Pleasing Readers

Sometime readers come to a blog, a post, a story, or a book and don’t have a positive reading experience. It may be all encompassing or just the frustration that while they liked some things they read other parts were dissappointing. We all experience this in our reading life. Some people say they feel cheated by the book/author, that the book/author didn’t live up to the accolades.

Let’s face the facts. No author can satisfy every reader, except in short bursts. To paraphrase Lincoln, you please some of your readers all of the time and all of your readers some of the time, but you will never please all of your readers all of the time. As an author, I can say we all strive to increase the first group and reduce the second group, at least as far as the content, the genre allows. If they don’t like the genre, then there is nothing you can do, but we never want our writing to be the cause of someone turning away from the text. They may not like the story or the message, but they shouldn’t find fault with our crafting of it.

So, I say to the reader, instead of feeling cheated (who cheated you? who owed you?) you should use each new reading opportunity to learn about who and what you enjoy/can embrace and don’t blame the author that they couldn’t please you. Instead just accept that this author may fall in the some of the time framework and accept that with a little grace for the effort it took to bring the read to you.

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