When in doubt, hit "send"

I enjoyed this NYT piece, "The Perils of 'Contact Me,'" on authors being all-too-accessible to their readers. Ben Yagoda writes that for him, being contacted by a reader is "flattering, and it's actually kind of fun" — though some authors get stranger messages and are a little more wary (Mary Karr, for example, says, "I get a handful of jailhouse marriage proposals every time I publish a book").

These days, it's hard to imagine a time when, as Yagoda notes via this excerpt from Catcher in the...