The sad truth is that most readers regard authors as a source of free information

20 February 2010

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

Like many authors, I include an email address at the end of my books so readers can get in touch to say how much they enjoyed them. That’s the idea, anyway. In fact, the vast majority of reader emails I get are requests for career advice. Take the following, which I received a couple of weeks ago: ‘I recently decided to embark on a little adventure and have moved across the pond to London. I know it is a dreadful time to be looking around for journalism work anywhere, but I was hoping that you might have some suggestions for me on navigating through journalism jobs here in London. I have been on a few interviews so far, but I was thinking that perhaps you might have some tips or ideas for me?’

Asking me questions like that is particularly bizarre given that the titles of my books are How to Lose Friends & Alienate People and the The Sound of No Hands Clapping. The first deals with my failure to make it in New York, the second with my equally disastrous career in Hollywood. I am the Eddie the Eagle of the modern media. You might as well ask Mick Jagger for some ‘tips’ on love and marriage.

The sad truth is that most readers regard authors as a source of free public information who have nothing better to do than respond to queries all day. This, at any rate, is the theory of Laurence Leamer, author of Sons of Camelot: The Fate of an American Dynasty. ‘I’ve written a trilogy on the Kennedys and I’ve become Mr Answer Man,’ he says. ‘There’s the assumption that I am this low-level public servant who sits there responding to all kinds of requests.’

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