Timothy's Thoughts

W hat is our responsibility as writers and to whom are we responsible? The other day, I fellow writer posted a letter she received from a dissatisfied reader. She also posted her response and asked for comments. Within those comments, a question was raised about an author’s responsibility to a reader. If you read the post, you know that the author attempted to be gracious in her reply, even though the reader accused her of “defiling her daughter.” As writers, we’re going to offend some people and some of them are going to write us letters. They make rack us over the coals for something we said that they dislike. What we must be prepared to address answer is what our responsibility is in these situations and why. The Basis of Responsibility Before we can determine what the writer’s responsibility is, we must first determine the basis of that responsibility. Perhaps we could say that the writer has a responsibility to the readers because they purchased the book. (At least we hope they ha...

T hree heavy hitters in the marketing community went at it this week. It began with Chris Anderson's book, Free . The second heavy hitter, Malcolm Gladwell, wrote a review for The New Yorker titled Priced To Sell: Is free the future? . His review disagreed with much of what Chris Anderson said in his book. Gradwell's claim being that no matter how cheap individual units of something become, the infrastructure of producing the whole will be too large to truly make them free. On Tuesday, Seth Godin came to Anderson's defense with his post, Malcolm is Wrong . So, who is right? Are Chris Anderson and Seth Godin correct that we will reach the point where information is so cheap that we might as well give it away? Have we reached the point? Or is Malcolm Gladwell correct that the cost of generating and delivering the information will prevent us from offering it for free? What was it your mother told you? There is no free lunch. I definitely am going to have to side with Malc...

H ow do you handle criticism? As writers, we open ourselves up for it. We labor over some of the decisions we make with our writing, from what our characters like to the theme of our books to whether to self-publish or traditionally publish. It is all open to scrutiny and every writer has his share of praise and criticism. We love the praise, but the criticism is hard to take. It might be better if we don’t handle criticism the way mediabistro.com reports Alice Hoffman reacted to a less than ideal review . Allegedly, she chose to respond by Tweeting the reviewer’s phone number and e-mail address, encouraging her fans to respond to the review. I can think of worse things she could have done, but the word for this is vengeance . She later apologized . I’m sure most of us have looked at something someone said or did that we didn’t like and thought, “I’m going to make him pay. He’ll regret he ever did that.” If I were to guess, that is what I believe must have been going through Alice Hof...