7/8/10

How Famous Do You Want To Be?

First, some Twilight snark for ya. Fun, fun, fun. (Caution: A couple of F-words...)

Many thanks to Agent Jennifer Jackson for posting this link on her blog, Et in arcaedia, ego.

Now that you've read the snark, I have a question. (Yes, the Twilight humor was relevant to today's post!)

How famous do you want your books to be? Really?

Because the more famous you are, the more snarky blog posts are going to be made about you. The more people are going to maintain that your MC was bland and boring and downright awful. The more people are going to think that you made a mistake when your MC ended up with Edward. The more people are going to proclaim that you are too liberal, too conservative, too religious, not religious enough, too unoriginal, a poor plotter, a poor user of words, and a poor writer.

(Except that you'll be anything from a 'poor' writer, hehe.)

Can you take it? I think a lot of us writers dream about the kind of fame that Stephenie Meyer has attained, but I wonder if we've neglected the downside of the entire country buying your books. There's a percentage of critics in every crowd, but when you're crowd is as big as this one...that's a lot of critics.

Are you ready to handle it? Will spoofs of your own work make you laugh? Or cry? (And hide?) How famous do you want to be?

Sometimes I wonder if I only want to be slightly famous and have a sort of cult following. Because anyone who is going to hate you...won't read it bahahahaha!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's interesting that you post about this, I was just thinking about it yesterday. Sometimes I think I'd like to be as famous and rich as Meyer (ha) but then at the same time, I think I would have trouble dealing with the snark and complaints and whatnot.

But who knows? Sometimes I enjoy spoofs of things I really like.

Btw, website copy consists of writing the stuff for business websites, like the “about” pages, the blog page, information page, etc :D

Lydia Kang said...

I've thought about this. I don't think I'd do well with all the fame. So--I guess I don't want her life! I would be thrilled with just a moderate amount of success with my books. Even then, that's already like winning the lottery in the publishing biz!