Your comment was not taken as “good faith, useful feedback.” You came across as mean-spirited, and your posting appeared ignorant of the facts of the matter regarding the frequency with which we openly advertise our own work.

My only fault was responding in kind.

Unfortunately your response is ALSO in kind, so moral high ground has been lost to both of us. Your haranguing reeks of personal attack. Sure, you’ve toned it down some, but you’re using fightin’ words. “Teenager,” and “extremely unprofessional” while perhaps justified are loathsome epithets in this setting and you know it. Yet you brandish those words freely.

You’ve let me drag you down to my level. Or perhaps I’ve been dragged down to yours. Shame on both of us.

Howard – regarding your response to my criticism about the advert:
That was extremely unprofessional. I made that comment in good faith to provide you with honest, hopefully useful feedback. Your response was churlish, sarcastic, gave the impression that you can’t handle criticism, and set up a heavy incentive for anyone else who dislikes an aspect to just not bother telling you, and not come back. … why do all that, when it would have been so easy to just be polite, or even ignore the comment altogether? I mean, look at the choices:

You have a listener (a potential customer) who has made a mild complaint. You could:
A) Ignore the comment. Nothing happens.
B) Acknowledge the comment with the explanations you gave – minus the sarcasm, and the last paragraph. Listener has a positive experience from giving feedback, feels heard and appreciated, and will likely continue listening. You look professional and accepting of criticism, and your more fanatical fans take the criticizer down a peg or two for you anyway. Everybody wins.
C) Make sarcastic remarks that dismiss and belittle the listener’s complaint, alienating them (and potentially anyone else that had a sympathetic opinion), make yourself look like the childish bully who can’t handle mean words, drive listener away. Everyone loses.

I know you’re a smart guy. So I can’t for the life of me work out why the hell you chose option C. It seems my comment really got up your nose, which I find surprising – it wasn’t particularly harsh, nor even directed at your work, but rather at an action you made. I would expect you’d deal with far worse in your career as an artist. I’m sorry to harp on, I’m just flummoxed that you’d respond like that. That’s the kind of response I’d expect from a teenager in a forum, not a professional on their own webpage. This is how you’re representing your professional self. Sure, it’s a message board, so it’s a little more relaxed and casual, but that doesn’t mean you act unprofessionally. How you conduct yourself still reflects on your professional image. Maybe I just caught you on a Bad Internet Day, but that was not an appropriate – not even an adult – way to handle that.

I personally define an “info dump” as anything that interrupts the story to get across information, necessary or unnecessary. Basically, it’s anything that makes your writing sound more like a textbook and less like a novel, and I hate it. I might differ from some of the people here, but I think that there is never a time when you need an info dump, and that if your reader really does need that information, there is always some other way of getting it across. When I write my stories, my goal is to get to the end without ever info dumping, not once.

In a previous Writing Excuses episode, Patrick Ruthfuss had some very interesting advice. He said that if you withhold information from the reader in the right way, it creates a sense of mystery that generates interest in that piece of story. When you finally do reveal it, the reader is thrilled rather than bored.

I suppose it’s analogous to some of the geeky conversations we’ve all had with people who are less inclined towards sci fi / fantasy. Have you ever been really, really eager to tell people all about this great story that you read, or that you’re writing, only to find that you’ve monopolized the conversation for the past half hour and everyone else is losing interest? An info dump is like that. You’ve got to find a way to make them interested in it, and often times that means restraining yourself and withholding the information until there is a more appropriate way to get it across.

I believe Baen’s universe also has a couple of “introducing” slots for the magazine that would be worth looking into for new writers. I don’t remember whether that was part of Baen’s Bar or not.

And sick on his birthday, aye? Smells fishy to me, but I’ll accept it as truth. )

Keep up the good work and congratulations on the good sales.