It’s 2013, and the world has shrunk to the size of a microchip, and in many ways, that’s a great thing.  There have never been so many conversations as there are going on right now, at this very moment.  It has never been so easy to connect with others, at least on a superficial level.  (Getting to know someone – really know them, inside and out – is a very different matter, but that’s a topic for another day.)  And for the first time in history, thanks to the miracle of Twitter, it’s never been so easy to strike up a conversation with an author.

I’ve had the experience of getting tweets from several authors I admire, and it hasn’t yet stopped being excruciatingly cool.  On a few occasions, I’ve tweeted my #fridayreads and received a response from the author.  Alex George, for instance, told me I made his day when I praised his novel A Good American on the mini-blogging site.  (Well-deserved praise, by the way.  A Good American is incredible.  If you haven’t read it yet, what are you waiting for?)  Alex George telling me that I “made his day” pretty much made my month.  And when I tweeted during a Friday lunch hour that I was enjoying a salad and Mrs Queen Takes the Train, William Kuhn shot back a charming tweet that Mrs Queen prefers walnuts on her arugula, leaving me grinning for the rest of the day.

I started thinking about authors and their various levels of engagement with their fans when Amal posted this interesting take on a Bryan Garner article she read.  While I agreed with her critiques of Garner (and she formed them much better than I would, so go read her post), I had to chime in with a comment noting that he was extremely gracious to his fans.  My best friend, unlike me, is a huge Garner fan.  While serving as a civilian U.S. government employee in a war zone that I personally would find pretty terrifying, R got into a debate over an esoteric point of grammar with her colleagues and emailed Garner to get his opinion.  He responded with a very kind email in which he answered her question, thanked her for her service, and asked her where he could send her some free books.  Since she’s basically the guy’s biggest fan, you can imagine how excited she was.

When I told Amal that story, via comment (and you can see our exchange in the comments section of her post), she responded that it was nice to hear that Garner took more of a “Dr. Seuss” attitude in responding to fans, and then linked me to a letter that a “grumpy” E.B. White once sent to a young fan.  The acclaimed author answered his little admirer’s request for another book by suggesting that the child start a national movement dedicated to NOT sending letters to E.B. White until he produces another book.  The response wended its way to the recipient’s librarian, who wrote to White to complain about his tart response, which he answered with a long letter explaining the demands that fan mail places on him.  While he made some good points – what a time-consuming effort it must be to answer thousands of fan letters personally – I still give the side-eye to his sarcastic response to a young child who probably wasn’t capable of grasping the snarky point, and who was just excited about Charlotte’s Web, anyway.  I think he probably just snapped after too much time spent trying to be gracious in fan responses and not enough time doing what he really wanted to do, which was writing, and I do sympathize.  But still.  There’s no need to get huffy, especially not when the recipient is a young child.  (If my Peanut received a letter like that from an author she admired, you can bet I’d be dashing off a reply of my own.)

The exchange between the author, the child and the librarian was a very interesting one to read, and I was grateful to Amal for pointing it out to me.  It also got me thinking about the things that writers must do to earn their incomes – aside from just writing, that is – and wondering whether the profession has gotten more demanding in recent years.  E.B. White bridled at answering fan letters.  Well, nowadays there’s the book tour, which can mean weeks on the road if you’re an author with bestseller potential.  (Have you seen John and Sherry Petersik’s posts about their Young House Love book tour?  Yowza.)  There’s the added work of “networking” on Facebook and Goodreads, maintaining your own blog or website as many authors do, and tweeting at starry-eyed fans like me.  On the one hand, the Internet makes it easier for authors to reach many more fans at once, just by updating their Facebook pages or putting up 140 characters.  On the other hand, when it’s easier to do, people demand that you do more.  If authors feel compelled to respond to every fan tweet, when exactly do they have time to write?  After all, we all know that the Internet can suck away hours of the day.  (Ever logged into Pinterest and lost two hours of your life?)

The relative ease of online communication has emboldened fans to insist on more contact with their heroes.  And I expect it’s probably added work for the writers who depend on readers to buy their books.  They now have to “sell” to readers online, or risk losing a reader to an author who is more engaging toward fans.  E.B. White-style reticence just doesn’t work in the Internet age, and an author who snaps back that fans should stop tweeting him if they want another book is probably going to alienate a few people.  (There are plenty of cases of Authors Behaving Badly that have enraged the book community – usually when an author responds angrily to a blog review.  I’m not even going to get into those sticky situations.)

It’s a tricky balancing act.  On the one hand, I like tweeting my favorite authors and seeing their responses.  I get excited at the thought of making contact, however superficial that contact is, with a writer whose work I admire.  And I also like giving credit where credit is due: if I really enjoyed a book, I want to tell people that I enjoyed it and congratulate the author on a job well done.  If I was a published author, I can’t imagine I would ever get tired of hearing from people who enjoyed my hard work.  But maybe we readers, as a group, need to back off a little bit.  Maybe we need to give our favorite authors some space to do what they do best: write books.

I’m not going to stop tweeting about the books I like, or telling the authors how much I enjoyed their work, because I know that if I had written a book I’d really want to hear from the people my words touched.  But when I tweet or blog about authors I like, I don’t expect a response from them.  I don’t expect them to take time out of their schedules to engage me in conversation.  When they do, though, it makes my day.

And with that, I’ll leave you with my absolute favorite quote about fan mail, from the great Maurice Sendak:

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”