Haruki Murakami in direct reader contact shocker
Haruki Murakami takes his readers’ criticism seriously, reading 100 email messages every day and answering 10 - 20 of those:
“I’m not interested in professional criticism, pro or con. I just don’t care. But I think it’s very important for me to read the words from my actual readers…” (full story at Maud Newton
This strikes me as one of the first examples of an author - and an established, well-regarded author at that - being in a direct, ongoing, daily dialogue with his audience. It’s not the usual luddite author scenario where they get a few crumpled letters forwarded every few months from the publisher. What Haruki is doing seems similar to a blog - bypassing the usual channels that mediate his relationships with his readers and going straight to the source. The word must have got out that Haruki is receptive and responsive to reader email, which is in itself quite an achievement. After all, a hundred emails relating to his fiction every day is a lot of email. And a lot of it must be, inevitably, utterly barking. So it represents quite a commitment on Haruki’s part to read and respond to that amount each day.
This stuff interests me because it’s opening up new ways of authors generating and maintaining interest of their work. And yes, that can be labelled marketing, which is obviously filthy, but it’s necessary. Publishers simply do not promote the work of the majority of their writers anymore, either because they can’t afford it or because they’ve spunked their entire marketing budget up the wall on the latest Jeffrey Archer book, which really needed promoting in the first place. So. Authors need to do it themselves, and we (yes, us, the readers) need to find easy ways for them to do it that’s useful to all of us. I don’t think of it so much as marketing as setting off every distress flare available before subsiding into the murky print sea of publishing oblivion.
It’s a shame that he doesn’t post the emails and his answers on a blog - I think it would make for great reading.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Contact?
- Why I haven’t written any of my books, part 94
- Authors - get free publicity for your new titles
- When Authors Attack Interesting article in Wire…
- Publish and be damned
