Letters to the author

Have you ever written to an author? It’s the norm these days, or at least emailing or Tweeting them is. But it’s not that long since contacting a writer meant applying pen to paper, then stamp to envelope, then feet to pavement until you reached the postbox. Real effort, and not that many people did it. Publishing in the old days, before writers all had ‘web presences’, could be a lonely business, the only real feeling for how your book had been received coming from newspaper reviews and sales figures. Yet when contact is made there can be moments of beauty. There can also be moments of terror, and indeed of bafflement.

I’ve been lucky in that my books seem to attract only positive correspondence. Those who hate them stick to Amazon, including the reviewer who said that a better title for my first novel would have been ‘&”Andrex” — ‘cos that’s where it’s going’”. Two female flatmates, on the other hand, wrote me a lovely letter to say the book had entertained them while their television was broken; they’d taken it in turns to read sections out loud. Twitter seems the same — apart from the odd (gratefully received) factual correction, my ‘Interactions’ column contains nothing but nice words from nice people.

David Long, the author of several books about London (including his new Murders of London), finds that letter-writers are complimentary, whereas ‘anyone wishing to pick a fight or be downright rude always does it by email.’ His most charming letter, in response to The Little Book of the London Underground, was from ‘a lady who had lost her bag on the Circle Line in the 1960s. She waited at the station for the train to come all the way round again, and found the bag where she had left it.’ Geoff Nicholson agrees with the letter/email point. ‘I’ve never had a negative letter. Why would they go to the trouble? Negative emails are far more common — and usually anonymous, of course.’ His only ‘disgruntled’ letter was about the novel Everything and More, featuring a ‘fantastical, perhaps Borgesian department store named Haden Brothers. The owner of a car repair garage in Birmingham called Haden Brothers wrote demanding to know why I had named it after his business.’ The polar opposite of Geoff Hotblack, co-founder of London estate agents Hotblack Desiato, after which Douglas Adams named a character in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For years people asked him how he’d had the nerve to name his business after the character.

Personal websites mean that even big-name authors can be contacted directly, but of course letters have to go via the publisher. Amelia Harvell, publicity manager at Cornerstone, says that their star writers still get an average of 8 to 10 letters a week. With old-fashioned pen and paper you can spot the nutters easily — ‘the green ink brigade’ — but what’s the email equivalent? Everything in capitals, perhaps? Science writer Brian Clegg says the warning sign is ‘the instant reply. You send a polite response to someone, and get something back immediately. So you wait a while and send a more terse reply. And get something back immediately. Eventually you have to stop, or it would take over your life.’ His all-time favourite letter was in response to the book Light Years. ‘I suspected it was going to be interesting when I noticed the seal on the envelope: a picture of the letter’s author, a striking blonde in a revealing outfit standing in her kitchen. The letter included a baffling diagram indicating the relation between my book and various other texts, from Richard Feynman to The Mayan Prophesies by A. Gilbert. It also made clear that the author of the letter had, until a year previously, been a man.’ Travis Elborough, meanwhile, who has written books on the Routemaster bus, the vinyl album and the English seaside, has had ‘a couple of letters from a probably older gay admirer who signs his letters Senex’. Like me, Travis had to look it up — it’s the Jungian archetype meaning ‘wise old man’.

Sometimes the territory is more straightforward. As a primary school pupil in the 1970s, my partner wrote to correct the publisher of a book which stated that spiders have six legs. She got a reply saying that the imprint in question had now gone out of business (Jo panicked that her letter had been the cause of this); but that they were impressed with her knowledge and so were enclosing a book token. Ana Sampson has had enjoyable correspondences with a Yorkshire man who enjoyed her poetry anthologies, including issues as diverse as ‘what he was going to do with a glut of Bramley apples, how he had a hedgehog in the garden the size of a cat and how he found his missing tooth in the U-bend.’

John O’Farrell had a less favourable reaction to his memoir Things Can Only Get Better. It took the form of a discontinued library edition of the book, passed to O’Farrell by a friend. ‘Somebody had taken the trouble to go through every page countering my arguments in neat block capitals and explaining why Mrs Thatcher was right. The extended subtitle of the book was ’18 Miserable Years in the life of a Labour Supporter. And another 10 miserable years under Mr. Blair.’

But occasionally, just occasionally, truly great things can happen. Marcus Chown wrote a book called The Magic Furnace, about the cosmic origin of the atoms in your body. He received a letter from the wife of a South London taxi driver. In her forties with 3 children, she had left school at 14 with no qualifications. ‘She said she’d been brought to tears by the end of chapter two. Don’t know if it was the thought of having to read chapter three. Anyhow, she was inspired by the book to study for A-levels, then go to university, where she got a first-class degree. I never thought, as a writer, that I could make much difference. But in this one instance I changed someone’s life. It’s humbling. And it beats all the reviews and all the good things that have happened to me as a writer.’

So, if in doubt — and even if you’re filling the pen with green ink — do get in touch. Writers don’t want to do all the writing themselves.