[Worldwalker]

I see the same thing all the time from fanfic writers: they insist their writing is awesome when it makes the reader cringe, or they demand adulation for the mere fact of writing, with no requirement for it to actually be good writing, and go ballistic when someone dares to suggest that anyone can write, and praise should be reserved for those who write well. Given that self-publishing, especially in electronic form, is little more than fanfic without the "fan-", I suppose it's only to be expected that the same attitudes will surface.

I think the biggest problem is authors who can't separate themselves from their writing. They see their writing as part of themselves. They see sharing it as having a one-on-one conversation with their best friend (or, as suggested elsewhere, their therapist). A collision of expectations ensues when readers see their writing as a commercial product, expected to meet certain standards of merchantability and usability, and if it doesn't, they react as they would if they bought a broken chair.

If you're writing for money, you're producing a commercial product, just exactly as if you were selling chairs. If you want to give a few chairs to your friends at Christmas, they can be as defective as you like -- it's a cultural norm not to criticize gifts, especially handmade ones, from friends and relatives (though I did unload that hideous clock at a yard sale). But if you're trying to sell your chairs, you have to research the market, produce what people want to buy, meet certain standards of quality, and make it good or make it right. Somehow, certain writers feel they're exempt from this. They're not.

Usually, it's the amateurs -- that's why the attitude is so prevalent in fanfiction. But not always. Along with the famous Anne Rice rant, there's Laurell K. Hamilton's even more unhinged tirade (where, among other things, she admits her characters are her imaginary friends). There are clearly cases where this whole "access to the audience" thing makes authorial misbehavior a little too easy -- an author can make a fool of themself in public with no editor to ask "my dear, is this really what you want to say?"

To some extent, science fiction readers have lived in this world for a long time -- SF writers have long been judged, not only on the quality of their work, but on their behavior at SF conventions. But that's still a one-on-one thing, and people tend to be more restrained when they can see the face of (or risk a punch from) the person they're interacting with. Now all authors, not just SF authors, can speak directly to their readers, and to all, not just the convention-attending part, of their readership. I think it's going to take society some time to work in the fact that writers tend to be, um, different. It takes a certain mentality to be a machinist, a landscaper, or a teacher, and it takes a certain mentality to be a writer. Actually, I think it takes one of several certain mentalities to be a writer, and one of those possibilities is seeing writing as a way of making the voices in one's head a little more real. Combine that with unfettered access to the whole wide world, and you get ... this.