You’ve Got Mail
By Marsha Moyer | January 24, 2007 |
Before I got published, I always thought that nothing could be better than actually seeing and holding copies of my books in my hands. I’ve since discovered that fan mail is a close second.
Like many writers working today, I have a website with a form readers can use to contact me with their comments. In the five years since my first book came out, I’ve been lucky in that 99% of the feedback I receive is positive—especially when I hear about writers who regularly get mail that’s not just critical but downright threatening or hateful. I did have the disconcerting experience of receiving, as my very first piece of fan mail, a note from a woman who neatly dissected my book and told me what I should have done differently in a variety of areas. (My response to this was, mentally if not literally, “Why not write your own book, then?”) But for the most part I’ve found that readers don’t usually take the time or effort to communicate unless they like what you’re doing.
Lately, though, for no reason I can discern, my mail has gotten a little strange. For example, I recently heard from a reader who praised the advice about writing on my website and then went on to ask if I could explain how to get a Chicken Soup-type book written and published, how much she could expect to receive as an advance, how many weeks it would take from the time her manuscript was accepted by a publisher for it to appear in bookstores, and how soon she’d be able to quit her day job.
Another person wrote to ask if I could advise her on how to embark upon a collaborative project with her spouse. Why me?, I wondered. Why not email someone who’s published non-fiction, or collaborated with other writers, if that’s your aim? I’m flattered that readers seem to view me, through my work, as knowledgeable and approachable, but the absence of logic in these queries puzzles me.
Then there are the readers asking if I’ll please, in my spare time, read their novels in progress. Or one particularly determined gentleman with whom I was acquainted years ago—in high school, to be exact—who couldn’t understand my reluctance to listen to the terrific idea he had which he’d permit me to translate into prose, let my agent sell to a publisher, and generously split the profits.
But these minor bewilderments and annoyances are more than made up for by the good stuff. Like the two men who emailed me on the same day last week to express in detail how my work resonated with them personally. (Since my books are usually viewed as women’s fiction, these communications across the gender gap are rare, and all the more treasured for it.) Or the numerous folks who grew up or live in small towns from Wyoming to Kansas to Australia who’ve written to tell me how I’ve described particular aspects of their own experiences. (Some elements of small-town life are universal, apparently.) Or the woman who lost her home and most of her belongings in Hurricane Charley and used my characters’ faith and resilience to help her hang on to her own—then went on, a year later, to share my books with other hurricane survivors in her newly-adopted home state of Louisiana.
Writing is such a solitary pursuit; unlike most jobs, you don’t have much interaction with others, and except for the few hectic weeks around a book’s release, there aren’t a lot of opportunities for feedback. That’s where having a web contact forum can make such a difference, keeping you plugged into your audience, letting you know you’re (mostly) getting it right, and why I (mostly) look forward with eagerness to opening my inbox and seeing the 
little icon that tells me I’ve got mail.
Do you receive any snail mail in your mailbox? I always love to get letters. My grandmother and I correspond via pen and paper and there’s something about reading her writing that makes me feel much closer to her.
Email has obviously made it much easier to communicate with each other. People probably type up some rather weird things and hit “send” before they really stop and think about what they’re doing. I know I’ve done that before!
several authors have expressed to me the joy and honor they feel receiving ‘fan’ mail. i thoroughly enjoy reading essays on great writers as to how their greatest friendships were borne of letters exchanged. Perhaps it is most difficult to be false in one’s letters. We are who we really are – in our written letters. I personally keep almost all the letters people have written to me and i’ve had friends amazed that i still had the letters they wrote to me in those agonizing years of adolesence, or those wild college years. I tell them that, someday, my son will be reading a blurb in the New York Times asking for any and all correspondence written by me or one of my oldest and dearest, and perhaps he’ll find his fortune in the old Bonwit Teller hatbox full of my old letters. Haa. It’s a grand bit of conceit on my part, but I’m not alone. Thomas Jefferson actually invited a machine to duplicate his correspondence so he could keep a copy of all that he’d written.
I used to worry that I’d be “bugging” an author by writing them and being a goober about how much I loved their work. But no more. E-mail certainly makes it much easier to connect. But I do agree about the handwritten note. There’s something wonderful about opening a box full of old letters and re-reading them, and possibly handing them down as heirlooms. That’s the downside of e-mail.
If I every get lucky enough to have fan mail, I’ll print them out and keep them in a file next to my bulging pile of rejection letters. ;)
I’ve kept a lot of my reader mail.
Some of my favorites:
– an email from a young widow who told me books like mine helped her forget her troubles for a while
– a letter from a reader (about whose number of cats I refuse to speculate) complaining about how she had to wade through pages and pages of explicit sex (it wasn’t that explicit, really!) but forced herself to do it because she thought the plot wasn’t bad. LOL!