That's the miracle of Amazon! It's like Internet dating. In the early days, you could get slimed as an author on Amazon by someone bearing a grudge, or jealous, or whatever. And because there were so few reviews posted, this stank.
My life as an author has always been about brilliant, odd people.
I have relaxed into my persona as an author, although I used to fight that.
Fiction is often most powerful when the author is exploring an issue - and not writing like a know-it-all who has the perfect answer.
If you're chained to a computer all day, you're not using up much energy, even if you drag yourself to the gym a couple of days a week. And to make matters worse for me, I've had a secondary career right along with my romance writing - cookbook author, under my real name, Ruth Glick.
I grew up in L.A., and I worked for 'The Hollywood Reporter.' I knew enough about the business to know that the usual role of the author on a movie is to get out of the way and not say anything.
English food writer Elizabeth David, cook and author Richard Olney and the owner of Domaine Tempier Lulu Peyraud have all really inspired the way I think about food.
What I find cool about being a banned author is this: I'm writing books that evoke a reaction, books that, if dropped in a lake, go down not with a whimper but a splash.
Children know when they are being sold a sanitised version of the world, and I think that's a betrayal of the relationship between author and reader.
I fantasised about becoming an author and wrote my first book at 18 - an introspective novel set in the 1920s.
The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.
I don't think anyone sits down and thinks, 'I know, I'll be a chick-lit writer.' You write the book that you want to write and then other people say, 'Oh, that's chick-lit.' You say, 'Okay.' But it's not like you look around and go to a careers fair and there will be someone at the chick-lit author stand.
Herta Muller, Mo Yan, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio - for many of us, the Nobels have become doubly educational: We simultaneously learn of an author's existence and find out that we ought to have been reading him or her all along.
Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.
Becoming a YA author was actually a very lucky accident. When I wrote the 'Queen of Everything,' I thought it was a book for adults.
I started 'Storyline' after I'd accomplished all my goals and still wasn't happy. I'd become a 'New York Times' bestselling author, which was my goal from high school, and yet I was less happy after accomplishing my goals than I was before.
I think that I had read so much fiction that the craft itself sort of sank into me. I didn't read any 'how to' books or attend any popular-fiction-writing classes or have a critique group. For many years into my writing, I didn't even know another author. For me, a lot of reading was the best teacher.
Each author has his or her own voice. I read each book slowly so I can see the patterns they use to spread out the garden of earthly delights.
I stepped out on faith to follow my lifelong dream of being an author. I made real sacrifices and took big risks. But living, it seems to me, is largely about risk.
Unless one is planning to go shopping - basically begging to be smothered by the ravening throngs of returners and bargain hunters; an embrace as constricting as that hugging machine designed by autistic author Temple Grandin - then Boxing Day feels like a bar after last call when the lights have been turned up.
There are only three indispensable things: the audience, the actor and the author. The rest is dross.
My favorite anything is always relative to the context of present time, place and mood. When I finish a book and want to immediately find another by the same author and no other, that author is elevated to my favorite.
When I was young, I loved a series of books by an author called Maud Hart Lovelace and the series, which is still around, I'm happy to say, is - they're the 'Betsy-Tacy' books.
Ray Bradbury was the first author that I was really exposed to back in grade school. I'm a big Philip K. Dick fan, but the emotion and humanity that Bradbury brings to his stories and the way he uses sci-fi to get at the human heart is something that's unique and for me incredibly influential.
I find writing really hard, but then, every author I know finds writing really hard work.
Obviously it makes a difference if an author has a public online profile of some sort, even just down to the level of having a moderately popular blog. Most books sell 5, 10, or 15 thousand copies. Most are midlist books. With those people, even a modest online presence can make a difference in sales.
Like an author, a cricketer signs his name on every innings he bats or bowls in; indeed for every cricket ball that challenges him on the field.
Like most of us, I'm used to juggling about 52 roles in life. Wife. Mother. Sister. Friend. Author. Sometimes I feel a bit 'multiple-personality'.
When a character bears the same name as the author it's just an invitation to have some fun.
I'm a novelist - not an expert on coal mining. I'm not a politician with an agenda to push. I'm not a reporter presenting facts, and I'm not a sociologist documenting the last struggling remnants of blue-collar America. I'm simply an author who sets her books in coal country because it's where I come from, and it's what I know.
The best advice I got as a writer was also the first advice, which came from the late fantasy author and editor Karl Edward Wagner: Any agent who charges to look at your work is a crook.
When I look back at my career as an author, I don't look at the first book that was ever published as to where my career began - I look to the first book that I ever wrote.
I want to be engaged and moved by theatre, there's nothing more disappointing than being left cold. After 'The Author,' I felt wrung out emotionally, like a used tissue.
I couldn't choose a favourite author, but two contemporary writers who have never disappointed me are Tim Winton and Alice Munro.
It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character.
There is no way that the Fourth Gospel was written by John Zebedee or by any of the disciples of Jesus. The author of this book is not a single individual, but is at least three different writers/editors, who did their layered work over a period of 25 to 30 years.
