Your Readers Owe You Nothing

Unless you're an international bestselling author, your readers will forget your name as soon as they finish reading your latest work.

They close the book or close the browser and return to their lives.

Ninety-nine percent of all authors share this fate.

Readers are ordinary people who have a thousand more important things to do than remember your name and wonder when you will finally publish something again.

That sounds callous and ungrateful. Didn't we put all our heart and soul into our story to make readers forget their everyday worries for a few minutes or hours? Can't we expect some loyalty and gratitude for that?

Well, we can expect a lot, but that won't help us. People are just the way they are. The truth is that most people are not interested in our goals, fears, desires, and dreams.

From our perspective, as writers, we expect the influence we have on people to be higher. We don't understand how a reader can simply forget about us after having just devoured the grandiose finale of our novel with a beating heart.

It is incomprehensible to us that our readers do not check impatiently on Amazon every day to see if we have already published a new book.

It is even more incomprehensible to us that even those who have subscribed to our newsletter do not automatically buy our new work when we send out our emails.

Readers do not automatically become fans

Very few readers become loyal fans if they have only read one book or article of yours.

But fans are the ones who, in the best case, react the way we authors want them to. Fans are the ones who really buy all our books and follow every single one of our social media posts.

Before a reader becomes a fan, a lot has to happen. Fans become fans because they know that they get exactly what they want from us. Readers only become fans after a long period of trust-building.

When a reader encounters a new author for the first time, he or she doesn't even notice his or her name. Instead, they will see an appealing book cover, read an exciting blurb, or find an article after googling a specific question.

The only exception is when someone searches explicitly for our name based on a recommendation. The recommendation of a fan to one of his friends is the single shortcut on the way from reader to fan.

When a friend recommends an author to me, this author does not have to start from scratch in terms of building trust.

But this case can only occur if an author already has a few loyal fans. Until then, there are no shortcuts.

As long as a reader is not a real fan, you cannot count on him/her as an author. To the average reader, you are just one of the millions of components of the uninterrupted stream of information that affects him/her daily.

As long as the reader is not a fan, he or she doesn't care if the story that fascinates him or her at that moment was written by you, by Stephen King or by artificial intelligence.

Consistency creates trust

The relationship between author and reader is just like any other relationship.

After a single, wild night, you won't move in with your new lover and plan a future together.

Neither will a reader give you his or her heart because you once captivated him or her with a story.

Before we share our life with someone and give them a place in our hearts, they must prove to us again and again that they deserve this trust.

Our partner must be there whenever we need him or her. He must not only stand by us in happy days, but even more so when we are scared, tired, or hopeless.

An author who is always there, no matter how the reader feels at the moment, can become something like a trusted partner.

To achieve this, the author must produce and publish new books and articles continuously, year in, year out, and these works must always be of the same high standard.

Just by publishing more and more, we can become more and more familiar to the reader over time. Whenever he or she is looking for new reading, he or she must come across us. With time, the reader will remember our name.

This process can take a very long time - sometimes years. But when the time comes, and our name has a place in the reader's mind, that reader can finally become a fan.

In the course of an author's life, a single real fan is worth more than a hundred random readers. A real fan will not only buy every one of your books but will also enthusiastically tell all his or her friends about you.

This way, you get new readers, who then become new fans much faster because they trust their friend's judgment, and they give you a leap of faith.

You owe your readers reliability

I wrote above that your readers don't owe you anything. If you think that means you don't owe your readers anything, you're wrong.

Readers can comfortably live without us. They need writers, but not you or me. Readers don't care if authors trust them, because they pay money for a book and don't have to prove themselves worthy of the book in any way.

Conversely, authors cannot do without readers. And with readers, the individual is vital. We have to conquer every heart individually, and every true fan counts.

If we want to turn a reader into a fan, we owe him or her something in return. We owe them constant supplies and consistently high quality.

The attitude that we don't write for the reader but only for ourselves is arrogant as soon as we claim to be paid for our work.

If we start a series and stop after three books, we cheat the reader. If we only publish a new book every few years, we are cheating the reader. If we continuously change genres or our quality fluctuates greatly, we are deceiving the reader.

Cheating is not forgiven. Disappointed trust is hard to win back.

Don't cheat and disappoint your reader, and he or she will thank you with the loyalty you hope for. Demanding this loyalty without first giving all we have does not lead to the goal.

Your readers owe you nothing. But you owe everything to your readers.