Creators and the Internet

George R.R. Martin posted a wee rant about some of his fans' behavior here, and John Scalzi expanded on the topic here. I was going to comment directly in Scalzi's blog, but it ran long.

It seems like there are two issues here - there's being discontented with the pace of production of a product you're interested in, and then there's how customers express that discontent.

The first is entirely the consumer's right. I'd be terribly curious to see the actual sales impact of longer delays vs shorter delays on publishing books in a genre series - I doubt that info is public anywhere, but I have to wonder if there's a sweet spot of building audience anticipation vs. losing the audience's interest. I suspect there is, and I suspect that publishers know about it. If the wait's too long, people probably will get frustrated and get distracted and wander off.

Now, if you're frustrated about something, isn't it your inviolate right to go bitch about it on the internet? Isn't that what the internet is for? And people often don't moderate their tone or take others' feelings into account on the internet. (This should not be news to anyone.) And I have met few if any authors, artists, game designers - anyone who produces a creative product for public consumption - who handled public, vitriolic criticism well at all. So this kerfuffle is absolutely unsurprising to me.

It seems like writing, because it's entirely a one-man job, is a little more intensely affected by this phenomenon, because there's no one else for the audience to blame. There's no production team running behind, no art contracts that fell through, no unexpected hardware failures or bugs in the code. The process takes place entirely in the black box of an author's head. This probably makes criticism a lot more personal, and it makes long delays (and make no mistake, Mr. Martin's latest book is long delayed indeed) even more frustrating, because the consumer literally can't understand what's holding up the process, and so they seize on anything handy - Livejournal posting, convention appearances, whatever.

In this particular case, though, the problem is one that's all too common, and all too avoidable - failure to correctly set expectations. I love transparency on the part of my favorite authors, and I read several of their blogs regularly. But this book was previously, publicly estimated to be released in 2006, 2007, and 2008. It has not yet been published - it is not, by the author's own admission, even completed. Now, this isn't a moral failing - no one deliberately lied. But there's a damn good reason the MMO industry customarily overuses the word "soon" when talking about... anything, really. Things change, deadlines get missed, plans get updated, and explaining all that to a bunch of furious customers is not anyone's idea of a good time.

I'm not blaming anyone here, and I will wait patiently until all of my favorite authors produce more masterpieces out of their black boxes. But guys, please don't tease me? I'd rather get a lovely surprise than another disappointment as an estimated date slips by.