You’ve finally got that story published, and readers love it. But now they have questions. So many questions. Should you answer them? How should you do it? What about interacting with fans through social media? If you’re a fan, what should you expect from creators in these situations? That’s what we’re talking about today, with the help of our recurring guest host Rhys!
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I wanted to ask about an element of creator-fan interactions that you touched on but didn’t really talk about, and it is the often incessant pestering of creators by fans for relatively unimportant facts. I’m thinking specifically of the Voltron fans pestering the writers for the ages of all the characters back when the first season came out, but others like the McElroy bros have also had this problem. I’m torn because on the one hand (as Oren I think mentioned) if that detail is not in the story, the fan’s guess is just as valid as the creators, but on the other hand, it can be really frustrating to be looking for concrete facts and have your question handwaved away.
It’s hard for me to speak on that because I’ve never been particularly interested in background information that’s not on screen, but if there’s a hunger for it among fans, it could behoove the creators to make that info available. Again, in this context, interacting with fans is a form of marketing. On the fans’ part, if lots of people are asking for this, then it’s pretty safe to say the creators know about the request, and so continuing to ask probably isn’t a great idea. The creators will either make the info available or they won’t.
The last I saw from Mark Hamill was that he still didn’t *like* the way Luke was in The Last Jedi, and considered this Luke as like a new character, but he’d come around to seeing how it had to be that way for the story Rian Johnson wanted to tell.
Mostly my reaction to it all was “Mark Hamill is very gracious and professional.”
An author whose fandom I was involved in started complaining about their falling sales, to the point where they made nasty comments about their agent and the fans that had (supposedly) drifted away. I thought that was a huge mistake because the people still following them on social media were their core fan base. Lesson learned – never bite the hand that feeds you!
But it’s helpful to think that a major online presence isn’t a deal breaker. I get that visibility and fan accessibility is important, but as a creator with a full time job I want to be able to use my free time to create first and do the social media as I can.