Writer Perspective - Online Behavior

I've never really seen the point of doing a post about online etiquette because I've always assumed that all my online acquaintances are gracious people who know how to act like professionals. But then I started hearing about strange behavior coming from newcomers to the m/m writing field.

I'm a newcomer, but some are even more new than I am. This post is for them with the best of intentions.

Putting our m/m field in perspective. We're operating in a tiny genre -- more of a niche -- that is made even tinier by the immediacy of the internet and the availability of everyone through websites and forums.

Add to this the permanency of communication on the worldwide web. Online hissy fits just don't fade away. This written content hangs out there forever on people's websites and forums and gets cached in Google's archives of "crawled" web-pages.

Author – Editor Emails. As hard is this is to believe, new writers sometimes behave badly when editors reject their fiction. Editors who were once willing to offer in-depth criticism on rejected stories now hesitate to do so because newcomers will respond with further emails that ARGUE on a point-by-point basis. This is a loss for all of us because we writers could have got some insight into editorial criteria for acceptance. The editors could have had more influence in shaping what comes their way.

The author-editor exchange isn't a court of law. If the editor says she's not buying the story, it's not open for debate. Even if a writer gets an invitation to revise and resubmit, there is no guarantee of sale. Newcomers, accept this and move on.

Some new writers, believe it or not, will respond to a generic rejection with a venomous email. What is this supposed to accomplish? To show the editor what it's like to get an unpleasant email?

This sort of thing gets remembered when editors talk to each other. They might even post examples of snotty emails online for everyone to see what not to do. They'll definitely be unwilling to work with a writer in the foreseeable future who seems unpleasant or unstable. Who could blame them?

If a newcomer gets the dreaded rejection email, she should probably go offline for a few days to get over it. Never take rejection personally. Maybe the story had flaws. Maybe it just didn't "wow" the editor. Maybe it didn't match the house style or mesh with either the budget or the schedule.

Who knows? Don't worry about it. Send that particular fiction somewhere else, write the next thing, and keep trying to improve. Don't remove publishers from your list if they reject you once. They might be interested in something else in the future.

Sticking to our area of expertise. We all have to have a website, right? What should a newcomer put on that website? I would advise newcomers not to compete with their own work.

I mean, we're all just entertainers, right? People aren't coming to our website to find out our religious beliefs, our political stance, or the details of our sex lives. They just want to know the numeric order of the books in our series and when our latest will come out. I'm not saying not to have an opinion. I'm just urging caution when you decide what goes on your author site – you may be competing with your own fiction.

Even if we entertainers get asked to comment on, say, politics, we should hesitate if we're not qualified to offer a well-reasoned response. Remember when actor Sean Penn said that Ronald Reagan deserved to get Alzheimer's disease as karmic payback? He didn't do himself any favors with that remark. Now, instead of thinking of Sean Penn as just a talented actor, I have to think of him as a talented actor who's also a jerk and an idiot.

Getting feisty! Sometimes people get larger than life online and post things that they would never dare say face-to-face in real life. This can lead to long, pointless exchanges. Newcomers, resist the urge to start, or respond to, online obnoxiousness. It doesn't impress anyone because we all know how easy it is to be rude online: it's all remote and anonymous!

Just ignore it and move on. Here at Obsidianbookshelf.com, I've been snotty online three times in the past 2.5 years, and now I'm grateful that I got ignored all three times. It gave me a chance to grow out of the behavior!

Less is More. I've been thinking about some things that I've heard from my online acquaintances who are writers. One stated he doesn't respond to negative reviews because it isn't "classy." I didn't agree with him at the time, but I do now.

Take it from me as a reviewer: we're totally insignificant! Really, we reviewers can't do you much harm. Just ignore a bad review. Newcomers, even if you show up on a review site with the best of intentions to correct a simple misperception, you risk turning the whole exchange into a three-ring circus that will probably humiliate you, spike the traffic for the delighted site owner, and alienate a lot of potential readers.

Another writer mentioned that she would rather not have her friends respond to a bad review on her behalf. I'd never thought about that before, but now I can see her point.

Yet another writer stated in her blog that she doesn't respond to ANY reviews – not even with appreciation for the good reviews – because it's just too hard to find and acknowledge everything that gets posted on the worldwide web. If she accidentally misses someone, she doesn't want it to look like an intentional snub. So she puts an overall statement of appreciation on her blog for anyone who has read her work. Again, something I hadn't thought about – but an excellent point, and a good solution.

In the end, maybe "less is more" can serve to guide a newcomer's online behavior. It takes the focus off you and puts it back on your work, and isn't that where most of us would prefer to have it? [I don't allow my blog posts to be copied in full. Please click here to see how to use an excerpt/blurb.]