Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was incredibly lucky that my first book found a large and loyal readership. It changed my life - from being a very withdrawn adult to living in Paris as a full-time writer. It has also given me enormous confidence.
They have increased readership, which is good, but I personally am not very turned on by e-books. The physical book has always meant something to me. I'm like the horse who goes back to the stall. I'm not that adventurous.
In the 1950s we use to feel that television was taking away our comic readership; with today's exciting, powerfully visual movies I have to wonder about their effect on the kids' loyalty to the comic book medium all over again.
It used to be if you wanted to do a newspaper comic, you had to appeal to a pretty big chunk of the newspaper's readership for them to want to keep you around. 'Dilbert' would be office humor, but even that is pretty widely experienced.
The readership of Victorian novels, when they were published, was much less diverse. People were probably white, and had enough money to be literate. Very often, there are phrases in Italian, German and French that are left untranslated.
If you take a print magazine with a million person circulation, and a blog with a devout readership of 1 million, for the purpose of selling anything that can be sold online, the blog is infinitely more powerful, because it's only a click away.
I've always assumed from the beginning that I had relatively few contemporaries among my readership. Not that I was consciously writing for a younger audience but that what I was doing interested a younger audience, or at least threatened them less.
Inevitably, most readers come to John Cheever's 'Journals' via his fiction. Whatever value they might have in their own right, their viability as a publishing proposition was conditional on the interest of the large readership of his novels and stories.
Creative life should be more than preaching to the converted, more than going for a core audience of 100,000 people. It should be taking risks, challenging the readership and having enough faith in one's own talent and craft to take readers on that ride.
The reason I was successful in launching my first book with bloggers is this: I assumed that I should spend as much time on a blogger with a million-person readership as I would pitching an editor of a publication with a million person subscription-base.
When Peter Jackson made the 'Lord of the Rings' movies, I remember there was a concern that people who didn't read Tolkien wouldn't go see the first one. But the films were so good in their own right that the audience grew beyond the readership of the book.
Mythopoeia has taken off in the Indian diaspora because there has been a change in readership from a mature audience to a younger one. This lot has a desperate yearning to reconnect. They want to consume mythology but in a well-packaged and easily digestible way.
It was not until Web comics that I saw stories about women and stories by women and things that were aimed specifically at female readership. It was just kind of this free-for-all that was achieving something amazing with creativity. That was where I got my start.
It's different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It's a cliche, but it's said that people who read my books don't read any other books, and you do get that element.
The readership for 'Sag Harbor' was different from people who'd read me before - it was linear and realistic, not as strange as 'The Intuitionist.' Did they carry over to 'Zone One,' a story about zombies in New York? Some, some not. I'm used to people not caring about my other books.
Donald Trump can take his message directly to the people via rallies and addresses carried over social media. I'd call them updated versions of Roosevelt's fireside chats, but a portion of my younger readership doesn't even know what a radio is thanks to a Democrat-run education system.
The experience that a publication creates for its audience is the very essence of that publication's brand - and without deep engagement, that publication's brand will be weak. A good publication is a convener and an arbiter - it expresses a core narrative that becomes a badge of sorts for its readership.
As someone who writes and teaches YA fiction, I spend a lot of time trying to define its character and readership, and I don't think I'm alone - genres are all about boundary drawing, and the YA genre is, in a lot of ways, about carving out boundaries around adolescence, a space for teenagers to do teenage things.
I think when you look at the diversity of the readership, all the different people who love comics, I want comics to reflect the real world, and I think Marvel does a good job of trying to do that, but I don't think there's ever an end point when it comes to creating diversity and creating stories that people can relate to.
It's part of a writer's profession, as it's part of a spy's profession, to prey on the community to which he's attached, to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters, whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.