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He didn't make it to 60 threads before they caught him, only maybe a dozen.
Despite him personally totally missing the point, he was an excellent demonstration of something that's significant about MobileRead and online venues in general: We're interested in our authors. We care if they act like jerks or talk like idiots.
Go back a hundred years and there were plenty of authors who were not only not civilized human beings, but even their being human beings might have been open to question. Even someone like Salinger, who wrote and vanished, was not uncommon. Now we have things like authors with MR accounts, blogs, public meltdowns in the Amazon comments, and all sorts of other interactions with authors that didn't exist even 20 years ago. Instead of writing being something that happens between author and publisher, and the public sees the results when they buy the book -- or maybe, special joy!, an interview managed by a third party -- it can be, and often is, right in our faces.
A hundred years ago, there just wasn't much of an opportunity for an Anne Rice or Laurell Hamilton to go off all over the reading public. They could have bought newspaper ads in major markets, sure, but not only was that expensive, it took time and effort; it lacked the immediacy of a forum comment or blog post. Now, when someone sticks their foot in their mouth and then shoots it, the results can be around the world in moments. Most of the people we MobileReaders know have Internet access; we can send them links, or copies of the post, for their entertainment. Something an author might not have considered, or might have thought better of, a couple of decades ago is now in the permanent memory of the world.
And we dissect whatever we can get of them, which is often a lot. We read their blog articles in minute detail. What did he really think? We scrutinize their forum posts. Was she nice to the readers? In short, we look at a whole slew of things that are not, in fact, the story. Not the writing. Anne Rice's meltdown is legendary -- but did it change what theoretically matters to the readers, what we see on the page? Would her writing have been better or worse if she'd gone and written everything she did without telling us why? We laugh about LKH's characters being her "imaginary friends" but are her books better or worse because we know that? That's something I think we all need to think about.
It's something the authors need to think about, too, and a lot of them aren't even considering it. Everything they say in public is going to be picked apart. If it's "I wrote that last book in a hurry because I needed money for my mom's funeral" it's going to affect how the book is perceived, even if it's called Rasselas. There is really no dividing line between an author's public and private writings anymore. If the fans can see it, it's public. If it's a blog entry, a forum post, an Amazon review, or even a comment on some other writer's work, the fans will find it. In particular, authors can't have their cake and eat it too. They can't say "this thing which promotes my book is official" but "this other thing I said doesn't matter". And too many of them still think they can -- they think that they are the ones who can decide what the fans will look at and what they can't, even if those things are posted in the same place and with the same name. It's not just the publishers who have to adapt to a changing market. The whole writing ecosystem has changed, and a lot of authors (even a lot of new ones) really don't get it.
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