Yesterday, a friend of mine wrote about meeting an author she'd long admired and how the response to her passionate enthusiasm was, essentially, dickish
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I worked at an extremely large independent bookstore for ten years in the 80's and 90's and I saw an array of author's responses to the fans. Clive Barker was one of the nicest, warmest people I've ever met in terms of fans. His books sold themselves pretty much.
I personally was quite fond of an author who's books I had just discovered while I was there. I used to go out of my way to push his books personally because I thought his writing was so clever and entertaining. So that's maybe 2-4 (sometimes even 5!) of his titles a month. Then I met him. He was so rude to me I could hardly believe it. Suffice it to say - I didn't sell any more of his books while I was there. Let's calculate the kind of loss that turned out to be. This happened in my 3rd year there. 84 months of losing sales of between 2 and 4 books a month for the remainder of my career there. Plus I told everyone how shabbily he treated me (so that might have created some more non-recommendations.) And I was just one person. I wonder if he has noticed that he's not really hitting the bestseller list anymore? Probably not because he is so self absorbed. He was not a genre writer. Maybe that was the problem. All the science fiction and fantasy writers I met during that time were quite kind.
I personally was quite fond of an author who's books I had just discovered while I was there. I used to go out of my way to push his books personally because I thought his writing was so clever and entertaining. So that's maybe 2-4 (sometimes even 5!) of his titles a month. Then I met him. He was so rude to me I could hardly believe it. Suffice it to say - I didn't sell any more of his books while I was there. Let's calculate the kind of loss that turned out to be. This happened in my 3rd year there. 84 months of losing sales of between 2 and 4 books a month for the remainder of my career there. Plus I told everyone how shabbily he treated me (so that might have created some more non-recommendations.) And I was just one person. I wonder if he has noticed that he's not really hitting the bestseller list anymore? Probably not because he is so self absorbed.
He was not a genre writer. Maybe that was the problem. All the science fiction and fantasy writers I met during that time were quite kind.
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