publicity
Thanks so much for your letter. I am very glad to hear you have a novel that will be out in November. I hope you won’t have as much trouble about keeping people from having parties for you as I am having. Around here if you publish the number of whiskers on the local pigs, everybody has to give you a tea. If you don’t send me a copy of your book, I will go to the extreme of buying one.
Letter to Robie Macauley, May 2, 1952, in The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor, ed. by Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 35.
It’s better, I think, for readers not to communicate too directly with an author because the author is, strangely enough, beside the point.
“A Note from Jeffrey Eugenides to Readers,” author’s Facebook page, November 3, 2011.