Ask and Ye Shall...

Readers often ask us, how do we get those great author interviews?  Well, here's the key: we just ask.

The same spirit that once compelled a certain eleven-year old boy to write his favorite ball player and beg for an autograph (thank you, Carlton Fisk!) works wonders for us, twenty-plus years later.  And truth be told, many of the authors we approach are flattered to be asked.

How do we ask? Some tech-savvy authors - Chabon and Boyle, for two - we've approached via their websites. But others are email-allergic - Auster and Antrim, for a different two - and so we have to get creative. Or at least pre-computer. With this issue's interviewee, Stephen Dixon, who still 'writes' on a device known as a 'typewriter,' a phone call did the trick. A while back, our quiver's golden arrow was an airmailed letter, to Nick Hornby. More recently, we had luck with a series of letters, over a number of years, to the reclusive Anne Tyler, who always promised she'd do an interview after her "next book"—which turned out to be this summer's Digging to America.

And to follow a train of thought, getting a good interview is not much different than putting together a good issue… .Yes, we get thousands of email submissions each year, but on occasion our transom is graced by a typewritten story or a handwritten poem. And some of those paper-scrawled pieces have been wonderful, and we're lucky to have been able to publish them. Format doesn't matter; style, topic, all that stuff, we're flexible. Reading a piece, we ask only one question:

Got anything interesting to say?  If so, welcome to the failbetter.com family.

TD