Feedback – This Time It’s Personal
It is a surprisingly simple thing to make a writer happy. You can write reviews, you can accept a story, you can do many things, but ultimately, all you need to do is this:
A couple of my friends have pulled this on me recently, which is honestly outrageous: I didn’t even give them copies, or talk to them particularly about my books, or anything. The devious bastards just decided to start reading all by themselves. And given at least one of them is now on the second book of the Boiling Seas they appear to have the audacity to be enjoying the reading. How dare they. It’s absolutely brilliant.
Knowing that someone somewhere is actually reading my books is honestly what makes it all worthwhile, as a writer. I can sell or give away hundreds of copies but by and large those books are hurled into the void, and I never actually know if they’ve been read, if they’ve been enjoyed – I certainly don’t have the reviews to prove it. Among many other things the hunt for feedback is the curse of any creative. We spend so long working on books, art, whatever, and by and large we get nothing but silence in return.
But sometimes it does work out. Sometimes we do get feedback and reviews or even just acknowledgement, that our work hasn’t been wasted. And in this modern age that largely comes online, on Amazon pages or Goodreads or hidden away in comments on blogs that can only actually be found by the occasional narcissistic searching of one’s own name. But sometimes it’s tangible. Sometimes there is something to see. Like when I went to my old local library to add The Owl in the Labyrinth to their kindly curated little collection of my books – and saw, when I wandered over to the fantasy section, that The Blackbird and the Ghost and The Singer were not in fact on the shelves, which means that either they’ve been removed from the catalogue for some reason or that someone has actually taken them out to read them. Or when the one kid at work who I know for a fact has read The Fire Within asks me for the umpteenth time when I’m going to write the second one (answer: eventually).
Or when a friend sends me the picture above, and I know that they liked their introduction to the Boiling Seas enough to carry on. Because every time I see that someone’s bought or read Nightingale’s Sword I relax a little, because I’ve been thinking more and more of how Blackbird is actually quite a weak book, in comparison to what comes after it; that I don’t want to disappoint people with the start of the trilogy so that they never get to the good stuff that comes later. Because it is good stuff, or at least I think so; more imaginative and better-written by far than that initial, brief adventure.
But that’s overthinking it. Because the important thing, the affirming thing, the thing that makes me want to keep writing, is that somebody’s reading.
It is a surprisingly simple thing to make a writer happy.
