Mark Edwards - Author Guest Post - Relationship between writers and readers

I am delighted to welcome crime fiction author Mark Edwards to the blog today! 

Mark has written a guest post all about the relationship an author has with their readers - would love to know your thoughts about this.

I Want You to Shout it from the Highest Mountain Top…

a guest post by author Mark Edwards

Recently, this meme sprung up on the web and was shared and commented on by numerous writers.

Entitled ‘The Care and Feeding of an Author on Amazon’ it asks readers who have enjoyed a book to share it on social networks, write a review and like it on Amazon. The idea is that by doing this you help to keep authors whose work you have enjoyed ‘fed’ so they will and can write more books for you to enjoy.

This made me think about my own relationship with my readers and what we writers expect from the people who enjoy our books, and vice versa. Of course, ‘expect’ is a strong word. It’s more what we would like to happen. Or rather, seeing as we writers are a needy bunch who crave praise like vampires crave blood, it’s what we would love to happen.

Until recently, readers had little access to the writers whose books they read, and little opportunity to share their opinion of their books. Cast your minds back to the mid-nineties, before Amazon was founded, long before Facebook and Twitter existed. Back then, a book would be published, the writer might go on a tour of bookshops and festivals, and very keen fans might write letters using these antiquated tools called paper and pens. Apart from encounters at signings and the occasional receipt of a letter, the only feedback writers received was from professional critics and their mums.

Then, as now, the most powerful marketing tool was word of mouth. Back then, it was really was passed from mouth to ear. Most of the books I read in my teens had been recommended to me by friends or family, or because I’d read about them in a magazine or paper. You recommended a book to one person at a time rather than tweeting about it to your thousand followers.

When I walked into a bookshop to browse the shelves, I had to trust the blurbs on the back of books. I had no way of knowing what the masses thought about this book in the way I do now, when I can skim the reviews on Amazon or Goodreads, or Google bloggers’ reviews. 

The internet changed everything for books and writers. Now, we writers are available 24 hours a day for readers to chat to. Most of us have websites, Facebook accounts, Twitter, Goodreads… We are easy to reach and communicate with. I personally respond to every reader who contacts me or tweets about one of my books, usually within hours or minutes.  On the Louise Voss and Mark Edwards Facebook page, I chat with readers every day. For me, it’s a hugely enjoyable part of being a writer.

Then there is that double-edged sword: the Amazon/Goodreads review. Now anyone can express their opinion – it’s like walking into that old-fashioned bookshop and finding thirty people standing by each book telling you what they thought about it. For writers, this is scary. When you notice that your review count has changed, you scroll nervously down the page, eyes half-averted, to see whether it’s a five-star winner or a one-star stinker, ecstasy or agony following.

Apart from the effect of all this on writers’ egos, and how much easier it is to contact authors, social media and reviews have a strong practical effect – and can make the difference between whether or not a book is a hit. There are so many books published every week, both traditionally and self-published, that getting noticed is a huge challenge. Most books vanish without trace, including many great books, because most readers don’t know they exist. It is not true that cream always rises. Yes, a book needs to be good – to connect with a lot of people – in order to break out, but the hard part is letting people know it exists.

This is why Sherry Snider, the creator of ‘The Care and Feeding of an Author…’, put together that graphic. Because she understands, as an author herself, how much we writers need our ‘fans’. If you don’t have a huge marketing budget, you are completely reliant on people spreading the word for you. So every good review, every tweet, every Facebook share, every face-to-face recommendation – they all make a difference.

In America, some writers have street teams – groups of fans who they ‘employ’ to spread the word about their books. They send the members of their teams free books, bookmarks, name characters after them in books, send them vouchers and so on, in return for favours, which could involve telling everyone they know about their books and asking their local bookshop to stock them.

Hugh Howey, author of Wool, has said that a large part of his success was being nice to his readers. He says writers should not concentrate on trying to get new readers but on nurturing those you have. This is a simple rule of business – your best customers are your existing ones, and it’s interesting to see a writer talking about his fans in such a way.

So what do you think? If you are on this blog, you must be a book reader. You must have favourite authors. Do you think that it’s fair for authors to expect so much? Do you resent being asked to share and help. Do you do it anyway? Or has this article made you think that you should do more to spread the word about authors you love? I’d love to hear what you think.

Many thanks to Mark for this very topical post. Please do share your views in the comments.

Mark Edwards’ most recent book is The Magpies, a psychological thriller about neighbours from hell, which is currently in the Amazon top twenty. If you have read it and liked it, please tell all your friends! Mark has also written three novels with fellow writer Louise Voss.

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