What the readers want is a good story, and what the writers always want to luck into, it's a good story.
I really believe that readers are smart and sophisticated enough to realize that the author is not the narrator of his novels.
The best books come from someplace deep inside. . . . Become emotionally involved. If you don't care about your characters, your readers won't either.
If I'm making myself laugh, I figure most of my readers will be amused as well.
Readers embrace all kinds of characters as long as they are written with emotional truth.
There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can't tell you why.
Don't be afraid to make a mistake, your readers might like it.
The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature. "
It is a fallacy to think that carping is the strongest form of criticism: the important work begins after the artist's mistakes have been pointed out, and the reviewer can't put it off indefinitely with sneers, although some neophytes might be tempted to try: "When in doubt, stick out your tongue" is a safe rule that never cost one any readers. But there's nothing strong about it, and it has nothing to do with the real business of criticism, which is to do justice to the best work of one's time, so that nothing gets lost.
The literature Nobel laureate of this year has said that an author can do anything as long as his readers believe him. A scientist cannot do anything that is not checked and rechecked by scientists of this network before it is accepted.
Few faults of style, whether real or imaginary, excite the malignity of a more numerous class of readers, than the use of hard words.
Fantasy stories will always be popular, as there are always readers who are willing to escape, freely, to the worlds that the authors create, and spend time with the characters we give life to.
I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.
. . . All these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world, not with my eyes only, but also with their own.
What I would not like is to be ignored. I write from the heart. I don't write for me. I write for my readers.
In my opinion, trying to guess what readers want is the wrong approach. You have to tell your story as best you can and as true to yourself as possible. You have to be honest and fair and vulnerable and foolish and brave, and not care what anyone thinks of it.
. . . it is how a person goes about quenching his desires or living with them unrequited that the readers get a glimpse of his true character.
There are an awful lot of readers who won't pick up a book if they think it's got anything horrific in it, or paranormal or whatever.
As much as I encourage communication with my readers, I don't want reviews from them, simply because I don't need to be hamstrung in the middle of working on something.
It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience)