A few thoughts on being supportive of authors

Before I introduce today's release, there's two things I want to talk about:

The first, I've already raised some concerns about in the forums... but it seems that many of our regular readers are not visiting the forums these days. Hopefully, you ARE at least checking the front page news when I post. In the past week or two, we have had a number of comment posts on things that shouldn't be in the comments posts at all and are unacceptable interactions with the authors. 

Neither authors or any editors who support our authors are being paid for their work here and we admittedly don't always spend the time and effort on proofing things that we would as a professional publishing house. That means that miss-spellings, miss-translations, incorrect words and even grammar mistakes occur along side typos and formatting glitches. We generally do a pretty good job of minimizing these... to the extent that I would match our work against most independently published ebooks... and even a lot of published materials. But yes, we do make mistakes. Ideally... if it doesn't disrupt your ability to read the book, it shouldn't be an issue; right? You don't write a typo note to Baen Books every time you find something wrong, do you? Why then, should it seem appropriate to do it here where you aren't even paying for the stories you read?

If you are trying to be 'helpful'... I'll remind you that every author can be PM'd. And the first thing that you should say when you PM an author about a typo is to ASK them if they want a couple typo notes on a story? Because it is entirely up to the author whether they get fixed once the story is posted. Mostly, I don't bother unless the mistake is going to cause problems later (confusing a plot point, or so on). This is because I have to choose how to use the time I have available... and I'd rather acknowledge that I rushed a piece out the door to make sure we got new content to you, and continue to work on more new content... than spend time tweaking something that has already been released so that it is 'perfect'.

The WORST thing you can do is start demanding in comments or feedback forums that the author needs to fix something. This is horribly inappropriate and changes the tone for all comments and posts around it. It's the kind of entitlement that starts authors down a conversation about being unappreciated... which can end in the author going somewhere that readers can't/don't treat authors that way. 

The other thing to discuss is that I set up the comments on the stories to give people a quick and convenient way to thank the authors. They are NOT designed to support conversation and discussions about the stories. If you want to discuss characters and/or plot points with other readers, please take it to the forums. Monitoring, moderating, and maintaining the comment system is more involved than keeping the forums running, requires specific action from me daily, and is not stored efficiently (meaning the comments take up more storage space than similar length comments would take up in the forums). So please... remember, the comments on the stories themselves are meant for quick responses... mostly targeted as a thank you or other praise to the authors. If you want to talk more about the stories, log in and join the discussion in the forums. Don't feel that logging in takes away from any anonymity you might have as an internet visitor. You're welcome to use a 'throw away' email account, as long as that account will not bounce an admin mail if one is sent to you because of a login problem or something... and there is no requirement to use your real name or even a recognized nickname. 

And finally... to this week's content release: back from a bit of writer's block, Bek has been throwing stuff in my inbox left and right for the past couple weeks. For those of you who forget what that means, 'when last we saw them' our drow were in New York looking for crown jewels for a certain island Princess. Jadis and Vamp, along with a few others, were around as well. Spark some memories? It's time for Part 3 of "Diamonds Are a Vamp's Best Friend" and it can be found in the Original Timeline stories.