Being bored with the truism (not meme) that traditional authors were cut off from their readership doesn't make it less apt. Speaking to the public under controlled and predictable circumstances is not the same as sharing a room with them on the internet 24-7.
Things are changing and your perception of authors is an updated one, which is to say non-traditional. This isn't a criticism. By traditional, I don't mean greater legitimacy or a more professional mindset. I simply mean past professional practice.
Traditional as in old-school, not better.
I grew up knowing a lot of writers published by big houses and academic presses. The first advice they gave me was never to be my own agent or promoter. This was because book stores, magazine editors, readers and so on considered it crass and unprofessional.
Never talk to store owners about carrying your books, they warned. It doesn't come off well. Have someone else do that for you.
(This is not a value judgment from me because I think things were better that way. It's simply the way things had worked and continued to work while I was still a mangy prodigy.)
One of the first people to go against that idea was Terry McMillan who, as a young woman (in those days) of color, found publishers unresponsive to a target audience she absolutely knew to be important. So far as I know (and I mean that anecdotally), she was one of the first successful writers in the past forty years to book her own tours, be her own agent and generally self-negotiate her way to the major audience she was certain she could reach. William T. Vollman was another.
But those are the exceptions. Those people managed the feat despite the limitations of conventional channels because they thought out their strategies carefully and were really good at interacting at the more hands-on levels they chose.
Your having "come from an SF/F perspective" makes absolutely no difference here because you're describing me as well (at least until age sixteen or seventeen). Ninety percent of the first writers I knew personally worked with SF and horror almost exclusively, and I've continued to read occasional SF and horror books for most of my life. Some critics have even categorized me as a horror writer.
But back to my old friends: None of them ever wanted a public forum in which to pontificate; the most skillful socially stayed completely clear of controversies, quarrels and bickering unless the effort was orchestrated (cf. cyberpunk) or the target was Harlan Ellison.
Conventions are an entirely different phenomenon than internet self-promotion. Those writers were far more shielded than any blogger.
Clearly, you and I have seen writers at conventions from different angles. I only ever went to any convention with my writer friends, which means I saw things from their vantage. I saw the us-vs.-them side they carefully hid from their fans.
Every writer is different, so the kind you're talking about could certainly exist and I believe you when you talk about them, but the literally hundreds I've known and/or observed before the popularization of e-books are all people who'd hate to be involved in self-promotion beyond the usual book tours, speaking to crowds and signing books. You're in a box made of gorilla glass when you deal with the public that way. It's a lot easier not to look like a Richard Face if you've got someone to play Richard for you.
The business is changing and the old model isn't sustainable even for most of the old guard. We're at the point at which tradition is ending and most of older writers are being forced to adapt. The point is that some of them can't seem to adapt very well to a post-print world. Some, like Thom Disch, even refuse.
Though Thom's no longer with us, his blog is still up.
It's often brilliant, but the tone is increasingly lonely and wistful. Deprived of fiction's artifice, the unsheltered, unprotected Thom is revealed in his final posts to have been, in the words of O'Neill, "a little in love with death." Yes, he was still grieving over Charles Naylor. Yes, he was frostbitten with fear by the likelihood of losing his home. But I believe it hurt him to strip away his masks. Revealing his naked face to the world helped to destroy his pride in not being of it.
You might be surprised at how many writers looked at book tours as the chance to become someone else, the glamorous and witty people they imagined their audience imagined them to be. I've even known writers whose spouses and partners had to agree from the beginning that monogamy was the expectation
everywhere but on a book tour.
The eye-widening event for me was watching career arcs before and after The Agent. Writers I knew became unfathomably popular. One went from having a book published by a small literary press to three major houses duking it out for the privilege of publishing a collection of short stories and essays (not even a novel). Shortly after that same book hit the shelves, he appeared on David Letterman.
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Originally Posted by anamardoll
According to whom? I'm not trying to be touchy at you, but I'm a little bored of the meme that before ebooks, all the TAs sat in darkened rooms cordoned off from their readership, but then the ebooks came along and forced them out in the sunlight where they are reacting in a manner usually reserved for vampires. 
Maybe it's because I'm coming from a sf/f perspective but "be engaged with your readership" and "don't be a dick" have always been basic rules for TAs. And sell/advertise/market/advocate has pretty much always been true -- unless convention appearances and book signings have been figments of my imagination all this time in which case I wish you guys had told me that earlier.  |