Dear Robert,
I’m in year six, and your books have taken off like wildfire since our headmaster banned them from our school…
That’s probably my all time favourite.
I made a Contact Me page for my author website six months before my first book came out. I promised to reply to everyone who emailed and I’ve kept that promise through 11 years and 12 million copies sold.
There are always messages in my inbox. The first came from the daughter of a bookshop owner, who’d been given a preview copy of CHERUB: The Recruit. She said it was better than Harry Potter and I carried a printout in my pocket and bored everyone with it for weeks. Now, fan messages are embedded in my daily ritual, like my morning Nespresso and nuisance calls about PPI refunds.
I get more messages on weekends and during school holidays. They don’t stop when you go on holidays and book tours, though kids mercifully seem to have other distractions over Christmas.
I’m often asked why I bother. Authors who sell way less books tell me they could never waste all that time replying. I’ve been known to suggest that maybe they’d sell more if they did.
The parent of any teen will confirm how hard it is to get them to say anything meaningful. Years of school and being told to behave nicely to grandma mean they’ve been thoroughly conditioned to say what they think adults want to hear.
First emails from fans tend to be all Dear Mr Muchamore and packed with, “Your book kept me on the edge of my seat” type clichés. But once kids get that you’re a real person, the barriers come down. While the vast majority only email once or twice, some kids start a dialogue and this is where a window opens into how my readers really feel
Hi Rob
Soz not been in touch. Finally got The Killing. Why did James dump Kerry? Dana is a total cow and I hope she dies brutally in the next book! BTW, wot car have you got?
By the fifth time a kid emails, they’re telling you that chapter 16 drags, that the piece of careful research you worked on for two days is boring and that they have a crush on a girl in their class.
People ask if I get upset by bad reviews. My ego prefers good ones, but in terms of my creative process the hundreds of pieces of feedback I pick up from young readers have a far greater influence on how I write.
Some people see using feedback as commercial, but kids authors need to get inside the heads of people who are much younger and have very different thought processes to themselves.
Over the past decade, I’ve come to realise that kids are generally decent and respectful even if they’re occasionally cheeky:
Dear Rob,
I know you’re $$$ minted. Can you send me a free iPad Air 2?
Dear Ben,
Yes, I’d happily send you a free iPad along with a signed copy of my latest book. I’ll just need you to send me £550 to cover postage and packing…
But many of the adults who contact me are trickier to deal with.
I’ve had loads of happy parents contacting me to say that my books are great for reluctant readers, but one added that she read through all my books first, blocking inappropriate passages with a Sharpie and correcting my grammar before letting her sons read them.
I’ve had many gay kids tell me that they like reading a kids book where there are gay characters, without it being a dominant theme. But there’s a pastor in Utah who is praying for my damaged soul because I’d normalised homosexuality, and a woman who successfully got my 6th book removed from a major UK supermarket, because of a gay sex scene. A couple of thousand copies got pulped, before I pointed out that the scene existed solely in the complainant’s imagination.
Then there was the female squaddie, who sent topless pictures from Iraq and whose proposal of marriage I politely declined.
The most fun of all comes from teasing gun nuts. Not long after my books were first published in America, I began receiving emails on how the characters in my books were using the wrong guns, wrong bullets and that I was getting all kinds of other details wrong. One email ran over 1,000 words, and included diagrams, referenced web links and even an equation showing how I could calculate the RPM of a bullet.
Under interview, authors tend to prattle on about how much effort they put into research (typically involving tax-deductible travel to exotic locations). However, I treat research in the same way I treated coursework when I failed my GCSEs and try getting away with the bare minimum.
Since I don’t like gun nuts, and I know how much it irritates them, I am now fanatical in making sure that every single fact about guns in my books is ever-so-slightly wrong.
But it hasn’t all been fun. There was the kid in a cancer ward, whose parents emailed to say thanks for cheering up their son by answering all his messages, but that he didn’t make it. Every academic year seems to bring a lonely fan having a horrible first term at boarding school and I frantically Googled to find the number for the German equivalent of Childline after a fan said she’d been raped by her step dad. I found a number she could call, but never heard from her again.
And what if they just keep on messaging?
My No1 stalker sent me over 2,500 emails. I met him and his mum at half-a-dozen book signings. He grew out of emailing regularly when he started university, but stayed in touch. I helped him get an internship at a publisher and since he was broke, he ended up staying in my spare room while he did it.
He’s now doing his masters in English Literature in London. He drops by my house once in a while. He drinks my beer, scoffs my ready meals and says he still reads my books in the bath because they remind him of one of the best parts of his childhood.
All kids names have been omitted or changed. You can contact me yourself if you so wish via my Contact Me page!
• Robert Muchamore’s latest book Boot Camp (the sequel to Rock War) is available to buy at the Guardian bookshop. You can read the first chapter here!
