Hello Everyone,
The fan club puzzled me from the beginning. Years ago when my assistant wanted to start one, I just didn’t understand why there needed to be one for me. I was a writer. Writers don’t have fan clubs. But I try to listen to the advice of the people around me, and so we started the fan club. Quite a few writers had fan clubs with newsletters, some merchandise. It was a way of keeping in touch with you guys between books. You all seemed to enjoy the free stuff that you could only get through the club, and you loved the newsletter. That seemed to be everyone’s favorite part, almost. But me doing a piece a month for the newsletter began to be harder and harder to meet as a deadline. My book deadlines became more stringent, and the short piece for the newsletter just got harder and harder to do. Far from being inspired to write the piece, I was actively not inspired month after month. I wanted to keep in touch with all of you, but the newsletter just didn’t feel like the right way to do it. Then a funny thing happened, it was called the internet, and suddenly I had a blog. I had a place that when I was inspired to write and share with you guys, I could. It wasn’t an artificial deadline every month, but more when I had something worth sharing, I could. It was great. You all seemed to really enjoy hearing from me more often. I was a true technophobe for many years, but first the blog lured me on line, then web comics, and then Twitter. I’d had a FaceBook account for awhile, but I let someone else run that. That same person set up the Twitter account, but I decided to try and do this one. It was only 140 character each message, so I could get in, out, and be done. It was a nearly perfect way to lure me into sharing more of my daily, even hourly writing progress with all of you. I then took over my FaceBook account, and started posting myself. There was a time when the account was first set up that someone else posted as me, but when I discovered that was happening I put a stop to it. If you see a post from me, that is on my account, then it’s me. No games, just me.
Between Twitter and FaceBook there seemed nothing left to say at the end of the month for the newsletter. I was even more stymied about it, and honestly people were getting a lot more of my daily life and writing process through the two accounts, plus the blog. The newsletter had become outdated, so we stopped doing it. Many of you in the fan club were upset. Some of you weren’t on line, at all, and others felt the newsletter was something special and collectible, or something. We have heard more people say that without the newsletter there’s less reason to be in the fan club. I agree with that. The fan club like the newsletter, itself, seems to have out lived its usefulness. Most of the writers that had fan clubs back when we started this one have dropped their club already, on line is just more immediate, simpler, and more fans say that they prefer it. The fan club was supposed to keep me in touch with all of you between books, but it never did that job as well as the on-line presence does. It’s time for the fan club to be retired, so that we can turn the energy of everyone here at LKH headquarters to other things. I appreciate all of you that signed up for the fan club, and have been members over the years. Thank you so much for your support, and interest in my books, my characters, and me. Most of you are on line and will continue to get all my updates that way. I am sorry for the handful of people who are still not on line. You have been the most vocal about missing the newsletter, because it was all that you were getting. My apologies, but it’s time for the fan club to hang up its hat, and for us to turn to other things. We had fun while it lasted, but it’s time. Thanks everyone. -Laurell
