Note: This rant is almost assuredly not about you, dear reader.  It's about a small percentage of folks who are really getting under my skin.  But even if you're not in that group, please read on — just don't take it personally! 

If you spend a fair amount of time online, perhaps you've noticed it:

People are becoming ruder.  And angrier.  And more entitled. 

Really, I'm simply amazed at some of what appears in my e-mail inbox.  Folks with whom I've never corresponded are sending me demanding messages such as "SEND ME THE EBOOK!!!!" and "I WANT TO GET PUBLISHED. TELL ME WHAT TO DO!"

People (non-customers) send us long, detailed questions out of the blue and expect immediate responses.  If they don't get one, we often receive an abusive message as a follow up.

And then there's the magic words that many people seem to be using as a justification for curt, nicety-free missives:

"Sent via my iPhone"

Look, I've been doing this a long time, and I've got a pretty thick skin.  So I raise this not to prevent my feelings from being hurt, but rather as a cautionary message about how *not* to sabotage your writing career.

As a 21st century author, your ability to communicate is paramount to your success.  Editors, agents, bloggers, book reviewers, distributors, promotional partners and readers are just some of the people who are important to your career.  For goodness sake, treat them with more respect than "Here's my new book. Write a review!".

Here then, are my tips to help you be seen as a courteous author worthy of consideration:

• "Dear", "Thank you", "Please" and "Sincerely/All the Best/Yours Truly" aren't archaic leftovers from the distant past.  They're still as important as ever.  Use them. Please.
  

• Composing a message from your phone or tablet is not an excuse for overly-direct curtness.  If you have a business message to send, wait until you have the time to write it properly.

• If you're contacting someone for the first time, make the effort to introduce yourself, and clearly state the purpose of your message.

• If someone doesn't get right back to you, don't fire off an angry e-mail accusing them of ignoring you.  Perhaps the message got lost.  Maybe they're on vacation.  Perhaps they're ill.  Calmly send another friendly message restating your request or comment.

• Remember that you're dealing with human beings.  In our case, every piece of e-mail is read either by me or by Laura.  We don't have a building full of underlings to take care of that for us.  When you send us kind words (and many of you do — thank you!), it feels great.  When you're rude or angry, it stings.   Treat me with respect — I think  I've earned at least that.

The vast majority of you are nothing but gracious in your communications with us.  That bodes well for your future success.  Keep at it, and gently work to correct those who aren't minding your manners.

For the few of you who may have let your etiquette slip, please take heed of the points I've laid out, and make a resolution to make the online world just a little bit more courteous.

That's it — venting over!      Onward….

Have you seen the movie Being John Malkovich?

It's the story of a forlorn puppeteer played by John Cusack, who works as a file clerk on floor seven and a half of a Manhattan office building. When he steps off the elevator he has to bend over, because the ceiling is only about five feet high. None of the characters seem to notice–this is their everyday world, and they go about their jobs no differently than if they could stand upright. But to the audience, the visual device of a building with half a storey signals there is something slightly off-kilter about this particular universe. And once we enter, it's perfectly logical that the puppeteer will eventually find a metaphysical portal into the brain of actor John Malkovich.

Writers of fantasy and science fiction have long known that the success of their stories largely depends on how much imagination and detail they invest in their settings. Readers willingly suspend their disbelief and enter a world of magic, time travel and talking animals because that world clearly exists independently of our own. But why can't more everyday, earthly stories do the same thing? A tweak of the environment can spin an ordinary plot in an unexpected direction.

The trick is to create a place that's just a bit off-center, so the reader knows it's the real world, only a tad exaggerated. It's like viewing your story through a funhouse mirror–some elements being wider and rounder than in real life, others elongated and skinny. And because the characters know only this universe, none ever question its shape. Read more

As we celebrated the recent 23rd Anniversary of the Children's Book Insider newsletter, we took the opportunity to look back at some of the many author interviews we've presented.  What caught our eye was some of the priceless advice these authors shared with our readers. Here are two quick — but powerful — lessons from our archives:

Judy Blume on writing from the heart (August 1990): What happened when I first started–as in Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, which is the first book that was really mine–is I was just telling the stories that I knew. I knew what it was like to be in sixth grade, and to be in Margaret's body, because that was my body. Slow growing, slow to develop….So that's what I wrote about, because it wasn't there for me when I was young. I didn't know if anyone would publish it, but it was from the heart. The only thing that works with writing is that you care so passionately about it yourself, that you make someone else care passionately about it. Books that are written to order are awful. It can't work. Children will see through that and they won't read it.

Barbara Seuling on common mistakes (December 1994): The main character is a big one. So often beginning writers will use boy and girl twins as the main character, or use more than one main character, such as a pair of boys going off to have an adventure and you can't pick out which one is the hero of the story. There should be one viewpoint to the book, and this rule hasn't changed since children's books first began. You can occasionally get away with it if you shift the focus to another character when you start a new chapter, but you have to do this very carefully. Point of view is another one. I always feel you should know how to use point of view so you can break the rules.

There are a lot of cases where the rules of point of view are broken very successfully, such as in Charlotte's Web. You can bend the rules but you have to be as good as E.B. White to do it. There are two ways to approach talking animal characters. The big differentiation depends on the story. Either the animals have to truly be animals, or they are really kids that happen to look like animals. If you're writing a story that just needs a substitute child, then you can decide if it's a soft furry animal or a funny-looking animal. It's funny to see a pig in children's clothes, but they always have some pig-like characteristic, such as a large appetite. If you're writing that kind of story, then it's fine to have the animal act like humans.

In a book like Charlotte's Web the animals were very true to their natures, and it was important that they were. Even Templeton the rat was not a sympathetic character. In a story where you're getting close to the animal world, you need to keep animals as true to their natural selves as possible. What you don't want is the animals doing animal-like things part of the time when it's convenient to the story, but then at other times have hands or stand upright to talk to each other. That never works.

To read these — and many  more — CBI interviews in their entirety, check out In Their Own Words: The Best of CBI's Interviews

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At Children's Book Insider, we've been helping regular folks get started writing children's books for more than two decades. 

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