Genre Shm-enre
Tess Gerritsen wrote an interesting post on her blog this week after she received a scathing letter from a reader. One of Tess’ books was reprinted and this reader was pissed because she didn’t like it compared to Tess’ current work. Here’s what I don’t get – this “fan”, who has no idea what it’s like when a publishing house reprints something, felt it was up to Tess to fix her “bad” experience. Uh, okay. Maybe this woman also expects directors to refund ticket money for movies we don’t like. If that’s the case, Mel Gibson’s in for a hefty refund to me.

Maybe it’s because the book in question came from a different genre (Tess writes from a number of perspectives, which is way cool to be able to do). I can’t say as I haven’t read the book. Still, would we as writers want to be judged solely on our early works? Even if they’re good, aren’t we allowed to expand and grow and experiment, or has the creative part of our writing process been defined for us based on current opinion? By the way, among her many talents, Tess writes romance novels, which is damn tough to do. I’ve heard writers poo-poo the genre. That, folks, pisses me off. Here’s a woman with success tucked squarely under her belt, yet writers who can’t create much beyond a shopping list are sticking their noses up at it. At the end of the day, who’s more successful – the wanna-bes who fuss about the “quality” of writing or the woman too busy making money to bother to answer? Enough of that rant….

So just how responsible are you to your own fan base? For most of us, the fan base is the client. Mind you, they’re a smaller group than say a best-selling author might be, so our leverage with an upset client is a bit less prevalent. But clearly, you’re not going to please everyone. There are those, like that reader, who aren’t going to be happy even if you worked for free.

Sometimes, you just gotta let it go. You can offer an apology for that person’s bad experience, but that’s not to say you have to jump through hoops to please one person when you’ve got a track record of lots of pleased clients.