keeps an artist from quitting. The praise leads us to where we went right, and where we connected in a way that is encouraging. Criticism is crucial in shaping my skills, giving me more of which to consider, and a path to the next steps I must make to grow as an artist.
I often wonder if the reader understands how integral they are in the making of a book. You might think, well, a book is already made by the time I get to it. I didn’t do anything to get it there. A book might be on the shelf but does it truly exist until someone picks it up and reads the pages that make it up? Once you read one of an author’s work, and should you like it, don’t you go to find more? Reading not only makes a book real, it encourages an author to produce more.
The past several years have been tough on all our wallets. It’s hard to come up with the cash to put down on recreational items. Many ignore books, though they cost about as much as a Blu-Ray in print, and little more than a single in e-formats. Both versions give hours more entertainment than a two hour film or four minute song, and they can be reread and enjoyed again as much as these other products. So to those who picked up a copy of my book, whether in paper or electronic, thank you. I understand that might have been you skipping coffee or even lunch out that week. I go through much the same conundrums. Each sale means I draw closer to being able to produce another book. When sales are stagnant, I have to pull the funds from other areas, and that hits the very little extraneous money I have. It takes me years to get together enough to produce a book–the editing, proofing, covers, marketing all cost. So your contribution through buying a book means the world to me, and it allows us to connect once more through story.
I hope you understand, dear reader, how important you are to an author. They may not always voice this thanks aloud, but it shows in the pages they produce from the moment you meet them into the future.
Take a moment and read what the other authors wanted to say to their readers…
