Imagine you’re an inventor and you wake up one day with the idea of making a toaster. But not just any old toaster – this toaster will take the toast and butter it, add jam if you select it, and pour you a nice cup of tea to go with it, if you like. You’re sure it will be be the most fabulous toaster in the world. You slave over it for months, maybe even a year. Your friends are all invited around to try it out – they tell you, man, this is the best toaster in the world, when can we buy it? You take it to an engineer and they dick with it a little, make it safe, smoother, but it’s still your baby. Then it’s prototyped commercially – initial reports are good. So then it goes into mass production.
Suddenly anyone can buy the toaster! Walmart, K-Mart, Target, Amazon, your local shit shop, everyone is selling the toaster, and lots of people are buying it. The money rolls in, and you think, how great it is that I have made the best toaster in the world.
But uh oh – then you get customer feedback. The toaster spreads the butter too thick, you hear. Some people don’t like the colour. Other people don’t want all the extras you so lovingly added, and worse, those additions actively annoy them. Other customers think it’s overpriced. Still more think that the whole concept of the tea making, toast buttering toaster is just sick and unwholesome, and a whole lot more like the idea but just don’t think it works very well at all.
So what do you do? These people hate the product! Sure, 90% of the customers never say anything, or say nice things, or buy the toaster for their mothers, or give them to their best friends saying the toaster changed their lives, but those 10% of whiners, what can you do about them?
Well – you could write to all of them and offer them their money back and apologise for the crappiness of the toaster. Or you could write to them and tell them they’re stupid and tasteless and that you don’t even want them to use your damn toaster because they’re too low tone to even own such a beautiful object.
Or you could go, okay, I got it 90% right this time. Next time – I’ll make a better toaster.
Books are like toasters. And customers are customers. They walk into a book store, and they see hundreds of your books, or hundreds of books very like yours, and though to you, it’s like they’re staring into your soul and judging you, in fact, they’re seeing a bunch of toasters. Consumer products, to be consumed, evaluated, sometimes reviewed for other consumers, but the act of consumption is all about them and their need for toast/porn/romance/a new diet based on chocolate. Consumers comment about everything they buy, expect the right to complain if the product doesn’t meet their needs, and will even ask for their money back if the product downright sucks. Your book, a toaster, a new car, a meal in a restaurant – all the same to a consumer, and with the exact same level of engagement. Sure, a book reader is more likely to write to an author and squee at them, but that doesn’t mean that they have a closer or more responsible relationship with the producer of the book than they do with the toaster maker. Your readers love you because your product works for them. If it doesn’t work, no love. Simple. We live in a world of too many choices for any one product to be given love it hasn’t earned.
So what happens to the toaster manufacturer who decides to contact each and every unsatisfied customer who complains about the product? Do you think that they convince that customer that no, the butter really isn’t too thick, or that when the teamaker scalded the cat, that the customer’s cat was old and likely to die soon anyway? Do you think a customer getting a letter telling them their opinion of the product is shit, is likely to have an epiphany and say ‘praise the lord, I done seen the light and I loves me some toasters, I will get me down to Walmart and buy a dozen’? No – not only does the customer not buy another of those toasters, they don’t buy the new improved toaster or the wafflemaker or the self-basting vibrator either, or any other product made by that inventor. More than that – they tell their friends that not only does the toaster sucks, but the inventor is a crazy ass bastard who scares the shit out of them. The rules goes, if a customer is satisfied, they tell one person. If they’re unhappy, they tell ten. And those people tell another ten, and so on. One unhappy, insulted customer could easily spread the word that this is one toaster to avoid at all costs, to a thousand people.
There is no way a toaster inventor wins by chastising the people who buy his toasters and then don’t like them. He wins by (a) making a product that people buy in great numbers and mostly like, because it’s mostly what they want and (b) sifting the complaints and extracting the real information from the pile of idiots who don’t know you can’t take a toaster in the bath with you, then using that information to make the next toaster fabulous, with jam choices and expresso coffee optional.
Writing is hard, editing and polishing is harder. It’s a deeply personal process. It’s not a unique process. Any creator goes through the same thing. And once you make the decision to turn your creation into a commercial product, it doesn’t matter what it is – ultimately, it’s a toaster. So learn to deal with your customers like a good little toaster maker, and don’t act like a jackass when your toaster gets toasted.
