Meet the readers? No thanks
Robert McCrum writing in The Observer, Sunday 7 June 2009

As the literary festival season swings into action across the shires of Middle England, there are many things you may want to say about this phenomenon, but one thing is indisputable: there is now an inexhaustible public appetite for meeting writers, in tents and church halls.
When you stop to think about it, this is quite strange. The English are not inclined to celebrate culture or to favour artists and intellectuals. We are more interested in pop idols and sporting heroes. But there it is. The public wants to spend time in proximity with poets and historians, novelists and biographers. Then get them to sign books.

In this craze to connect with authors and books, we have to ask: is it mutual? Is it a two-way street ? Do writers have the same interest in satisfying their public? Take novelists, for instance. Does the author of the well-reviewed literary novel that's promoted at Hay or Edinburgh have any sense of an informal contract with his or her audience? Answer: not a chance.
This question is not as bizarre as it sounds. In the days when writers understood their job to mean entertaining a readership, when "story" was not a dirty word, and when popular literary magazines carried serial fiction by writers like Conrad, Stevenson and Hardy, the writer had a strong sense of the marketplace and its demands.

At the high end, this produced Far From the Madding Crowd. More commercially, it yielded Conan Doyle's evergreen hero, Sherlock Holmes, and his villainous opponent, Moriarty. Famously, Conan Doyle killed off Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, but was persuaded by public outcry to restore him to an avid public in The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
By the time the generation that included Conan Doyle, John Buchan, JM Barrie and Arnold Bennett was dead, the writer had become an artist, far too elevated in his or her concerns to be bothered with the tastes of the masses.

In our time, those who, like JK Rowling, pay attention to their audiences can reap great rewards. Rowling's success is grounded in a telling throwback to Victorian and Edwardian literary norms: What does the public want? A fathomlessly evil villain, some hocus pocus and a boy with a wand.

Today, writers are acutely aware of the market, but in the abstract. They fret about sales and advances, but rarely translate their concerns into any consideration for readers. Practically speaking, they often disdain them. How often have you come away from a literary festival with a sense of regret at the failure of the big name in the marquee to live up to your expectations?

Read the rest of McCrum's column here. He is always entertaining.