Back in 1991 there was a guy named Gerald Ratner who was in charge of Ratners jewellery. He was invited to make a speech at “the Institute of Directors”. During the speech he made a joke:
We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, ‘How can you sell this for such a low price?’ I say, because it’s total crap.
He’d made this joke many times before but this time it hit the papers. Once it did it looked like he was saying that Ratners was making its money by fleecing its customers. He’d unintentionally called his customers stupid and they were not happy. He lost his job and the company nearly went bust.
People don’t like it if you call them stupid and they vote with their feet and their pennies.
Now Ratner insulted his own customers, and he didn’t even mean to, but the same applies to insulting your competitors’ customers. If you call them stupid they are not going to buy off you.
Over at Novelr Eli has posted a couple of posts about the success of indie author Amanda Hocking (Here and Here), the posts are interesting but the comments are shocking. There are people denigrating Hocking’s writing and suggesting her readers buy it because they are only borderline literate and don’t know how bad it is. What’s worse these people are writers.
*Facepalm*
Look, I don’t care if her writing seems to defy everything they taught you in creative writing class. Her readers are your potential readers as well. You do not call them stupid for reading her stuff, that will just make them avoid your stuff, because you come across as a pretentious prat who doesn’t want them.
The venom about Hocking’s work got so vicious that I became curious and went and looked at her excerpt. Its really not as bad as some of the comments insinuated, I think I’m going to buy the ebook and read the whole thing. Paranormal Romance isn’t my normal thing (inspite of the number I seem to end up reviewing), but I’m curious as to why it’s getting panned.
Which, I guess, just proves that Zoe Whitten’s guest post over at Michele Lee’s Blog is absolutely true. Hate hype only makes people curious.
There is another thread in the comments on the Novelr posts that does bear more serious consideration, and that’s why do publishers say they want original stories when the public seems to like more of the same thing they liked before.
But that’s a topic for another post.
